One-to-Many medium to the Networked Society

For centuries the most dominate medium was One to many. Such as Public speeches and Books. Nowadays, one to many medium is still dominate but Many to Many medium are taking more space. But still, One to Many is more organized and controlled. For example with blogging, a one to many medium, the message is clear and undisturbed. It flows smoothly from the one to the many. While in an online forums, a  many to many medium there is always too many messages flying around which make it hard to be organized. Nevertheless the variety of opinion and discussion is the main strength of many to many medium.

One-to-Many & Many-to-Many

In 1963 Jurgen Habermas defined what he called the Public Sphere as a virtual or imaginary community which does not necessarily exist in any identifiable space. In its ideal form, the public sphere is "made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state” Link.  In the digital age one to many medium is different and interactive. Most blogs and online newspapers offer a space for people to comment and discuss the content and sometimes refuse it with presenting some evidence, not to mention the massive and active “many to many” online forums. That does definitely offer a kind of public sphere. Bloggers now are very active socially and politically. They can start riots and rallies in many countries. They applied a public sphere as Habermas described it.  Although a limited public sphere was always active, it expanded in a mass revolutionary way through technology. Social communication became very easy; activists can now pass their messages to large number of people with little effort because modern societies are mainly networked.


But Networked society is a two edged weapon. Its pros are mainly “making people communicate in a much easier and effective way”. For example: family and friends can connect all the time by fast and cheap means where ever they are. However, the main cons come as a result to these pros. As much networked society shortened distances between people, it has been argued that it destroyed the real values of simple human face to face communications. It also raise some concerns privacy and identity


More about the Network Society in Youtube video below: