Page 37 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 2. Literature review

The prevalence of the internet has evidently expanded the realm of public com-

munication by breaking the boundaries of the traditional physical public sphere. The
mass space constructed on the internet forms a virtual public sphere (Du and Cao,
2013). Some scholars have also claimed that the medium of the internet generates an
exceptional advantage for the emergence of the public sphere online (Chen, 2006).
Downing et al. (2001) argued in advance that the internet had the potential to

become the first global public sphere, as the first medium through which ‘individuals
and independent collectives throughout the globe may hope to communicate, in their
voices, with an international audience of millions’ (ibid, p.202). Thus, on a purely tech-

nical level, the internet as a public sphere is unlimited (ibid). The public sphere in the
contemporary mediated communication environments can therefore be defined as ‘the
collection of places and spaces from neighbourhood cafes to internet chat rooms’ (Ben-
nett et al., 2004, p.437). By this, the active role of the media, especially internet media,
has extended the original meaning of the public sphere.

However, there are debates over the development of the online public sphere in
authoritarian countries. Lu (2014) has observed that, in the early phase of the internet
age, because of access restrictions in the media market and content censorship mecha-

nisms, the online public sphere in China was still under the control of the government
and official media. However, Wu (2007, p.42) believed:
‘the emancipatory role of the internet especially poses a threat to authoritarian
rule in regimes such as China where the traditional media fail to perform their role
as a democratic institution in the public sphere’.

Information technology advances were manifested in the popularity of social net-
working sites, and user-generated We Media and online versions of encyclopaedia cre-
ated a break in the government’s control (Lu, 2014). Citizens who used to be message

receivers have gradually switched to sharers and producers of messages, generating a
bottom-up approach to form public opinion (Deuze, 2007).
Information digitalisation decentralised the traditional hierarchy system in the
offline world and led to harmonisation, equality and empowerment (Rheingold, 1994;
Castells, 2001). The internet provided a horizontal structure for citizen networking and

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