Internet—the voice for a pluralist society?

Recently, we watched the "Virtual Revolution" documentary series presented by Aleks Krotoski and the impact of the internet on our lives. Although, we watched the "Cost of free", the first episode of the series "The Great Leveller" provides an interesting starting point. 


It's particularly relevant to the PR industry since it relies so heavily on the media, and the advent of Web 2.0 and its increasing enabling power to everyone around the world is of special interest. The inventor of the world wide web—Tim Berners-Lee—invented it simply because he thought it was a necessity. It stems from him, and the other creators of The Well to challenge the accepted forms of authority and hierarchy within society, where the ones with the loudest voices had power. The episode highlights these aspects of the birth of the world wide web. This debate of challenging authority is of importance to PR, much like Moloney argues: that in a pluralist society PR has an even greater role in making voices heard. However, as the episode progresses, one notices that the purpose with which it was invented is now perhaps lost. Krotoski points out that now the world wide web is in effect a market place dominated by a few voices that wield the most amount of power. Going by the number presented, it seems that the world has "one online book store in Amazon, one shopping store in eBay, one search engine in Google" and so on. In fact, there's another question, if these are the names that dominate the web, and these are the gatekeepers of the information that filters to us, then haven't we reverted to the traditional form of hierarchy? Perhaps it's a pessimistic outlook, and Web 2.0 has indeed given many people voices, unlike before. But we can't ignore the fact that even today, as more blogs and voices turn dead, the ones with the most amount of money (and therefore power: case in point Huffington Post as suggested by the documentary), do indeed wield an influence on what's read,  what's talked about and what forms the agenda. 


In this climate then, one can't help but question the role of Public Relations as a tool that can perhaps serve to realistic push through and past these voices, using the channels and tactics endowed by the world wide web.