CMS faculty member David Thorburn has suggested that in many if not most cultures one core medium of ommunication rehearses the 'Consensus Narrative' of society, expressing its shared values and beliefs. The theaters of ancient Athens and Shakespeare's England were such institutions, representing stories and myths that articulated and reinforced the dominant belief-systems of those societies. In the 19th century, the novel performed some of these same functions; writers such as Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo or Harriett Beecher Stowe wrote novels that embraced dominant balues yet also appealed to their readers' social conscience. The movies during the era of the studio system performed this function in American society and were recognized as so important that the government gave away free tickets to the poor during the Depression and classified Hollywood as an "essential industry" during the Second World War. And since the 1950s, television has been the "consensus" medium for American culture, Thorburn argues, as the networks' ambiton to generate to generate the largest possible viewership created a story system that articulated the most widely-held views and values of our culture - often at the cost of ignoring diversity, silencing by exclusion values and beliefs that belonged to subcultures not in accord with the dominant culture. ["Television Melodrama," in TV: The Critical View, ed.Newcomb (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000) pp. 595-608; "Television As An Aesthetic Medium," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4 (1987) 161-173.}

We generally argue that the consensus-building function of broadcast media is breaking down at a time when many new media choices are available and cable narrowcasting (that is, the focus of programs at smaller niche audiences, such as MTV's focus on young people or Oxygen's focus on women) are serving to fragment the viewing public. Yet, in times of crisis, the consensus building power of television reasserts itself as people are drawn towards shared media channels to make collective sense of disturbing developments.

It would be a mistake to ignore the important functions played by personalized or grassroots media. Probably no sooner did you see the images or hear the news of the tragedy than you grabbed some personalized technology - your telephone or your computer keyboard - to spread the news or seek information about people who are close to you. In the first few hours after the events, most of the key news website froze people raced to their computers in search of a reliable summary of the developing events - too many people hitting the same servers at the same time jammed the works - but e-mail correspondence got through, because its routing is decentralized, carried by millions of networked computers. These are the media channels we control ourselves. We sometimes describe broadcasting as one-to-many (refering to the way one centralized entity - a television network - sends out a feed to a large national audience), where the telephone is one-to-one (allowing one person to communicate with another) and the web can be described as many-to-many (allowing many people to communicate among themselves).

One of the striking things about these events is the way that portable information allowed people to communicate with each other from seemingly any location - consider the cell phone calls made from the airplanes or from people trapped beneath the rubble - or consider the e-mails that were sent from people trapped inside the World Trade Center. We have become increasingly dependent upon such technologies, as has been suggested by the panic experienced by many when the collapse of the Towers destroyed an important relay center in New York City cut off telephone access to Manhattan.

re:constructions would not exist without e-mail. Various participants have e-mailed friends around the world to get them to write submissions for thesite and we have used e-mail to remain in constant contact with each other as we have developed these materials across a broad range of different locations.

People have described electronic communications as enabling "virtual communities," forging significant emotional and social ties among people who may be geographically dispersed but who share experiences and thoughts in on-line discussions. It is striking how almost all of the communities of the web have engaged in discussions of these tragedies, discussions which, in some cases, build upon their normal topics and suggest alternative ways of understanding the events, and in other cases, push aside their ordinary concerns because of the need to feel connected to each other.

We have turned to the web because we believe it is a powerful channel that will allow us to communicate directly with many readers and to get ideas into circulation that are not necessarily being heard on the broadcast media. We are using the web because it offers a way to forge intimate bonds between our writers and readers and because it encourages a greater diversity of perspectives than can be heard through any medium with a relatively narrow pipeline.

Yet, there are important concerns which are being raised in current discussions of the web about the ways that participating in net communities may narrow our perspectives, making it easy to filter out ideas with which we disagree, making it possible to form a false sense of consensus because everyone seems to be saying the same thing. See, for example, an important debate of this issue published earlier this summer in Boston Review .

Others have warned of the dangers of the unverified information that can circulate in the digital environment, because of the absence of established or certified gatekeepers to police content. Just as the web may open access to the perspectives of groups ignored by the mainstream media, so too it may enablehate speech and lies.

In the coming weeks, we need to stop and reflect on what each kind of medium contributed to this discussion and how each benefits or harms the potential for democratic participation. In an important book, written well before the current Internet revolution, Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), MIT Political Science professor Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote, "Freedom is fostered when the means of communication are dispersed, decentralized, and easily available, as are printing presses or microcomputers. Central control is more likely when the means of communication are concentrated, monopolized, and scarce, as are great networks. But the relationship between technology and institutions is not simple or unidirectional, nor are the effects immediate. Institutions that evolve in response to one technological environment persist and to some degree are later imposed on what may be a changed technology....The onus is on us to determine whether free societies in the twenty-first century will conduct electronic communication under the conditions of freedom established for the domain of print through centuries of struggle, or whether that great achievement will become lost in a confusion about new technologies."

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