Summary Transformations of the Public Sphere (Tilburg Uni)
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Course
Transformations of the Public Sphere (800156B6)
Institution
Tilburg University (UVT)
Book
The Public Sphere
Summary of the introduction, chapter 1 & 3 of Alan McKee's The Public Shere & all articles to read for the course Transformations of the Public Sphere of Tilburg University, year 1
Transformations of the Public Sphere
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Introduction.................................................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1: Trivialization...................................................................................................................................................7
Article Divided democracy in the age of social media – Sunstein..................................................................................13
Article How technology disrupted the truth – Katharine Viner.....................................................................................24
Article Publics and Counterpublics – Michael Warner (2009).......................................................................................27
Chapter 3: Spectacle......................................................................................................................................................31
Article: Tensions within the Public Intellectual: political interventions from Dreyfus to the New Social Media – Patrick
Beart & Josh Booth (2012).............................................................................................................................................37
Video: BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU.......................................................................43
Video: TED talk Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story...................................................................43
Article: A community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public Spheres (chapter 5) – Thomas Risse............43
Article: After the Paris Attacks – Edward Iacobucci and Stephen Toope.......................................................................49
Video: Should free speech be protected, no matter what? Glenn Greenwald vs. Stanley Fish debate.........................51
Article: Free Speech, ten principles for a connected world (chapter 7: privacy) – Timothy Garton Ash.......................51
Article: Free Speech, ten principles for a connected world (chapter 8: secrecy) – Timothy Garton Ash.......................55
Introduction
The public sphere: improving or exacerbating?
, Implies change
Academic concerns about the public sphere in Western countries at the start of the 21 st century:
1. It is too trivialized
2. It is too commercialized
3. It relies too much on spectacle rather than rational argumentation
4. It is too fragmented
5. It has caused citizens to become too apathetic about important public issues
Problem 1: consumers are more interested in unimportant news about celebrities, diets and sex tips than about
important, serious political issues.
Problem 2: the media don’t care about the quality of material in the public sphere.
Problem 3: public culture is too spectacular audiences have short attention spans and only want flashy visuals and
distractions, not in-depth discussions about important issues.
Problem 4: the demands of various identity groups are breaking up the common national cultures that we once
enjoyed.
Problem 5: citizens no longer engage with politics or their own governance, they become lazy and passive. They
don’t care about issues anymore.
THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Jürgen Habermas defines the public sphere = a domain of our social life where such a thing as public opinion can be
formed, where citizens deal with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion, to express and
publicize their views.
Sphere is a methaphorical term that is used to describe the virtual space where people can interact.
Public space = where people’s conversations, ideas and minds meet and issues can be discusses to reach
agreement about ‘matters of general interest’.
Public sphere and media are often used interchangeably. Academics worry that the ‘public sphere’ is becoming too
commercialized, just as journalists worry that the ‘media’ is becoming too commercialized. The public sphere is a
bigger term than the media. Human interactions are all parts of the public sphere, just as much as the mass media is.
On the other hand, the mass media obviously plays a central role in the public sphere. It is only in the mass media
that vast populations of people can come together to exchange ideas. The media is the place where we find out
about the ‘public’.
THE PUBLIC SPHERE AND MODERNITY
The public sphere attempts to describe the way in which millions of citizens reach consensus about the running of
their society. One useful perspective that a study of academic writing gives us is an insight into the periods into
which Western history is usually broken down. During the 17 th century the nature of western societies changed
dramatically. Before, western cultures were organized as feudal systems. They were strictly hierarchical, the
monarch was the absolute power, often directly appointed by God.
During the 17th century, a radical set of ideas began to emerge based around the concept that every person in a
society should be treated equally entering of a time period also known as modernity.
Modernity
A historical period that began in Western Europe with a series of profound social-cultural and intellectual
transformations in the 17th century and achieved its maturity as a cultural project with the growth of the
Enlightenment and later with the development of industrial society. Modernity is associated with order, certainty,
harmony, humanity, pure art and absolute truth.
Modernity involved a different way of seeing the world and of seeing the place of people in it. Thinkers developed
Enlightenment values as a guide to organizing society:
All citizens were of equal worth and importance (equality)
Everyone should be treated fairly (justice)
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, Everyone should have control over their own lives (freedom)
Everyone has the right to a basic level of material welfare (comfort)
Now common sense, at the time this was revolutionary
Because the existing societies were feudal and hierarchical, in order to organize them around the idea of equality it
was necessary to radically restructure social organizations. Within the then existing political structures there was no
way for citizens to have some input into the political decisions made. Citizens had to find ways of exchanging
information and ideas, reaching agreement about what they wanted done, and communicating that information into
the members of society who had the appropriate power. And so, the public sphere emerges as a vital part of
modernity and its Enlightenment commitment to equality.
From around 1750, ordinary citizens were increasingly involved in (public) discussions about issues of common
concern. An element of democracy was introduced when ‘ordinary’ people were allowed to become involved in
making decisions about how the country should be run emerging of a public sphere. The power for making
decisions moved away from the absolute ruler and moved towards the people. Now the state (the system for
governing the country) emerged as something separate, of which the ruler was only a part.
The state was disembodied/abstract everybody could conceivably contribute to it.
Important political shift
Still underlies our current forms of social organization
o Many people have an input into deciding how the state is run
o There is a system that allows input in public discussion
o There are opposition parties, who get to speak in public against the current ruler
How do liberal societies function?
Liberal forms of social organization are characterized by a commitment to the idea that individuals should have a
‘private’ realm of their life, over which they are allowed some control. This is unlike totalitarian societies in which
every element of the individual’s life is managed by the state.
Only in liberal forms of social organization makes the idea of a public sphere sense. In a totalitarian society, public
opinion doesn’t emerge from individual voices discussing issues. The public sphere is separate from the state. It is a
place where individual citizens work out what the community thinks about an issue, and then gets back to the state.
An important part of the public sphere is that citizens can discuss whether they are happy with the performance of
the state. The public sphere is not set up by government and not managed by government. The public sphere is part
of the civil society, separate from the state.
The concept of public sphere is a useful metaphor, because it lets us think about the role that ordinary people might
play in the creation of public culture, public policy and the running of the state. The concept of the public sphere is a
useful one for researchers who believe that ordinary citizens play a role in the creation and distribution of ideas
about how society works.
Public sphere is not the same thing as private experience. One of the dominant ways to understand mediated
representations in current Western debates is by getting angry that public representations of groups that we belong
to are not the same as our own personal experiences. There is no group out there that is represented accurately
(represented in the same way that members experience their own lives). Both the powerless (muslims) and powerful
groups (politicians) feel the same way. Being ‘misrepresented’ is actually a quality of being represented in the media
at all. A public representation is a loss of control it is a consensual representation, how a variety of people agree
the world should be seen, not your own vision of it.
Central in the discussion about the public sphere is Habermas’ book The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere.
The Habermas effect = whenever something is mentioned about the public sphere, it will usually be with a
genuflection to Habermas
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, Habermas’s writing provides a vision of the ideal public sphere, a vision that is common both in academic and
popular thinking on the topic. The public sphere should ideally deal only with serious issues of real importance. It
shouldn’t be sensational, easily accessible or commercialized. It should only engage in rational, logical argument. It
should be unified and homogenous, refusing the fragmentation of niche audiences and different kinds of culture.
This is the vision of how the public sphere in Western countries should function.
DISAGREEMENTS ABOUT THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Is the public sphere improving or degenerating?
Although we can agree on the facts of the public sphere, there remain differences of attitude that cannot be
argued out rationally.
Historians describe the period in which Western citizens are currently living as ‘modernity’, where there is general
agreement on all sides of politics that society should be organized according to principles of equality, justice,
freedom and comfort but there isn’t a general agreement about what those words mean or about the best way of
achieving them.
There is a general commitment to the Enlightenment project of modernity, of trying to organize society
around these ideals. But there is also ongoing discussion, debate and disagreement about what they mean
and how to implement them.
Philosophers: distinction between beliefs about facts and attitudes towards those facts in understanding how human
beings argue with each other.
In relation to equality, we can find out facts about how various different groups are treated in society, but
our attitude towards what counts as real equality isn’t so easily addressed by facts.
Why is the public sphere a vital part of democratic societies?
In a feudal society, you don’t need a way to find out what ordinary citizens are thinking, because the monarch
doesn’t need to know: they make all the important decisions themselves (with help of advisors or God). But a society
that wants all citizens to be free and to be treated equally and justly, needs a functioning public sphere to ensure
that their opinions and ideas contribute to the forming of general agreement.
Dichotomy into two camps:
1. Modern: the degradation of a pre-existing bourgeois public sphere by the forces of consumer capitalism
2. Postmodern: emergence of different publics, public spheres and public spaces, each with their own forms of
communicative organization
Modernity is a name for a historical period which saw the development of a specific set of Enlightenment values
about how society should be run: equality, freedom, justice and comfort.
Postmodernity is also a historical period (emerged after WOII), but it doesn’t replace modernity but rather exists
alongside it.
Postmodern thinking offers a slightly different attitude towards Enlightenment values. A postmodern
attitude still accepts the importance of basic Enlightenment values (seen in modernity), but takes a
‘relativist’ rather than a ‘transcendental’ approach to them.
From a modern perspective, there are certain core truths that transcend difference, that are the same for all human
beings, no matter where they come from, and so one correct definition of these terms should be found and applied
to everybody. From a postmodern perspective, different groups think and communicate differently about issues and
we should respect that.
Groups have formed around institutions, within universities there are different academic disciplines that tend to
favor one approach or the other, and different journals that tend to publish material from one or other perspective.
Different combinations of attitudes form into distinct ‘paradigms’, ‘basic belief systems’, for analyzing the world.
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