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‘Blogging and Globalization: the Blurring of the Public/Private Spheres.’ Aslib
Proceedings: New Information Perspectives 2009 61(2):127-138.
Blogging and globalization: the blurring of the public/private spheres
Gillian Youngs
Department of Media and Communication
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Abstract
Purpose – The blurring of public and private spheres is among the changes associated
with the phenomenon of blogging. In linking this to theories of globalization we can
see more clearly how new media transformations have macro as well as micro
significance.
Design/methodology/approach – An assessment of blogging is undertaken in the
context of theories of globalization, with specific focus on issues related to
public/private linkages, the aim being to make theory-practice connections to enhance
understanding of the wider implications of blogging.
Findings – The analysis identifies how theories of globalization offer foundational
understanding for investigating blogging as a social rather than purely new media
development. This relates to the spatial reconfigurations of social, political, economic
and cultural life, which have been characteristic of processes of globalization. The
ways in which blogging demonstrates the blurring of public and private spheres is
usefully understood within this broader spatial framework.
Research limitations/implications – This is a primarily conceptual and theoretical
approach with substantive reference to blogging, which remains at the general level
rather than looking in detail at different kinds of blogs and their implications. Its
contribution is therefore located primarily in the conceptual and theoretical domains.
Practical implications – This form of analysis foregrounds public/private sphere
boundaries in relation to blogging and could contribute to critical thinking about the
social implications of blogging for bloggers and readers alike.
Originality/value – Conceptual and theoretical linkages between theories of
globalization, especially in relation to spatial issues, blogging and the burring of
public and private.
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Keywords Globalization, Blogging, New media, Internet, Public sphere, Private
sphere
Blogging and globalization: the blurring of the public/private spheres
Gillian Youngs
Department of Media and Communication
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Introduction
This article discusses some of the conceptual and theoretical implications for the
blurring of public and private spheres demonstrated by the Web 2.0 phenomenon of
blogging in the context of theories of globalization. Its approach is to consider
blogging in the broader frame of new media developments rather than as an isolated
development, thus focus is placed on how blogging helps us to understand the social
manifestations and consequences of new media more generally, as well as introducing
specifically new factors that need to be addressed. In this way, blogging is viewed as
one of many interconnected threads of online communication that have developed
over the history of the Internet. Also, there is an applied approach to thinking
conceptually and theoretically about new media. In other words, a sense that many
insights about these two areas, draw heavily on innovative new media practices and
the ways in which they become established. So, to a certain degree, practice is being
read back into concepts and theory, as much as they are being read into practice.
The article is divided into two sections. These are intended to offer different
insights into our thinking about private and public spheres in relation to new media.
First, the question, what is new about blogging in relation to blurring of public and
private spheres will be considered, in order to draw out some of the continuities as
well as discontinuities across media developments. The stance here is that thinking
critically about where we have come from, even in terms of the relatively short
history of the Internet, will not only help our clarity about where we are now, but also
thinking about the range of possibilities for the future. Second, the complex mapping
of the blurring of public and private spheres in relation to traditionally conceived
boundaries of political spheres is considered. What is centrally at stake here is the
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diverse meanings of the social spaces of new media blogging in the setting of
traditionally configured geopolitical communities. It is argued that new
communicative dynamics lead to new critical thinking about public and private
spheres, as well as the shifting linkages between them, thanks to new media. Both
these sections of the article draw on theories of globalization, highlighting how they
have focused on spatial transformations as part of contemporary social dynamics.
What is new about blogging in terms of blurring public and private spheres?
It can be argued that in common with many Web 2.0 (social networking) phenomena,
blogging has contributed to embedding
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individualization in the public sphere of new
media. However, there are a number of qualifications that instantly help us to probe
the specific nature of such individualization. First let’s say a little about the new
challenges presented to our thinking about public sphere by the Internet.
The public sphere has traditionally been a core concept in the study of mass
media and communications in liberal societies. In broad terms it represents the free
flow of public discussion and exchange of views that is seen, in particular, as
fundamental to the legitimacy of democratic systems. It is a concept that locates an
open media realm as integral to the legitimating processes of liberal societies,
including in terms of accountable structures of governance. Thus the concept of
public sphere (most notably theorized by Jürgen Habermas) tends to carry with it a
heavy normative baggage related to the workings of democracy. Power is part of this
picture and thus the differentiated influence of individuals and different (elite etc)
groupings and organizations within it. Critiques of the public sphere concept focus
among other things on the ‘ideal’ nature of it and the problem of exclusions or
limitations affecting groups such as women (see, for example, the range of debates in
Calhoun 1992. See also Harcourt 1999 and Beetham and Valenti 2007)
Discussion of the public sphere has inherently focused on the modern
(democratic and territorially defined) state/society relationship (see Habermas 1992,
1996).
