Web 2.0: Disaster Response in the New Public Sphere

Much has been said about the Internet’s capacity to act as a “new public sphere”; a radical departure from the bourgeois structures of Habermasian participatory democracy in which only those with social capital are given a deliberative voice¹. Building on the work of Nancy Fraser, who outlined the importance of the counterpublic², scholars such as Lincoln Dahlberg³ and Peter Dahlgren⁴ have each noted the potential for the online world to shatter the boundaries not only between state and public, but between the institution of journalism and the public.

According to Terry Flew, citizen journalism is one facet of this new era, emerging “at the intersection of emergent internet and digital media technologies, a perceived crisis in news values and professional journalism, and the demand for online participation”⁵. Lowered barriers of access such as declining costs, increasing global infrastructure, and user-anonymity, coupled with unrestricted and free dissemination substitutes for the traditional printing press in the form of blogging platforms (i.e. Wordpress, Blogspot, Tumblr), are each transforming the landscape of public communication and the definitions of what constitutes “news”, who can create “news”, and what relevance “news” has for diverse, fragmentary societies today⁶.

(source)

Social media, specifically Twitter and Facebook, represent another novel departure from conventional models of news-production and distribution, instead prioritising collaborative, immediate, real-time updates over the complete and decoded messages of published journalism⁷. Contrasting this, too, with the Wiki phenomenon, containing within it the possibility for anyone to contribute to the written historical record, as well as refine it and rewrite it⁸.

Jay Rosen speaks further of the exchange on roles mentioned in From the Ashes of the Journalist Rises a New Hero, citing citizen journalists as "the people formerly known as the audience”, who are “simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable."⁹

A Facebook update from a Virginia Tech Student (source)

During the Virginia Tech shootings, emergency services lagged behind in their communications about the situation to the public. Meanwhile, students harnessed the power of social media, creating a Facebook group, "I'm OK at VT". A study by the University of Colorado found that “within just 90 minutes of the first deaths... a web page accurately describing the events appeared on Wikipedia”.

Editor Zed will explore the structural and ideological foundations of Web 2.0 that thrust the “audience” into a new, undefined territory in which user-generated-content is not only “democratic” in nature, disintegrating and redistributing the authority of news once monopolised by “legitimate” news-room sources, but can also be thought of as expository, demystifying, revolutionary, and sometimes even life-saving¹⁰.


1. Sparks, Colin (2001), 'The Internet and the global public sphere', in W.L. Bennett and R.M. Entman (Eds.), Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy, New York, Cambridge University Press, pp. 75-95.
2. Fraser, Nancy (1992), 'Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy', in C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Boston, MIT Press, pp. 109-142.
3. Dahlberg, Lincoln (2001), 'The Internet and democratic discourse: Exploring the prospects of online deliberative forums extending the public sphere', Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 615-633.
4. Dahlgren, Peter (2005), 'The Internet, public spheres, and political communication: Dispersion and deliberation', Political Communication, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 147-162.
5. Flew, Terry and Wilson, Jason (2010), 'Journalism as social networking: The Australian "youdecide" project and the 2007 federal election', Journalism, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 131-147.
6. Blumer, Jay and Gurevitch, Michael (2001), 'The new media and our political communication discontents: Democratising cyberspace', Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 1-14.
7. Flew, Terry (2008), 'Participatory Media Cultures', New Media: An Introduction, South Melbourne, Oxford University Press, pp. 106-125.
8. Benkler, Yochai (2006), 'Peer production and sharing', The Wealth of Networks, New Haven, Yale University Press, pp. 51-67.
9. Rosen, Jay (2006), 'The people formerly known as the audience', PressThink, June 27 2006 [online]. Available. Accessed 14 August, 2011.  
10. Alasuutari, Pertti (1999), Rethinking the Media Audience, London, Sage.