the narrowing of the public sphere

But honestly I wouldn't have minded at all if it had been, as I see it the Net is just an extension of connection rather than a replacement of it. I won't say this to deny the many good points brought up here, especially Ethan's. At the same time, my personality has been less one of wanting to always participate IN the public sphere -- 'enforced fun,' as I've always called it, bugs the frickin' hell out of me -- so in ways I think I've just ended up finding a better balance than I would have necessarily expected I might have had in earlier years.

This actually does tie in a bit with a writing project I've currently got on the boil, so I'm going to turn this whole subject over in my head a bit more. I WILL agree wholeheartedly with this in any event:

not to mention how much more fufilling it is to actually sit down with a big dense hardcover book like moby dick or something and just immerse yourself in it for hours, with no instant messages popping up in the middle or funny cat dancing gifs pasted every 2 pages - even after not reading a book for a couple weeks its still a mind-bending almost spiritual thing every time i read something not on the damn computer

Working at a library is a godsend in this regard, I have to say. Always new books coming through to read, always something to crack open and get into, and no computer around. It's as natural to me as breathing.

the shift in culture from 1990 to 2005 seems much much much much much more drastic

Yes indeed. (This is even more to the point of my particular project, so it's nice to see this articulated.)

upon reflection this feels completely accurate. and I'm old enough (nearly 50) to remember the days before the VCR let alone the WWW.

You fossil, you utter antique. Oh wait.

having gone on a pub crawl last monday with someone from the Internet I can testify to its ability to encourage hanging out.

the internet offers me some of the 'new sincerity' that I crave.
-- nicky lo-fi (ilmforsur...), May 21st, 2006. (later))

are you sure it's not offering the new anonymous snarkiness and lack of civility that you crave?

I don't remember seeing anything specific on that, but it could be true. The thing you always hear about in the US is the way the proliferation of channels via cable/satellite has to a tremendous extent destoryed the "shared culture." The most popular shows now are viewed by many, many fewer people than they were in, say, the early 80s.

Truth be told I didn't grow up with THAT much of a public sphere myself, being in a kind of remote corner of DC with an infrequently running bus and no subway and not having a car. At least one of my high school coffeeshop/bookstore hangouts is still doing fine. The arty moviehouse I liked is gone but there are others. Some of the record stores and pool halls I used to like are still there.

But if you're talking about a lot of center-less suburbs, lack of public sphere has been a problem for a long time now, and I think the counterpart to this is a culture of fear (one of the few things I thought Bowling for Columbine did a good job of portraying).

The trend toward building skate parks is certainly a good thing, though the culture of fear tends to fight those as well.

otm :|

-- Fritz Wollner (fritzwollner5...), May 22nd, 2006.

How the fuck would you know what I crave? I'll take sincere snarky over passive-agressive snideness anyday. You don't think it's possible to romanticize the past? Those small neighbourhood movie theatres, video game arcades, and pool halls sure must have really been something.

ethan otm too, about the push-pull of wanting to hold onto things that mean something to you but not wanting to turn into the boring crotchety luddite. the suburbs have to factor in here too. the web is massively popular in the suburbs exactly because people in a lot of those places lack alternatives for interaction. i mean, i wish i'd had the internet when i was a rural-suburban teen.

I dunno, when I was a teen (and even now to some extent) I was never the sort of person who liked bars and dances and clubs and bowling alleys and social spheres in general – I never met friends/likeminded people that way, ever. The internet came along just when I needed it, sort of – when I was starting college back in autumn 1995, and introduced me to all sorts of people and ideas. Granted, most of the friends I currently have I met and interacted with in person while in college, but when I think back to our interactions in many cases email played a huge role and STILL does in terms of keeping us connected – (almost) everyone lives so far away now that email’s a life line! And so many college memories revolve around email even though we weren’t far away from each other.

