In Machines of Knowledge, we dealt with issues like data ethics, digital archives, questions of “who controls the narrative”, and the history and evolution of the web, which we thought about through three key theoretical frameworks: postcolonialism, feminism, and public spheres.
I had come across all three before, but they were really solidified for me by the ways we applied them – in tutorials by giving presentations and taking part in a debate, but also in the skills sessions, where I got my first taste of distant reading and text analysis.
Something I hadn’t considered before, or even really heard of before, was the concept of close versus distant reading. EVERY academic piece I’ve written until now has been close reading, and I really enjoyed having this whole new methodology opened up for me.
I also thought the structure of the course, introducing postcolonialism first, followed by feminism and finally public spheres, was thoughtful and provoked some interesting discussion. When thinking about Habermas’ original concept of public spheres with our recent tutorials in mind, it was clear to see the institutional and societal barriers in the accessibility of the spaces Habermas would consider to be “public”.
Habermas’ public sphere is “made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state”. In short, it’s a freely-accessed public space for people to discuss societal and political interests, with the intention of reaching some kind of consensus on them.
However, the history of how public spheres were constructed made them less accessible than Habermas argued. From the early days where discourse was held in coffee houses, a certain level of affluence was needed in order to attend. You needed the finances to buy the coffee before you could participate; you needed to live in an area where public discourse is held; you, likely, needed to have the news passed to you by word of mouth that such an event was taking place. And, of course, those who are marginalised from a postcolonial or feminist perspective were less likely to have access to each of those points.
Now, in the digital age, a lot of the barriers of a “traditional” public sphere have been overcome. Anyone with access to the Internet can participate in online discourse. But I think that the issue of accessibility remains; a large portion of the world’s population does not have the means to access the Internet, and discussion is quite often limited to those who can read and write in English.
While the Internet tends to be presented as an equal, emancipative space for worldwide communication, it’s easy to see through to the underlying privileges necessary to access it.
All in all, Machines of Knowledge has been a thought-provoking course that has made me reconsider the way I view information, as well as the mechanisms of privilege working alongside the Internet.
Habermas, Jürgen (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, p. 30, ISBN978-0-262-58108-0 Translation from the original German, published 1962.