Public Sphere

The taste for music is not dissimilar to the taste for food and drink. A palette is like a repertoire. Pop music is like sugary sweet plastic candy. Classic is like a fine wine matured over many years. As with the taste for food and drink, the taste for music develops over time and much listening. When I was a child I remember listening to Bryan Adams' 'Everything I do I do it for you' over and over. I also used to choose the same chocolate bar every time; a Cadbury's Crunchy. As children we like the most basic flavours: sugars and salts, and we like as much of those flavours as we can get. Broccoli has no appeal to a child. As grown ups we still salivate over particular smells, such as a hot chocolate waffle covered in maple syrup and melting ice cream. And although our taste buds do develop over time, so do our minds. I haven't eaten a Crunchy for probably a year now. I still like them but I have grown bored of its flavour and texture as I have experienced it so many times. Of course this is the same for music. But my point goes deeper than that. Really it's about commercialism.

As with a child's desire for artificially enhanced foods, a child's ears are drawn to particular musical sounds. Those over produced, almost 'perfect' sounds common in most popular music are made to tease a child's ear drums. However anyone with any experience of a mixed and diverse range of sounds and genres will no doubt have a far greater appreciation for music that is good for the right reasons. But children don't have that. Children are in fact simply slaves to commercialism and commercial music is their master. So what is my point?

I am currently studying media communication at university and I also own the website publicsphere.co.uk so I thought it might be useful to start this blog as well. For an introduction to this subject this page has some useful links.

Anyone who has studied the concept of the public sphere might be interested in discussing the subject here on this blog. My aim in the long run is to create a 'virtual public sphere' on the internet using my website as the platform for communication.

For now I want to openly discuss this subject with anyone else who has a similar interest. The more people who understand the purpose of what I'm trying to do, the more likely it is to succeed. Theoretically it is possible for the www to host a public sphere but in reality it may not be. I think a blog is the best place for me to start.

I suppose the overall aim of what I'm doing is to improve participatory democracy with the use of the Internet. For more about this read my article: Will the Internet create a digital democracy?