The Public Wheel

The last time I sat in front of the big screen, there were hundreds of channels waiting for me to flick by, covering every topic from cooking to sports- of course, the guys around me stopped on ESPN, so we watched Monday night football. After the game, while we were flipping through channels, a CNN photo displaying all of New Orleans completely submerged riveted us.

That entire week, the television set grabbed the attention of the entire country, as it had done so many times in the past. Photos of the attacks on September 11^th, the floods of Indonesia, Princess Diana’s funeral, even Janet Jackson’s “mistake”, reached everywhere moments after they happened. But I never noticed any of that in my online forays. While searching for something on Yahoo, my eyes rarely stray to the headlines posted beneath the search bar- I’ve never been informed by Internet of anything concerning the masses before the newspaper or television. Mass media’s ability to address millions at once still holds a very central place in the public sphere, one that the Internet or any other form of peer network will be hard pressed to replace.

It’s certainly true that the Internet and its many peer-to-peer connections have taken a larger role in the public sphere. All the niche interests find homes in its tangled web in a way television will never match, and, as Benkler put it, the spokes of the wheel lead back to the hub in ways that make the Internet much more reactive and conforming to public opinion. The Internet’s role as a connective network brings together all the peer groups in ways that television can’t, letting anyone speak to anyone about any issue.

However, forms of mass media still and will continue to hold the center spot in the public domain, simply because as the hub it connects to all the spokes. Information presented through the radio or television spreads like a forest fire through networks, pervading the public sphere with the hot topic of discussion. Until peer networks can spread news as quickly and pervasively, mass media will always continue to exist at the public sphere’s nucleus.

Of course, that’s not to say that the Internet can be discounted in importance. Often, topics first presented by television become the substance of Internet debates, where peer network mediums rule as communicators of individual opinions. In the end, though, mass media will continue to serve as that hub to the millions of spokes. In an extension of that metaphor, the Internet and other networks might be seen as the rubber at the end of all those spokes, taking in and connecting all the spokes of media users to each other. However, no bicycle wheel is complete without its hub, and the public sphere as it exists today would not be complete or even functional without the hub of mass media.