* the chart-topping worldwide success of TV and radio and the internet has elbowed aside PRIVATE space as well, or instead, if you consider broadcast media and the internet to be forms of "publicity." the concept of a public sphere is a consequence of what benedict anderson in calls "print democracy" in his classic "imagined communities"... the rise of newspapers in the 1700s created an imaginary space where the literate could hold a kind of silent communion with all those other literate people who also subscribed to those newspapers. one is alone, but one knows that thousands or millions are all reading/seeing/hearing the same thing, often at the same time. in this public sphere, one could even contribute to the debate - a promise that actually delivered to an extent in the 1700s, when the only avid readers were men of learning and influence (and leisure time), and now is delivered in spades with the internet. in this contribution, what you say has force DESPITE who you are, not BECAUSE of it. at least, that's the idea. in "the structural transformation of the public sphere" jurgen habermas complicates this but to be honest i can't remember what it was he said. i mainly remember nancy fraser's critique of habermas' book, a paraphrase i've remembered and probably always will, which goes: "simply bracketing status distinctions as if they don't exist is not enough to make it so" -- i.e. yes, we all could be dogs on the internet, but "literacy" has many levels and passcodes beyond one's ABC's, so that even a space comprised of text alone will find a coalescence and alignment with the same cliques, class groups and even racial groups that one finds in the world of bodies.

er so anyway my point is that the internet - and TV and radio and newspapers and books - ARE the public sphere, and that sphere of publicity - however well or poorly it actually delivers on the promises made on its behalf - and its enlargement and penetration into our lives (sorry, those words just work for this!) - i see as an elbowing aside of the PRIVATE sphere, of time spent alone with others, without the TV on, without lines of flight always available. a computer with always-on internet just begs to be used by those with healthy curiosities. there's always an escape hatch, some place to disappear to. mobile phones are also lines of flight, but curiously always connect to a zone of privacy: the space just around another person's mouth, so one manages one half of the public sphere's function - flight outside of one's body and immediate environs - but one lands right in the middle of someone else's, rather than into some neutral, "negative" deliberative space - which is to say, phone calls are kind of kinky (and one can easily see here the last century's massive boner for "the telephone girl", who was like a kind of geisha girl that hand-held and guided your private call to its destination). (what i'm working around to is a logistical beatdown of the "irritated-by-people-on-cellphones" syndrome, but i'm not quite there yet.)

bowling alleys, the polish national home, workers' clubs, roller discos - these are not part of "the public sphere" as it's classically known. i'd just call them civic spaces. they're places for bodies: where who you are and where you from are massively foregrounded rather than wished away. pedantic, i know.

* the chart-topping worldwide success of TV and radio and the internet has elbowed aside PRIVATE space as well, or instead, if you consider broadcast media and the internet to be forms of "publicity." the concept of a public sphere is a consequence of what benedict anderson in calls "print democracy" in his classic "imagined communities"... the rise of newspapers in the 1700s created an imaginary space where the literate could hold a kind of silent communion with all those other literate people who also subscribed to those newspapers. one is alone, but one knows that thousands or millions are all reading/seeing/hearing the same thing, often at the same time. in this public sphere, one could even contribute to the debate - a promise that actually delivered to an extent in the 1700s, when the only avid readers were men of learning and influence (and leisure time), and now is delivered in spades with the internet. in this contribution, what you say has force DESPITE who you are, not BECAUSE of it. at least, that's the idea. in "the structural transformation of the public sphere" jurgen habermas complicates this but to be honest i can't remember what it was he said. i mainly remember nancy fraser's critique of habermas' book, a paraphrase i've remembered and probably always will, which goes: "simply bracketing status distinctions as if they don't exist is not enough to make it so" -- i.e. yes, we all could be dogs on the internet, but "literacy" has many levels and passcodes beyond one's ABC's, so that even a space comprised of text alone will find a coalescence and alignment with the same cliques, class groups and even racial groups that one finds in the world of bodies.

er so anyway my point is that the internet - and TV and radio and newspapers and books - ARE the public sphere, and that sphere of publicity - however well or poorly it actually delivers on the promises made on its behalf - and its enlargement and penetration into our lives (sorry, those words just work for this!) - i see as an elbowing aside of the PRIVATE sphere, of time spent alone with others, without the TV on, without lines of flight always available. a computer with always-on internet just begs to be used by those with healthy curiosities. there's always an escape hatch, some place to disappear to. mobile phones are also lines of flight, but curiously always connect to a zone of privacy: the space just around another person's mouth, so one manages one half of the public sphere's function - flight outside of one's body and immediate environs - but one lands right in the middle of someone else's, rather than into some neutral, "negative" deliberative space - which is to say, phone calls are kind of kinky (and one can easily see here the last century's massive boner for "the telephone girl", who was like a kind of geisha girl that hand-held and guided your private call to its destination). (what i'm working around to is a logistical beatdown of the "irritated-by-people-on-cellphones" syndrome, but i'm not quite there yet.)

