Hey look how this text is structured in two ways:
We're going to do some wrting and perhaps use some new tags. See the instructions/guidelines that start just before the table...Habermas says that
At one time, the process of making things public [Publizität] was intended to subject persons or affairs to public reason, and to make political decisions subject to appeal before the court of public opinion. But often enough today the process of making public simply serves the arcane policies of special intersts; in the form of "publicity" it wins public prestige for people or affairs, thus making them worth of acclamation in a climate of non-public opnion.
If you believe this narrative -- in which the public sphere has suffered a marked decline since the early 19th Century — the open question is, can the Web reverse that trend? Everything depends on what you think the main virtues of the public sphere are, and how the Web can prop them up.
When Tim Berners-Lee first tried to build a web browser, he thought it would be a kind of specialized word processor. he imagined that every user would be creating as much as consuming. He wanted to call it the "read/write web". But browsers never became the creation tools he wanted them to be. Instead we now have websites that invite creation. These present their own encodings of public and private.
Think about the structure of HTML (links, hypertext) and also about the interactivity that the Web now gives you. Make an argument IN HTML about whether the Web saves the Public Sphere (Mark Poster thinks it does) or continues to pose problems for it. As you do this, use as many tags as you can, and mess with the CSS on this page if you have a chance.
You can learn more about HTML tags at mozilla or W3schools or using Google.
| Left Side | Right Side |
|---|---|
| and here is some text on one side, y'know | as well as some text on the other |
| can you add a third column to the table? | can you change the width of the columns, and other style attributes? |