Media Access to the Public Sphere

Studies on media access would be incomplete without assessing it within the context of democratic participation, central to the notion of a democratic society. McCrery and Newhagen, 2003 raise this critical issue of access to the public sphere and the elasticity, which surrounds its definition. Their conceptualization of the public sphere as a combination of process and opinion spheres is a credible way of representing the differences and the interactions that occur between the political elites and the mass public, especially in the context of the policy making process. This model while capturing the broad essence of the phenomenon of public sphere may be too simplistic. Neither does it capture the gradations in the political efficacy of the mass public nor does it reflect the differences between the political elite. They have not delved into how the differential Internet access has mediated or changed the dynamics of the public sphere and with what implications. The focus appeared to be on historical background rather than on future ramifications of public sphere membership in the altered landscape of Internet access.
In addition, the article on the skills and motivations of interactive media audiences in the use of radio was a total throwback. This discussion would have been more appropriate in a journal or book devoted to the discussion of radio as a medium of accessing the public sphere. The term interactivity has come to be synonymous with Internet rather than radio. It appears a misnomer, to me, to equate radio as being an interactive medium and calls to question the definition of interactivity. A search for a good definition of interactivity revealed that there is no universally accepted definition of interactivity. Also, interactivity could mean different things for different media. Based on Hofstetter’s, 2003 description of radio as an interactive medium it follows that interactivity in this context means content that forces radio audiences to participate either passively (by exposing themselves to political content) or actively by calling in the radio political talk show hosts or participating in political activities. It is no surprise then with such a broad interpretations of interactivity, virtually any media would qualify as being interactive The next logical question/step would be to determine the degree of interactivity on the continuum of what constitutes as more or less interactive medium and identify its defining characteristics.
A similar predicament surrounds the issue of digital divide or unequal access to information technology that may be responsible for the gap that exists between different stratum of people and their disparate development. Dijk, 2003, contends that lack of universal availability of hardware dominates the discussion on digital divide. (p.238). which, may not be the only lens through which to examine the digital divide. His cumulative and recursive model of media access premised on—mental access, material access, skill access and usage access is similar to the model proposed by Newhagen and Bucy, 2003, except for the usage access and may fill the gap in explaining the digital divide. However, he also raises some valid points about digital divide that hits at the core For instance, there might not exist a digital divide because the distribution of Internet technology among the population approaches normality i.e. the averages of income, ethnicity, and gender rapidly parallel society as a whole (p.243). They are old inequalities that are reproduced rather than new inequalities. Conclusions of the SCP research team illustrates that differences of skill and use are smaller than differences of possession and once the threshold of possession of computer and network connection has passed, material and social resources plays a relatively minor role. To me these arguments seem convincing and muster at least a closer inspection. The debate on the causes and implication of digital divide is not new and is open to arguments, as most likely my detractors would like to conclude and weigh in.