Being a master of metaphors

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Gripsrud, J. and H. Moe, eds. 2010. The digital public sphere: challenges for media policy. Goteborg: Nordicom, 167 pp (ISBN 978-91-86523-02-2) The concepts of 'the public', 'public sphere', 'civil society' and media regulation have dominated media studies for some time. Scholars have attempted to explore the nexus between regulation and the audience/public's access to the media/public sphere (Curran 2000; Eribo & Jong-Ebot 1997; McChesney 1999; Venturelli 1998). In most of these writings, regulation is seen as hindering access to the public domain and as stifling freedom of expression. However, these scholars are concerned with traditional media, (1) while the authors in The digital public sphere: challenges for media policy extend the critique to the digital public sphere. They examine the problems of regulation in a digitised environment and conclude that political and commercial interests take precedence in the crafting of media policy, mainly because end users of such digitised media are not perceived as a public (2) but as audiences or consumers. The issues discussed in this collection are relevant across the world, even though the digital public sphere in most Third-World countries is not as developed as it is in Europe, largely because of political, economic and technological challenges. In Chapter 1, Slavko Splichal grapples with the concepts 'public', 'public sphere' and 'civil society'. The author looks at the movement from the angle of one homogenous public sphere to many public spheres. He argues that the public may be 'dispersed physically but mentally/spiritually tied together' (p. 32). The public is distinguished from the crowd in that its members act rationally. The public is distinguished from public opinion, which safeguards against the 'misrule of those in power [and] is also a means of coercion in the hands of the majority against any minority of those who would not share the majority opinion' (p. 26). He adds that the public is only a social category, while the public sphere is the infrastructure which enables public opinion to flourish. Therefore the public's infrastructure is the public sphere. On the other hand, civil society is said to generate the public sphere and to enable citizens to wield power over those in power through 'public discussion and persuasion' (p. 30). He also rightly notes that through this persuasion and discussion 'civil society influences regulative forces of the state and corporate institutions' (p. 31). He aptly sums up the problem by stating: 'There is no public sphere without civil society, but there is also none without the public' (ibid.), then points out that the Internet popularised the concept of the public sphere and helped launch the notion of an international/global public sphere. However, this is debatable as stories broadcast via satellite, radio and digital technology before the advent of the Internet, were able to cut across geographical boundaries and spark debate worldwide. As Thussu (2006: xvii) argues: 'Although the Internet has received greater attention in recent public debates on international communication, television, being much more widely accessible, is perhaps more influential in setting the global communication agenda.' For example, The Beatles were a worldwide phenomenon. Besides the above, Splichal (2010) corrects the misconception that all mass media are public spheres, by pointing out that some are not and that there are other actors (such as the state, political parties, interest groups, media gatekeepers and businesses) who are already in the public sphere to influence it. Finally, Splichal points out that the 'citizens qua citizen--either as publics or as audiences--are not among key actors in the public sphere anymore but rather, as in the old Lippman's theorization, spectators observing the public stage from the balcony'. In Chapter 2 Hannu Nieminem looks at global copyright law by taking a case study of the Finnish TVkaista. …

Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

The emergence and evolution of the internet have reshaped the landscape of political communication and discourse, transforming it into a public sphere that transcends geographical boundaries and traditional hierarchies. This paper explores the role of the Internet as a platform for political engagement, communication, and mobilization. Reviewing different theories of the public sphere and empirical studies, it examines how digital technologies have democratized access to information, enabled diverse voices to participate in political discussions, and facilitated collective action. The internet's potential as a public political sphere is accompanied by challenges and controversies. Issues such as echo chambers, filter bubbles, and the spread of disinformation raise concerns about the quality and inclusivity of online political discussions. Moreover, the concentration of power among a few tech giants poses risks to democratic governance and freedom of expression. Despite these challenges, the Internet also presents opportunities for enhancing democratic practices and civic engagement. Platforms for citizen journalism, online petitions, and social media activism empower individuals to hold governments and institutions accountable. Moreover, digital tools enable marginalized groups to amplify their voices and advocate for social justice causes. If people can freely connect to the Internet without corporate, economic, and governmental restrictions, then the Internet can function as an open and democratic public sphere. This paper concludes by discussing future directions for research and policy interventions aimed at strengthening the Internet's role as a vibrant and inclusive public political sphere. This paper concludes by discussing future directions for research and policy interventions aimed at strengthening the Internet's role as a vibrant and inclusive public political sphere.

“Ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology”: On Habermas’ reflections and hypotheses on a further structural transformation of the political public sphere

Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement

To gain and retain political power, politicians utilise the mass media to persuade the polity to support them, especially during elections. The Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition has successfully manipulated the mass media in Malaysia to maintain power for the past 57 years, making it one of the longest serving government in the world. The emergence of new media, however, has challenged this status quo. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how new media has influenced the political process and communication strategies in Malaysia, and its subsequent impact on the Malaysian political landscape. Nineteen in-depth interviews were conducted among politicians, bloggers and media consultants from both sides of the political divide, along with direct observation of the use of the new media during elections. The study revealed that new media, especially Web 2.0, has expanded the public sphere and enabled more Malaysians to participate in the democratic process – through information dissemination, mobilization or crowd-sourcing and fund-raising. At the same time, the cyber-warfare between the Barisan Nasional (BN) and the opposition Pakatan Rakyat (PR) caused considerable confusion and disinformation on the polity. The online public sphere was inundated with political propaganda, often resulting in information overload for Internet users, thus affecting their quality of decision-making on political issues. Nonetheless, the emergence of the new media in Malaysia has become the single biggest threat to the BN’s political hegemony on the flow of information. Malaysian voters now expect greater engagement and interactivity with politicians via social media. Malaysian politicians are increasingly forced to be more accountable, transparent and responsive. Malaysian users of social media tend to be better educated and vocal; they can set the agenda for public discussion. This study concluded that the Internet and the use of social media have led to unprecedented complexity in the political communication process in Malaysia. The new media can function as a catalyst for media-savvy political actors working towards gaining power but this may not lead to a more democratic system as a whole. External factors such as the structure of the electoral system and political institutions play a part in determining whether ideas spread by social media can find fertile ground in the polity who can ultimately bring about political change.

The public sphere and its associated concept of civil society are frequently cited as representative models for media and political communication in Africa, with little critical reflection on their historical and cultural specificity. In this uncritical narrative of “Habermas in Africa”, the public sphere or civil society, and by implication the media, is presented in a binary opposition to the state in Africa: bad state, good civil society. Yet, Habermas himself makes clear throughout his book that he is speaking of the public sphere, not in isolation, but as part of wider and associated political, social, economic and historical developments occurring at a particular place and time, namely Western Europe, and therefore indicating the conceptual difficulties of extrapolating his ideas uncritically to non-Western societies like Africa. Indeed, the Norwegian media scholar, Helge Ronning (1994), raises the urgent question, that: “can you have a civil society or public sphere in an unmodern context?” Thus, building on seminal ideas by African sociologists such as Peter Ekeh’s (Comparative Studies in Society and History 17(1): 91–112, 1975) concept of the “two publics” in Africa and Mamdani’s (Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) nuanced differentiation of “citizen” and “subject” in Africa; this chapter interrogates both the “public” in the public sphere and the “civil” in civil society in order to make them more relevant to African historical and contemporary democratic realities.

Author's Introduction The articles in this cluster deal with aspects of an enormously rich and complex historical problem: the role of print and other media in political communication in Britain, from the Tudor period through the nineteenth century. They might be employed together in a course covering this large subject; but equally they lend themselves to separate use in other kinds of courses, dealing with problems ranging from conventional political history to the role of literacy in early modern society, the nature of early modern public culture or the rise of more open and ‘democratic’ forms of politics. Rather than trying to tailor this guide to a single course design I have tried to suggest a range of possibilities. The full cluster is made up of the following articles: 1. Mark Knights , ‘History and Literature in the Age of Defoe and Swift’, History Compass , 3/1 (2005), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00131.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bsl131 . 2. Joad Raymond , ‘Seventeenth‐Century Print Culture’, History Compass , 2/1 (2004), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00131.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bsl123 . 3. Mark Hampton , ‘Newspapers in Victorian Britain’, History Compass , 2/1 (2004), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2004.00101.x . URL http://www.blackwellcompass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bsl101 . 4. Jason Peacey , ‘Print and Public Politics in Seventeenth‐Century England’, History Compass , 5/1 (2007), 85–111, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00369.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl369 . 5. Alastair Bellany , ‘Railing Rhymes Revisited: Libels, Scandals, and Early Stuart Politics’, History Compass , 5/4 (2007), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00439.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl439 . 6. Brian Cowan , ‘Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British Coffeehouse’, History Compass , 5/4 (2007), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl440 . 7. Andrew Walkling , ‘Politics and Theatrical Culture in Restoration England’, History Compass , DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00453.x . URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl453 . 8. Joseph Black , ‘The Marprelate Tracts (1588–89) and the Public Sphere’, History Compass , (forthcoming). Author Recommends The relevant secondary literature is enormous but the following are suggested as surveys or preliminary guides to particular topics. 1. Jurgen Habermas , The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society , trans. Lawrence Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). A translation of Habermas's deeply controversial but highly influential theoretical study, first published in German in 1965. An extensive literature exists debating Habermas's theories and their usefulness to historical investigations. 2. Alastair Bellany , The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News, Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). A study of how the involvement of high‐ranking courtiers in a murder became the subject of a famous scandal, through the ways in which it was reported and discussed in print and especially manuscript sources. 3. Brian Cowan , The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). A wide ranging survey of the development of coffeehouses and their role as centres of social interaction and political discussion. 4. Adam Fox , Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). A ma

