The seminal idea of the public sphere introduced by Habermas in 1962 has remained popular until today because it is very useful both for legitimizing, and also imagining, the development of democratic capitalist societies. However, Habermas’ idea needs to be updated in order to fit the dynamics of late-capitalism and the post-modern fragmentation. In an era of highly tailored, individually-directed, interactive media systems, the modern public sphere has exploited into a myriad of spheres of influence and discussion.
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Habermas introduces the idea of modern public sphere by doing a historical analysis of the development of European democracies. He claims that “the bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.”(27) Although at first glance, such idea seems to be quite progressive and egalitarian, from a contemporary critical perspective it ends being quite exclusive and monolithic. Fascinated by the Enlightenment and modern European project, Habermas romanticized the saloons, coffeehouses, and world of letters where bourgeois males met to talk about their “common good.” He ignored the existence of other spaces for deliberation where other publics (counter-publics such as groups of women, working class workers) met and spoke using a different form of rationality.
The proliferation of publics and counter-publics in the 21st century has become more evident. It is impossible to hide their existence and recognize just one sphere of discussion exclusive to a single class or gender. There are publics/counter-publics everywhere: environmentalists, music fans, gamers, social activists, hackers, ethnic groups, vegetarians, you name it. People meet together not only to talk and discuss their “common interest” but also to construct their post-national identities. The spaces where they meet have also changed. Although some of the publics/counter-publics meet in physical places, they have also discovered the cyberspace as a realm for discussion and encounter. Web forums, e-mail lists, bulletin boards, online virtual worlds, chat rooms, blogs, and other Internet-base spaces have become the new loci for public deliberation.
Even if it is true that the new technologies and interactive systems are highly tailored and individually-directed, they are designed to work with a networked logic that not only facilitates the creation of public spheres but also moves the users to speak to each other. The “compunication infrastructure” of contemporary information and networked society facilitates and encourages the organization of the publics/counter-publics in a way that was never experienced before in the history of human history. Geography has turned out to be irrelevant for deliberation and for meeting in a common place. Discussion time has also changed due to the possibility of both synchronous and asynchronous communication, and computer capabilities of storing, retrieving, and processing information. The members of the public/counterpublics could be very individualistic but at the same time they are very connected to each other. They could be alone in their rooms looking to a computer screen, clicking, and typing, but they know other members of their public/counterpublic will hear, read or watch their utterances.
Contemporary networked public/counter-public spheres are sometimes connected to each other and are able to form clusters or groups of spheres. This case is especially relevant when specific circumstances seem to happen in the real physical world or when different publics/counter publics have identified a common goal. If this happens, they take advantage of the Internet dispersed architecture to link (connect) to each other and deliberate. An interesting example of such networking of networks was the presidential campaign of 2008 in the U.S. and the manner in which multiple publics/counter-publics engaged in a conversation that exceeded the limits of their sphere.
References
Habermas, J. (1989). Structural transformation of the public sphere. Chapters 1 and 2. Cambridge: MIT Press.
