New Shape of the Sphere

Imagine for a moment that you have the extraordinary ability to look at a person and know how they learned any given fact that they have kept in his or her collection of knowledge. Now, give yourself the powers to fly and survive in a vacuum, zoom out to space, and look at the globe. Finally, surpass the speed of light, travel back in time (Superman-style) to 18th century England, the 1920’s, the late 1950’s, and come back to present day. When comparing the origins of where people learned what they know, you would actually be analyzing the vague concept of what is known as a “public sphere.” These spheres, heavily theorized about by Jürgen Habermas, represent the changes in the infrastructure of the transfer of information between individuals throughout time beginning during the onset of the Enlightenment period. For the most part, this sphere has retained its shape. However, in our current age, we are finding that the structure is changing with the shift in the dominant form of mass media distribution.

(Refer to the crudely drawn depiction.) The cloud-like formations of ideas hover above the ground available for all to receive, and as time continues onward, these clouds increase in number representing the availability of varied ideas.

It is the trend that ideas will be passed in the form of mass media that is dominant at the time. In 18th century England, the Enlightenment period was inspired by ideas that were passed along in coffee houses and intellectual pamphlets; during the 1920’s, the radio was the source for most news and entertainment; and with the advent of the television in the 50’s, most information had been passed along the ultra high frequencies over the years. However, the public sphere had become restructured after this time because the motivations behind using the television, or dominant mass medium, had changed. It was no longer just a vessel for transporting processed information to the masses. TV had become a commercial industry, degrading the simple transfer of ideas that had been found in the past. Jürgen Habermas devised this concept implying that mass media was becoming a “commodity… rather than a tool for public discourse.”

Today, more than ever, the internet is beginning to overtake the preferences of the population and causing for all forms of other media to submit and become assimilated into its collective (like the Borg). Even television itself has been converted, clipped, transmitted, buffered, and streamed in order to conform to the luxury of the computer. This creates a situation of almost instant gratification. No longer does one have to wait for the news at 10 when he or she can go over to news.google.com and get an instant update on the North Korean nuclear testing.

However, what does this mean for our public sphere? Contrary to Habermas’ predictions, we are finding that this degradation in the concept of the public sphere is not mending itself and is actually running in the opposite direction. Instead of getting a news feed for the masses, people can now personalize what they want to read, hear, or see. This results in a knowledge base that is very focused in one topic but rather clueless in all others. You may be asking yourself, “How will we progress if the entire population becomes a group of disconnected, self-serving individuals without the capacity to know enough about the world to accomplish anything?” The new dominant mass medium has already solved this problem through the magic of collective thinking. To replace the public sphere, people have become separated – physically. However, communication has not decreased, and in fact the world is becoming more connected to itself than ever before through the collection of wires and frequencies known as the Internet. As a result, the former sphere has become an interwoven chain of nearly infinite links that traverses the globe, but what kind of name can we give to something of this netted shape? Oh wait, it already has one. The world wide web.