Approaching the Networked Public Sphere

Milwaukee.
The next presentation at AoIR 2009 is by Hallvard Moe, who begins by noting that the public sphere is still a useful concept It exposes us to expressions, opinions, and perspective we would not otherwise have chosen in advance, and provides a range of common experiences for citizens. But how do online media impinge on this - do they segment and polarise the public sphere (as suggested by people like Cass Sunstein), or provide more connections between and access to different ideas (as per Yochai Benkler's networked public sphere)?

The problems with this debate is that there remains a lack of empirical data on this question - even if some are now beginning to emerge (but remain largely focussed on the Anglo-American context, or on narrowly defined political communication). How communal is the online community, and how strongly are borders and links felt in the blogosphere or the wider online mediasphere?

So, we need to look beyond news and factual content, and consider participation in a wider range of genres (many forms of participation are ultimately relevant here); we need to apply a wider scope when deciding which instances of communication are relevant; and we need to move beyond a convenient selection only of official channels or explicitly political sources and arenas. In doing this, media and political studies researchers need help from other disciplines.

Hallvard's own work in this context is a study of the Norwegian blogosphere. Norway has 4.8 million inhabitants and a widespread use of ICTs; 85% of homes have Internet access, Norway is the seventh-most broadbanded-up country in the world, and on average, people spend some 65 minutes online per day. Newspaper readership also remains the highest in the world, interestingly. The top four Norwegian bloggers are NRKBeta, a new media blog by the public broadcaster, VamPlus' Verden, a conservative political blog written by a 30-something female, Revolusjonært Roteloft, a personal and artistic blog by a 22-year-old woman, and Ida Wulff, a young woman's blog discussing her life in Oslo and offering no outlinks and no sustained dialogue (which nonetheless covers topics that can be considered to be politically relevant, however, and can be considered to be a source of news for its readers when it covers relevant topics).

The Norwegian blogosphere can be analysed using a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches; this can be used to examine how Norwegian blogs link amongst one another and to other sites, and whether these links are reciprocated, for example, as well as to examine the thematic content of these blogs. This, then, provides insights into the nature of the networked public sphere in Norway, and this research contributes to the development of new and important research approaches combining a number of methodological inputs.

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