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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Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm argued that the press takes on the form of the society in which it exists. They support their argument by tracing the origins of authoritarian, libertarian, social responsibility, and Soviet Communist theory. Each theory’s historical background shows that the state of the press mirrored the society that it served, supporting the original premise of the book.
In the documentary film, Page One: Inside The New York Times, the inner world of journalism is revealed through journalists David Carr and Brian Stelter as the newspaper company The New York Times, struggles to keep alive within a new wave of news journalism. The film is dedicated to reveal the true inner mechanics of what modern day new journalists face on a daily basis and leaves the audience almost in a state of shock. It broadcasts news journalism as yes, an old school method of news generation, but it also highlights an important component that reveals the importance behind this “old school” methodology. We often think that progression always correlates with positive products, but the documentary insists that within the case of modern journalism, the new wave method is actually a detriment that can reap negative consequences.
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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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.
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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.
The public sphere has been falsely represented as a virtual place where one can share and debate opinions; ...
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