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The Role of the Internet in Establishing a Fifth Estate

Hong Kong.
The second day of The Internet Turning 40 at Chinese University Hong Kong is upon us, and we're starting with a paper by William Dutton. He begins by noting a current story of mobile phones and online communication being used to mobilise workers in China in protest against working conditions - and he says that this illustrates the potential of new media as a fifth estate. The original three estates (clergy, nobility, commoners) were a feudal concept, of course, with journalists added later as a fourth estate, tasked with keeping the other three honest.

In the twenty-first century, Bill suggests, there is now the emergence of a form of association that is different from the press but functions in similar ways as a corrective and is organised through Internet communication. This has to do with the politics of the Internet, which have matured over time - after being seen as a novelty and passing fad, the Net was then seen as a deterministic technology of freedom or control; via reinforcement politics we have now moved to a perception of the Net as a strategic resource for reconfiguring access, which enables the development of a fifth estate.

Reconfiguring access affects technological dimensions, people, services, and information - but does the Net enable actors to reconfigure access in ways that enhance their communicative powers, or does it reinforce existing power relations? Bill presents evidence from a number of recent surveys, including the Oxford Internet Surveys conducted over the years by the Oxford Internet Institute as part of the World Internet Project.

In the first place, the Net is a central but divided resource - access is far from equal and universal, which creates problems for democratic participation. However, the fifth estate does not depend on universal access, but simply on having a critical mass of participants who can utilise the Net to make their voices heard - even in regions where access remains low (only 19% of the population in Asia were using the Net in 2009), the impact can still be felt. (Notably, of course, levels of Internet access are strongly correlated with economic performance - and within populations, access is correlated with age, as well: the 'old rich' have as little access as the 'young poor', interestingly.)

Internet users also rate the Net very highly as an important information resource - higher than TV, radio, or newspapers -, while non-users rate it (unsurprisingly) as unimportant. People who use the Net now find themselves in a space of flows - they are approaching the Net using a search logic rather than going only to known online destinations, and increasingly tend to go to the Net first (ahead of other information sources) when searching for information.

This space of flows is not a public sphere in the traditional sense, though - and the fifth estate is not simply the online environment (let alone online journalism), but consists of the associations enabled by the Net. That said, the fifth estate is also under threat, especially from established institutions and organisations which are often actively opposing the associations of networked individuals.

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