As a sphere between civil society and the state, in which critical public
discussion of matters of general interest was institutionally guaranteed,
the liberal public sphere took shape in the specific historical
circumstances of a developing market economy. In its clash with the
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arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergent
bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s
power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in
which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and
critical discourse by the people. (McCarthy 1992, xi. Emphasis in the
original)
In the pre-new media mass media age defined by print and broadcast outlets, a
lot about the public sphere could be taken for granted. These media traditionally
mapped, in the main, directly onto key social boundaries such as the national and the
local, and as such, reflected the particular characteristics of such national and local
contexts, including through different languages (see, for example, Anderson 1991, 37-
46). Transnational media of national origin, notably the BBC World Service, always
and intentionally reached well beyond their boundaries, but their national roots
remained evident and a key aspect of what they were communicating. In other words
part of the broadcast role is to reflect the key characteristics of the British public
sphere and to report on the world and to the world in those terms. The multichannel,
transnational broadcast era from the latter part of the 20
th
century based on satellite
and cable technologies has given growing numbers of people access to growing
numbers of public and private channels. But it is fair to say that to a large extent these
can still be viewed in traditional public sphere terms in that they reflect the national
public spheres in which they originate, and thus in turn the different national political
and broadcast cultures (for a range of related material, including from critical
perspectives, see for example Mohammadi 1997).
These points make it clear that the concept of the public sphere, as it has been
most familiar in the study of media and communications, has in effect mirrored how
societies have been organized as polities, economies and cultures along national and
local lines. Thus the public sphere has implicitly been a concept incorporating ideas
about the spatial (territorial) organization of societies into distinctive and clearly
segregated (bounded) entities. The publics of public spheres are by their very
definition different from one another to large or small extent in relation to: languages,
cultures, political systems, types of economy, histories, public and private
broadcasting traditions, levels and types of governmental (political) control or
regulation, etc (Anderson 1991, 37-46; Dahlgren 2001).
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Public sphere traditions are most closely associated with highly developed
democracies, notably in the US and Europe, where patterns of free speech, lack of
centralized political control over media, and the role of public and private media in
facilitating free flow of information from top to bottom and vice versa, are among
defining qualities. The Internet and the World Wide Web are respectively American
and European inventions, and as mass media of a new kind, their operation reflects
western free flow public sphere values. But the inherently anarchic and boundary
crossing nature of new media necessitates expanded thinking about the public sphere,
and the phenomenon of blogging is illustrative of why this is the case.
The public sphere of traditional mass media has context inherently contained
in it. For example, the majority of people consuming such media (whether local or
national) would traditionally have been located within, or associated with, the public
sphere within which the media is generated. These audiences could be assumed to
bring some kind of foundational historical knowledge of the specific context to the
material they are accessing. And this is probably still the case for many consumers of
such media. But now that this (traditional print and broadcast) media is online (via the
web), it is also being presented out of its specific public sphere context, and open to
access by increasing numbers of people who may be completely or only slightly
knowledgeable about that context. This raises whole ranges of questions about
contrasting forms of media literacy, which will doubtless become more prevalent in
analyses of different aspects of new media consumption. When audiences are self-
selecting and boundary crossing, including across national borders, something is
happening to conventional understandings of the public sphere.
Theorizing about processes of globalization has included the notion of social
relations being ‘stretched’ across time and space (see Giddens 1991) and it is
interesting to think about public sphere contexts being stretched in similar ways. This
may be a more accurate conceptual approach to public sphere discourses, including
the individualized ones associated with blogging, than ideas about the possible
development of a global public sphere or spheres (see also Sparks 2001). My reason
for saying this is that all such discourses (whether formal and mediated or informal
and individual) are generated out of specific public sphere settings, knowledge of
which may be relevant to evaluation of the information and opinions being expressed.
One of the many contributions of conceptualizations of the public sphere is the