Mediating the Web as a Public Space

Amidst the commercial hype that has come to surround the internet in recent years, there has been much excitement about the democratic promise of the net and a growing wave of various e-democracy projects. It is thought that the ICTs and the world wide web in particular will enable more direct forms of citizen participation, especially at the local level, foster reciprocal interaction between citizens and decision-makers and create new spaces for public discussion and debate.

Despite the claims of interactivity, the agenda for most online democracy projects has been set and their purposes of communication defined by institutionalized and powerful actors. The disparity between the rhetoric and the reality of web-assisted democracy is bound to persist unless the compartmentalized and hierarchic practices of public communication are challenged both theoretically and in practice.

This article suggests that in order to tap the democratic potential of the web, we need to address the question of genre. As genres offer the cultural interfaces through which people make sense of and use the web, like other media, bottom-up alternatives to dominant online genres are needed in order to create more citizen-oriented spaces of public communication on the web.

By drawing upon an experimental project where academic research co-operated with local grassroots citizen groups and actively mediated interaction on the web across social boundaries and power hierarchies, the article aims to demonstrate the socio-cultural significance of civic web genres.