Benkler on why the Internet is better than the mass media as a “public sphere”

Based on Chapter 7 of The Wealth Of Networks

Remember:

The correct baseline is the one-way structure of the commercial mass media, where only a few can speak and most are only passive listeners/readers/watchers.

Summary:

We are seeing a newly shaped information environment, where indeed few are read by many, but clusters of moderately popular online sites provide platforms for vastly greater numbers of speakers than were heard in the mass-media environment.

Filtering, accreditation, synthesis, and salience are created through a system of peer review by information affinity groups, topical or interest based.
These groups filter the observations and opinions of an enormous range of people, and transmit those that pass local peer review to broader groups and ultimately to the polity more broadly, without recourse to market-based points of control over the information flow.

Intense interest and engagement by small groups that share common concerns, rather than lowest-common-denominator interest in wide groups that are largely alienated from each other, is what draws attention to statements and makes them more visible.

This makes the emerging networked public sphere more responsive to intensely held concerns of a much wider swath of the population than the mass media were capable of seeing, and creates a communications process that is more resistant to corruption by money.

Stop Sinclair example:

In 2004 when John Kerry was the Democratic candidate for President, running against incumbent Republican Geaorge W. Bush, the Sinclair Broadxast network, which owns something like 25% of the television stations in the US, planned to run a documentary a couple of weeks before the election, alleging the Kerry was a coward and a fraud and that his status as something of a war hero (he received a Silver Star and a Purple Heart for his service in Vietnam) was not deserved. Activists were able to organize online and disrupt this plan by organizing an advertizer boycott of Sinclair stations.

Benkler says this story suggests a more complex reality than simply "the rich get richer" and "you might speak, but no one will hear you."
In this case, the topology of the network allowed rapid emergence of a position, its filtering and synthesis, and its rise to salience.
Network topology helped facilitate all these components of the public sphere, rather than undermined them.

How?

"… intuitively, it seems unsurprising that a large population of individuals who are politically mobilized on the same side of the political map and share a political goal in the public sphere - using a network that makes it trivially simple to set up new points of information and coordination, tell each other about them, and reach and use them from anywhere - would, in fact, inform each other and gather to participate in a political demonstration."

"We saw that the boycott technique that Davis had designed his Web site to facilitate was discussed on TalkingPoints - a site near the top of the power law distribution of political blogs - but that it was a proposal by an anonymous individual who claimed to know what makes local affiliates tick, not of TalkingPoints author Josh Marshall. "

In other words a 'bottom-up' political movement was succesfully organized on the Internet.