Blogs and the right to communicate: Towards creating a space-less public sphere?

Abstract

With the emergence of the interactive use of the Internet especially during the course of the past decade, netizens have started to create a ldquospace-lessrdquo public sphere. This is an ldquoonlinerdquo arena where the utopian Habermasian conceptualization of an open and interactive public discussion of issues of public interest is materialized. Blogs in particular exemplify the global, interactive personal communication anticipated, and hoped for, by early advocates of the right to communicate. Both politics and government are significant proportion of the dialogue found on Blogs. Using blogs as a case study, this paper argues that a new space of democratic public dialogue has been formed in which issues of local, regional, national and international matters are discussed freely, reciprocally, and-most importantly-publicly. While the human right to communicate as it is articulated in research [1] was not defined until the late 1960s in the work of Jean dpsilaArcy, its philosophical roots can be traced back to the seventeenth century. On the one hand, the use of the innovation of blogging as a public sphere demonstrates how a right to communicate is being realized in a real world application. On the other hand, blogs can foster a growing communicative consciousness among netizens throughout the world. The monopoly of communication by the global corporate sector is being challenged as individuals become more aware of the centrality of communication issues to their lives as communicative beings. Such a communicative consciousness generates a demand for the recognition and the realization of a right to communicate for everyone.

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