In brief: Ward reminds us that "any technology has physical and economic limits," and that the internet is not inherently egalitarian. She then uses Habermas' description of the rise of the bourgeois public sphere "to discuss the potential for the Internet to become a public sphere, and, hence, a forum that private individuals could use to democratically influence the state." In her examination of the public space of the internet, Ward looks at the incidence of social leveling, newly available areas of debate, and availability of access to the public sphere, the three institutional criteria for public space delimited by Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.