New Media and Democracy

Jenny Kidd's Are New Media Democratic? is a neat little article wherein she tells the two narratives of new media. The first approaches the question positively and suggests that democracy is a constituent part of the internet - both in its inception and infrastructure. It gives everyone a voice and isn't moderated or owned by any one government and works in a bottom-up model rather than a top-down hierarchy. The second narrative concludes that new media are not democratic. They are capitalistic (if not by nature, then by design), which has led to "Big Media" institutions that control, in one way or another, the flow of information (e.g., Google, Facebook, IE8). Additionally, to say that no one government controls the internet is not to say that particular governments can't control their citizens' access to the internet. So, for example, while China has the majority of web users, they also employ more than 30,000 internetofficers to police users and restrict access to certain websites and Google search results (and, of course, the US government has the freedom to shut downsites that break US law). So the proposition of the first narrative - that no one can turn off the internet for users - is only true in a sense. If a person only sought to access certain portions of the internet that were subjected to government restrictions, then for that user, the government would have functionally shut off their internet (and, of course, a user's ISP retains the freedom to shut down their internet if they deem it appropriate). 

I liked Kidd's approach in providing two narratives that are both "true" in their information. In a sense her two narratives were also told in the Carr and Rosen debate from last week , albeit with more analysis. I happen to hear the truth of the second, more negative narrative a bit more loudly, but in true rhetorical fashion the debate swings on what aspects receive the most emphasis. It is ostensibly true that people can speak their minds much more easily on the web through blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, but if nobody is listening (as Kidd suggests in her second narrative), then what is the difference between web-published rants and those of the unheard TV viewer? Without a ripple-effect or some kind of public discourse then both forms of ranting are an exercise of free speech, but not necessarily democracy in any actualized sense.