Media regimes and political communication: Democracy and interactive media in France

The laws and institutions that determine the rules for political discourse and for the conquest of state power may be thought of as the media regime. Under the televisual regime image communicates more vividly than text and a small number of speakers have access to massive audiences of passive receivers. However, the "new" media support some degree of interactivity, meaning they allow audience members to respond to a message or to communicate with one another. Their widespread introduction makes possible an interactive regime, with fundamentally different rules by which politics would be conducted and by which power would be both accumulated and exercised.;This study tests the idea that media-based interactivity may be a vehicle for democratic political communication. What are the genuine participatory opportunities presented by mass scale interactive media, and how are they adopted (or not) by the institutions involved in political communication? Can the bi-directional capabilities of new media facilitate the establishment of a media regime more congenial to discussion and democratic participation?;The widespread introduction in France of an interactive medium provides an opportunity to reconceptualize theories of media effects, to examine the medium's observable contribution to democracy, and to investigate its actual service as an engine of social transformation. Under the French government's Programme Teletel six million small computer terminals called Minitels have been distributed to telephone subscribers. Minitel is the first generation of popular interactive media. The French experience provides a means of observing how the introduction of an interactive medium on a mass scale effects established patterns of political communication.;This study develops a theory of media regimes and a mechanism for measuring interactivity. Using semi-structured interviewing techniques, more than fifty representative telematic services in the areas of electoral, governmental, and associational communication are evaluated. Conclusions center upon the difficulty of converting interactivity from a technical attribute into true social and political interaction.;Comparing aspirations with results reveals telematics to be a disappointing revolutionary force, and challenges many of the hopes for the fundamental transformations with which new media have been invested. Properly understood, however, the French experience reveals ways interactive media may be used to improve democratic political communication.