Knowledge Constitutive Interests and the World Wide Web: Can the Internet Be an Emancipatory Medium?

The Internet has great potential as a medium for social change in international relations by providing a forum where ideas can be explored, transmitted, and archived in real time. In order to answer the question, “can the internet become an emancipatory medium?” two bodies of literature must be evaluated: Habermas’ work on cognitive interests, discourse, and communicative action, and the metatheoretical approach to international relations called constructivism. By evaluating these two literatures, one can examine the potential of the Internet both as a “medium for emancipation,” a tool used to liberate people oppressed by political or economic structures, and as an “emancipatory medium,” a forum by which those structures can be critically examined in our construction of social reality. This study examines the possibilities and barriers for the Internet, yields guidelines for evaluating web site content, and presents conclusions about the potential and reality of the Internet.