인터넷 공론장의 매개된 상호가시성과 담론 공중의 형성

Abstract

This paper explores the process in which the rise of the Internet media for public discussion creates social conditions under which Internet readers and writers make themselves 'discursive publics' who facilitate new forms of public engagement in South Korea. In order to explain that a public is constructed around issues and events and that there are other collective subjects such as nations and right-bearing citizens overlapping with publics, I introduce the notion of 'public as an association of public selves.' Critically appropriating the notion of the transformation of visibility developed by Thompson(1995), I suggest that the Internet as a media environment produces yet another turn of the transformation of visibility by which interconnectedness, documentability, and traceability of online actions creates a new visibility condition. Reading and writing under the 'mediated intervisibility' condition of Internet public spheres could make readers and writers associated with one another. Mediated intervisibility means a condition under which one's own presence and visibility as well as others' are recognized and utilized in subsequent interactions. I argue that discursive interactions among readers and writers under this condition should be sufficient for them to make a public.