In this essay I will discuss Jürgen Habermas’ “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Inquiry into a category of bourgeois society” (1962), and the ideas presented surrounding the public sphere. What I will investigate is whether or not the post-modern phenomenon of new media (e.g. the internet) could in fact present a new-wave of public sphere, or is just another platform for mass-media. I will also explore the public sphere model, and discuss its decline (due to either political or economic reasons). I will look in particular at the 21st Century, and the evidence of a possible public sphere in the modern day, as well as the factors which could have extinguished the public sphere in the early part of the 20th Century, not just looking to Habermas’ philosophy but also other social commentators like Noam Chomsky & Del Sola Poole.
The “Public Sphere” (Habermas 1962) is a term coined by German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, as he believes, the public sphere social structure directly proceeded feudalism in European society. It comes from the two separate factors of the “public” ( referring to public authority – the state) and the “private”(referring to the idea of economy, society and the family) coming together for rational critical debate about the world around them. Habermas believes that this was initially started with the “literary public sphere” which allowed people of all social standing to discuss art and literature, usually in public places like coffee houses and salons. From this branched the political public sphere, where private people (not working for the government, or influenced by it) came together to use reason critically and analysed (and often opposed) ideas present in government. W...
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In his editorial "Words Triumph Over Images," Curtis Wilkie blames today’s media for being “reckless” and “a mutant reality show”. He believes that television and radio are “unfiltered”, which causes the quality of journalism for newspapers to be unmatched. Yet, it is unfair to label all media that is not print as lesser because the quality of any media relies on the viewers and the individual journalists, and in drastic situations like a hurricane, reporters may have many road blocks. Any of these aspects can affect the quality of journalism, which invalidates Curtis Wilkie’s claim.
When discussing the media, we must search back to its primal state the News Paper. For it was the News paper and its writers that forged ahead and allowed freedoms for today’s journalism on all fronts, from the Twitter accounts to the daily gazettes all must mark a single event in the evolution of media in respects to politics and all things shaping. Moving on in media history, we began to see a rapid expansion around 1990. With more than 50% of all American homes having cable TV access, newspapers in every city and town with major newspaper centers reaching far more than ever before. Then the introduction of the Internet; nothing would ever be the same.
Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm’s “Four Theories of the Press” argue that “the press always takes on the form and coloration of the social and political structures within which it operates” (p. 1). The book supports this argument by discussing authoritarian, libertarian, social responsibility, and Soviet-totalitarian theories of the press.
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In his book The Transparent Society Gianni Vattimo, the Italian media philosopher, advocates the "hypothesis" that "the intensification of communicative phenomena and the increasingly prominent circulation of information, with news flashed around the world (or McLuhan's 'global village') as it happens, are not merely aspects of modernization amongst others, but in some way the centre and the very sense of this process" (Vattimo, 1992, 14f). Vattimo's hypothesis is shared by Jacques Derrida, the founder of postmodern deconstructionism. In the essay The Other Heading - Reflections on Today's Europe Derrida formulated his basic media-philosophical diagnosis with a view to Europe as follows: "European cultural identity cannot (...) renounce (...) the great avenues or thoroughfares of translation and communication, and thus, of mediatization. But, on the other hand, it cannot and must not accept the capital of a centralizing authority (...). For by constituting places of an easy concensus, places of a demagogical and 'salable' consensus, through mobile, omnipresent, and extremely rapid media networks, by thus immediately crossing every border, such normalization would establish a cultural capacity at any place and at all times. It would establish a hegemonic center, the power center or power station [la centrale], the media center or central switchboard [le central] of the new imperium: remote control as one says in English for the TV, a ubiquitous tele-command, quasi-immediate and absolute" (Derrida, 1992, 39f). What's expressed in this diagnosis is the inner ambivalence with regard to the basic structures of our understanding of the world and ourselves which is emerging in the wake of the comprehensive mediatization of human experience of time. On the one hand lies an indispensable chance in this for the constitution of "European cultural identity"; on the other hand it harbours the danger of "a hegemonic center's" establishing itself, one which might soar to become the media centre of a new imperium.
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Democracy appears to necessitate the constitution of the person as part of a demos; that is to say, as an individual within a meta-community whose functional capacities are governed by identifiable rules establishing the relational modes that exist between those on the inside and those on the outside, which for Habermas represents the construction of a system for the exclusion of the other (reference). This system of exclusion, which can be understood with reference to the rule of law - that which governs the relationships of all parts of a demos - is authored, ...
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...phere as the “sphere of private people who join together to form a ‘public’” and through the celebrification of politicians, the public sphere has been widened. We live in a world where anyone in the news, a politician, a footballer, a reality TV star, is a celebrity. Although we do not need to know the behind-the-scenes of each of their lives, it is of interest to the public and stories that are interesting to the public, sell the most newspapers. But because people buy newspapers because of celebrity gossip etc, the public sphere widens as a result. This stark fact was candidly recognised by Rupert Murdoch and as the head of News International, he described his company as being “in the entertainment business” (Shawcross, 1992: 261) and for this reason, the celeberification of politicians will neither cease, nor damage democratical debate within the public sphere.
Stromback, J. and Esser, F. (2009) Shaping Politics: Mediatization and Media Interventionism, in Lundby, K (eds) Mediatization: Concept, changes, consequences. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc, pp. 205-223.
In order to understand new media, one must first have a solid background of the old media. The old media traces its origins back to the “elite or partisan press [that] dominated American journalism in the early days of the republic” (Davis 29). With the advent of the penny press around 1833, the press changed its basic purpose and function from obtaining voters for its affiliated political party to making profit (Davis 29). With more available papers, individual companies competed with each other with “muckraking journalism”—investigative journalism exposing corruption—and “yellow journalism”—sensationalist journalism that completely disregarded the facts (Davis 30). The press continued to evolve its journalistic approaches and next shifted to “lapdog journalism,” r...
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