Democracy started over 2,500 years ago in Athens. As the form of government was largely one of direct democracy, the focus of deliberation was the ‘agora’ – a forum in which Athens’ citizenry debated and decided on public policy and law. Modern democracy, on the other hand, is representative, so that policymaking and legislation by definition occurs within the parliament and executive branch. Nevertheless, the shift from public agora to governmental parliament need not in principle remove the populace from the deliberative process – certainly not when it is called upon tomake the only formal decision within the system: election of the representatives. The fact that this generally does not occur in the modern age is less a function of political philosophy than of logistics – how do millions find each other, not to mention carry on some sort of rational discourse? They normally cannot. As a result, election campaigns have also been removed from the purview of the citizenry and given over to the candidates and especially to the mass media. Consequently, almost all political communications researchers have focused on top-to-bottom election discourse: candidates (and parties)-topublic, as well as media-to-public. This traditional situation is now undergoing change for the first time in modern democratic history with the advent of a ‘mass’ medium – the internet – that renders bottom-to-bottom (‘peer-to-peer’) and bottom-totop (citizen-to-party) communication as effortless as its more traditional counterpart: ‘the media is [sic ] still monologic and one-way – the great and the good speak and everyone else listens or turns off. There is a way out of that tradition: a “civic commons” in cyberspace . . . intelligent spaces for public deliberation about policy issues online’. Of course, the internet not only empowers the citizenry, it can also be fruitfully exploited by the parties and the candidates for their own purposes – through top-to-bottom communication. However, as opposed to the public that has not had much opportunity to express itself during

The Public Sphere

Democratic responsibility in the digital public sphere

With increasing attention devoted to automated bot accounts, fake news, and echo chambers, how much of the theory of a Habermassian public sphere is still applicable to social media? Drawing on Twitter data collected on April 16, 2017, during the night of Turkey’s 2017 Constitutional Referendum, we test whether the networks of political communication resemble the communicative structures characteristic of Habermas’s “public sphere.” The referendum left the country sharply divided; 51.4 percent of the electorate voted in favor of amending the constitution to grant sweeping new executive powers to the presidency, with an overall turnout of 85.46 percent. In this article, we examine whether Twitter users were meaningfully engaged on the night of the referendum, and if their communicative patterns resembled a networked public sphere, that is, a space where information and ideas are exchanged, and public opinion is formed in a deliberative, rational manner. We find ideological uniformity, polarization, and partisan antipathy to be especially evident—mirroring existing social tensions in Turkey. Rather than resembling a public sphere, we found Twitter users to be more likely to communicate on the basis of homophily—rather than to engage in democratic debate or establish a common ground between the two campaigns.

This article tries to examine the relation between Cyberspace and Civil Society, especially in the post modem era. The writer believes that there is contestation amongst civil society, government, and private sector in order to dominate the public sphere. By using its apparatus, state is dominantly dominating public sphere in every day life. By using high technology and huge amount capital, private sector is successful in dominating public sphere especially in form of mass media. Private sector is much more profitable because by using mass media such television, private sector can dominate not only public sphere but also private sphere of society. Thus, where is civil society? Due to the lack of capital, civil society is being marginalized from public sphere. Even the number of NGO that is representing civil society is always increasing, in fact, the civic engagement is decreasing. Entering the post modem era which is signed by the rise of cyberspace, the condition is turn 180 degree. Cyberspace gives civil society the space to exist in public sphere. In one hand, cyberspace gives us space without any control and domination where all people free to express their self. In the other hand, it gives us an anarchist space that can not be controlled.

The chapter Fragmentation and Dissolution of the Public Sphere revisits the changes in the communication system to analyse how these transformations affect the process of shaping public opinion. After re-examining the concepts of public space and public sphere, this section focuses on the characteristics of the so-called mediasphere, the public sphere agreed upon by and within the mass media. It then discusses how the changes experienced in recent decades, following the introduction of digital technologies, have contributed to the definition of the post-media public sphere, where public space has expanded and fragmented. This section highlights the contradictory consequences of a process in which informational pluralism and the multiplicity of messages, rather than fostering a large public space that encourages exchange and the search for consensus, have led to the creation of multiple public spaces and greater polarisation. The causes that have blurred Habermas’ concept of an inclusive public sphere of debate and consensus are analysed, illustrating how these changes have led to an increase in noise, the dispersion of voices, and fragmentation, alongside a shortage of references. Echo chambers have further entrenched comfort spaces, fuelled by ideological biases. Lastly, this section explores Habermas’ (2023) reflections on the democratic and deliberative potential of new digital communication platforms, which is limited by the persistence of economic interests and the often superficial, partisan, and demagogic uses of these platforms.