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 They have largely been replaced by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
                         john@well.com one day, a teenage girl called kate@aol.com 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.