bowling alleys, the polish national home, workers' clubs, roller discos - these are not part of "the public sphere" as it's classically known. i'd just call them civic spaces. they're places for bodies: where who you are and where you from are massively foregrounded rather than wished away. pedantic, i know.

* the mystical god-like status of radio stations and television and newspapers - which have long since ceased even the pretense of inclusive communication and debate we can all participate in (NB early radio was imagined very similarly to the internet: we would all have radio transmitters and receivers, and each have our own radio station, which could be looked up in a telephone book-style directory; some of these early directories are still in many public libraries) - has hobbled our world for long enough

For some reason this is poetry to my ears, an incisive and evocative turn of phrase.

(I like this thread)

one thing i really love about techno is that - in the US, at least - it is still very very arcane and the internet does little to shed any light on it

gypsy does internet really provide the "same thing"? i think ethan is saying it totally doesn't.

i guess one thing about the places in question that is different than the net is the idea of the permanent record left by most web interaction - which makes it impossible to romanticize. because we leave google-able tracks on the web, it is all public (even if we're using assumed names etc) and permanent, whereas the exchanges in the semi-public spaces of record stores exist only as we remember them. meanwhile this accessibility also eliminates the concept of the "arcane", the handed-down, the secret, the regional, the local...

I don't think I've experienced what we're looking for. Public space and community were already quite diminished before I was born, and I think things progressing in that direction.

The internet will never be a substitute for bricks and trees and calouses (please god), but because it is such an open and malleable medium, it offers a new type of place. What's more it can be made to be quite intuitive and open to creativity and social dynamism.

So maybe the internet is reversing the trend a little.

I'm not placing any faith in Meetups and FAPs, but pessimism about the effects of the internet is just as unfounded as triumphalism.

are cities losing their ateliers, their salons, their bowling alleys?

the answer is obviously yes to some degree, and it's been happening for a while for reasons that predate the internet. but the internet is filling some of those same functions, in different ways. and it's not like the ateliers and salons and completely disappearing. why i met my wife in an atelier...

reading this thread, i was half-composing a post in my head ... but really, this says it all. the internet is genuinely bringing people together. posting on ILX is, for instance, both a solitary and enormously social pastime. fluffy bear OTM about a "new type of place": not one where you should spend all your time, granted, but then that's true of the cinema/the pub/the train tracks too.

and ILX alone has brought me together with people IRL too: f'rinstance, i had the fortune to met ned last year (not to mention lots of glasgow ilx0rs too). forums like this are about the mind, about discussion: i'd far rather meet people on that level first, then spend time with them IRL. it cuts out an awful lot of social awkwardness.

and, somehow, its the very process of finding out, that cements these social bonds, and to remove that, perhaps a step is missing. by pre-filtering, sorting at home in order to know only people who match you 96.5%+ maybe people are missing the stuff that goes before that

and that this happens in the public sphere, in the civic space, where you have to WORK to find out about people, instead of clicking next.next.next attention deficit disorder

A very good one. Thanks for reviving it; I was thinking a bit about the subjects here the other day.

football games sometimes end 1-0, the goal a scrappy one, in the 80th minute, it was probably Brian Mcbride. It was deserved though, the game really needed a goal. I suppose you could just watch the goal along with the other goals from all the other matches, on the highlights show. After all, you can just cut straight to the important bits, and not bother with the scrappy parts of the match, after all nothing much happened in those bits, right?

was a thing on Click (BBC tech program) about a social networking thing set up in france where it was limited to a very small geographical area and ended up promoting things like meeting your neighbours, going to local places etc, widening your social group based on area rather than interests.

oh, in their archive:
http://www.bbcworld.com/content/clickonline_archive_01_2007.asp?pageid=665&co_pageid=3