Cybersalons and Civil Society: Rethinking the Public Sphere in Transnational Technoculture

Recently, I checked out the discussion lists on Borders Books's on-line magazine Salon. I had enjoyed Salon's commentary on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, so I was optimistic about their discussion groups. ¹ There were hundreds of options. I could chat about the challenges of mothering, debate current events, or analyze television shows. I joined the group on current political and cultural events. Again, there were abundant possibilities: gay parents, gays in the military, gay schoolteachers--the very range of options on queer matters suggested the prevalence of contemporary cultural anxieties around perceived threats to straight sex, anxieties that easily exceeded the ostensible terms and terrain of debate. After noticing that most of these "discussions" were voyeuristic excuses to gay bash or painstakingly detail a variety of sexual practices and positions, I went to a group considering the pros and cons of establishing English as the official language of the United States. I found it difficult to follow--or find--the logic of the discussion. Few of the comments seemed relevant, and few offered reasons to justify a position or arguments to counter an opposing viewpoint. One thread concerned why Germans like to watch American blockbuster movies and whether James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic would be a hit in Europe. Other remarks were "Hi," "Jimbo's remark was lame," and "Later."

This brief foray into Salon's discussion list is not an exhaustive account of talk on the Net or life in cyberspace. Rather, it highlights the salon as a form of computer-mediated discussion, of communication among persons linked not by proximity, tradition, or ethnicity, but by an ability to use and an interest in networked interaction. The cybersalon provides a link, as it were, to the networked complexities of communication, interaction, and information exchange in late capitalist technoculture.

Before clicking on this link, I want to contrast this salon with two other salons, those offered by Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas presents the salons of eighteenth-century France as instances of the newly emerging bourgeois public sphere. There, bourgeoisie, nobles, and intellectuals only recently removed from their plebeian origins met on equal footing. As Habermas writes, "In the salon the mind was no longer in the service of a patron; 'opinion' became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence." ² The salon provided a space apart from the economy, a space where people could exchange ideas and voice criticism on matters of shared interest or concern. The vitality of the exchanges was such that new works and great minds first sought legitimacy in the salons.

Habermas associates the salons with the Tischgesellschaften (table societies) and coffee houses of Germany and England to abstract the following characteristics of this new form of interaction, of what for him is the newly constituted sphere of private persons come together as a public. First, there was disregard of social status, a fundamental parity among all participants such that the authority of the better argument could win out over social hierarchy. Second, new areas of questioning and critique were opened up as culture itself was produced as a commodity to be consumed. Third, the newly emerging public was established as open and inclusive in principle. That is to say, anyone could have access to that which was discussed in the public sphere. These abstractions lead Habermas, fourth, to conceptualize the public sphere in terms of the public use of reason. ³

Benhabib's version of the salon comes from a rather different, and largely feminist, angle. In "The Pariah and Her Shadow," her essay on Hannah Arendt's biography of Rahel Varnhagen, Benhabib views the salon as "a space of sociability in which the individual desire for difference and distinctiveness could assume an intersubjective reality and in which unusual individuals, and primarily certain highly talented Jewish women, could find a 'space' of visibility...