Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Rethinking the Public Sphere in the Age of Social Media

Abstract

The present paper is dedicated to the phenomenon of the public sphere which is currently undergoing significant transfor-mations under the influence of the Internet and social media. The main goal of the article is to find a new approach to the mod-ern development of the public sphere by rethinking it from an Arendtian perspective. The first part examines the main actual changes taking place in the public sphere under the influence of social media, and concludes that the classical concept of the public sphere, dating back to its early notion of Jurgen Habermas, needs to be rethought, this requiring a new approach which would take into account the actual changes and new circumstances in the development of the public sphere. It is proposed to use Arendt’s understanding of the public sphere as one of the sources of this new approach which remains relevant today in many ways. The second part examines Arendt’s notion of the public sphere as compared with the concept of the public sphere of early Habermasian writing. As a result of this consideration, it is concluded that, in a number of points, Arendt’s notion of the public sphere is better suited to an understanding of the modern public sphere than the classical Habermasian concept. In the third part, I rethink the existing trends in the development of the digital public sphere from Arendt’s standpoint.