Media monopolies, digital democracy, cultural clashes - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 220

media, but should be seen against the background of an informa-
tion overflow, in which deterritorialised experiences overall have less
'power' and influence than place-bounded experiences.
The Internet, e-mail systems and cyberspace divert from some of the
cultural and moral characteristics of television, as engagements can be
much more direct and the dialogical structure is stronger. At the same
time, the Internet adds up to the information overflow and has similar
features of deterritorialised experience as television. But through its
dialogical structure, the new media is - more often than, for instance,
television - able to support and strengthen face-to-face, place-bounded
and co-presence information exchanges, as we saw with respect to the
use of ICT by environmental NGOs. Consequently, until now the new
media is generally believed to do better in closing moral and cultural
distance than television. In the future, this will depend on the further
development of this new technological paradigm and the way it is inte-
grated with the conventional media. That will determine the further
impact of cyberspace and the Internet on individual experiences, inter-
actions and interventions, as well as on social systems.

4. The Fourth Estate in transition

There are three major developments that have changed the landscape
of media, mediated information, and news dramatically during the past
two decades. First, whereas for a long time the media was contained in
the nation-state, there is an increasing tendency towards global media.
It is only recently that media such as newspapers, television broadcast-
ing and radio have started to address audiences beyond the nation-state
of their origin. Most television stations were national, even for a long
time publicly run and state-owned. The so-called public sphere, in
which the media functioned and which was also structured to a signifi-
cant extent by the media, was a national public sphere. That has started
to change dramatically during the past two decades. Satellite television,
the Internet and even newspapers have widened their audience and
thus their profile (cf. Schuler and Day, 2004 ). Although it might yet be
one step too far to speak of a global public sphere with global media
(as Sparks, 2005 , correctly notices 3 ), the containment of the media in

3

Sparks ( 2005 ) points at the limited audiences of truly global satellite TV
(e.g. CNN, BBC World Service); the difference that the global media brings in