يا اخوانا ما معنى كلمة ( إسفيرى) المستخدمه هذه الأيام .....!!!!!!؟؟؟؟

Quote: The Net as a Public Sphere? By Mark Poster Throughout Western civilization, places such as the ancient Greek agora, the New England town hall, the local church, the coffeehouse, the village square, and even the street corner have been arenas for debate on public affairs and society. Out of thousands of such encounters, "public opinion" slowly formed and became the context in which politics was framed. Although the public sphere never included everyone, and by itself did not determine the outcome of all parliamentary actions, it contributed to the spirit of dissent found in a healthy representative democracy. Many of these public spaces remain, but they are no longer centers for political discussion and action. They have largely been replaced by television and other forms of media - forms that arguably isolate citizens from one another rather than bring them together. Now, Internet newsgroups, MOOs, and other virtual communities are being promoted as nascent public spheres that will renew democracy in the 21st century. But these claims are fundamentally misguided: they overlook the profound differences between Internet "cafés" and the agoras of the past. Disembodied exchange of video text is not a substitute for face-to-face meeting - it has its own logic, its own ways of forming opinion. These attributes will powerfully affect the politics that emerge in our digital era. To understand how our notion of democracy will change - and I believe it will change radically - we need to understand how the Net differs from historical public spheres. In Western civilization, the public sphere was a place people could talk as equals. Status differences did not exclude frank discussion. Rational argument prevailed, and the goal was consensus. It was a place anyone could argue with anyone else, and the collected assembly acted as judge of the wisest direction for society to take. As those who read Usenet can tell you, this definition doesn't come close to describing the online world. True, the Net allows people to talk as equals. But rational argument rarely prevails, and achieving consensus is widely seen as impossible. These are symptoms of the fundamentally different ways identity is defined in the public sphere and on the Net. Traditionally, a person's identity is defined by contact. Identity is rooted in the physical body. This stability forces individuals to be accountable for their positions and allows trust to be built up between people. The Internet, however, allows individuals to define their own identities and change them at will. A person might be an aging hippie known as [email protected] one day, a teenage girl called [email protected] the next. This kind of protean identity is not consonant with forming a stable political community as we have known it. Dissent on the Net does not lead to consensus: it creates the profusion of different views. Without embodied copresence, the charisma and status of individuals have no force. The conditions that encourage compromise, the hallmark of the democratic political process, are lacking online. On the Internet, since identities are mobile, dissent is encouraged, and "normal" status markers are absent, it is a very different social "space" from that of the public sphere. These changes must be examined without nostalgia. True, the Net marks a break with tradition. But that does not necessarily make it incompatible with political thought. Political discourse has long been mediated by electronic machines: the issue now is that these machines have enabled new forms of decentralized dialog and created unique combinations of human-machine assemblages - individual and collective "voices" that are the modern building blocks of political formations and groupings. If the current media technology (television) is viewed as a threat to democracy, how can we account for a technology like the Internet, which appears to decentralize communication but enhance democracy? We must remember that the Net is something entirely new, and its effects on democratic politics can't be predicted using historical precedent. The Internet threatens the government (unmonitorable conversations), mocks private property (the infinite reproducibility of information), and flaunts moral propriety (the dissemination of pornography). The technology of the Internet shouldn't be viewed as a new form of public sphere. The challenge is to understand how the networked future might be different from what we have known.