Online publicities as a resistance to empirical research

So far, research of online public spheres has mainly been carried out as an online version of offline public spheres. The possibilities of the new medium to create new and Internet-specific forms of a public sphere have been ignored both on the theoretical and empirical level. In this article, I propose an approach that allows for the conceptualization of new forms of online public spheres. It takes the Internet user, the providers of web sites and the structural specificities of the Internet into account. The main thrust of the article is the question as to where the Internet provides public spheres that fulfill functions similar to their offline siblings yet are characterized by an Internet-specific quality. Taking the case of online public spheres that are created by search engines, it can be illustrated how these Internet-specific forms of the public sphere may be analyzed empirically. In order to be able to judge their potential, online public spheres are compared with printed mass media. In a final reflection, I propose a theoretical framework that could be fruitful for the explanatory interpretation of the patterns found in the empirical analysis.