The Legacy and the Future of the Public Sphere

Purpose. To determine the specifics of the impact of IT use on the economic and social spheres in Ukraine. To develop a mathematical model for evaluating and forecasting the impact of IT on these areas. Methodology. General and special methods of cognition were used in the research: mathematical formalization for evaluating and forecasting the impact of IT on the economic and social spheres, correlation analysis to establish multiplicative relationships of parameters and basic functions; comparison to establish the nature of the IT impact on the social and economic spheres; analogies to analyze the level of IT development in Ukraine and other countries; quantitative and qualitative comparison to analyze the level of social Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) use at enterprises by types of economic activity. Findings. It is proved that there are limiting factors to the growth of the positive IT impact, in particular the average level of income per capita. This is also evidenced by the comparison of agricultural and industrial regions of Ukraine, which indicated a significant gap in the introduction of IT in the countryside and the city. The weaknesses and successes of Ukraine in the implementation of IT are identified. The causes of hampering the positive impact of IT use on the development of social and economic spheres are indicated. A significant level of differentiation in the use of IT by business by types of technologies was proven. Originality. The peculiarities of the IT impact on the economic and social spheres in Ukraine are determined. The main feature is balancing between the development of IT technologies and social sphere and the state of stagnation of this process. A mathematical model for evaluating and forecasting the IT impact on the economic and social spheres has been developed; the intermediate results of its use have been given. Practical value. Recommendations for removing obstacles to the implementation of IT in Ukrainian social and economic spheres have been proposed.

This article challenges the false opposition between public and private spheres that is often imposed upon our historical understanding of the Old Regime in France. An analysis of the work of Jurgen Habermas, Reinhart Koselleck, Philippe Aries, and Roger Chartier shows that the authentic public articulated by Habermas was constructed in the private realm, and the of private life identified by Aries was constitutive of Habermas's new public sphere. Institutions of sociability were the common ground upon which public and private met in the unstable world of eighteenthcentury France. Having superimposed the maps of public and private spheres drawn by Habermas and Aries upon one another, the article then goes on to examine recent studies by Joan Landes and Roger Chartier to show the implications of drawing or avoiding the false opposition between public and private spheres for our understanding of the political culture of the Old Regime and Revolution. Public sphere and private life these domains are now the focus of considerable interest among historians of the Old Regime on both sides of the Atlantic. 1989 saw the publication of English translations of the two works most closely associated with public sphere theory and the history of private life: Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and volume three of A History of Private Life, edited by Roger Chartier.' Each domain, private and public, has its own historiographical tradition and, in a sense, its own partisans. This division of historical labor, however, has contributed to a misunderstanding of the relationship between these two spheres of activity in eighteenth-century France, a misunderstanding that has led to the creation of a false opposition between public and private spheres. My aim here is to show that the two visions of the Old Regime represented by these two historiographical schools are fundamentally complementary. By focusing on the simple real1. Jfrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, transl. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); and A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). Habermas's work was originally published in German in 1962, and then translated into French in 1978. Chartier's De la Renaissance aux Lumieres, volume 3 of Histoire de la vie privie, edited by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, was published in France in 1986. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.231 on Thu, 06 Oct 2016 04:06:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Susan Dalton. Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003). Pp. 206 + ix. $70.00 cloth. Alessa Johns. Women's Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Pp. 212 + xi. $34.95 cloth. Patricia Meyer Spacks. Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Pp. 242 + vii. $36.00 cloth. A critical rethinking of the ubiquitous terms "public" and "private" in the eighteenth-century context informs the three books under review here. Susan Dalton, Alessa Johns, and Patricia Meyer Spacks explicitly address the influence of Habermas' 1962 Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (translated, in 1989, as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society) on the entire field of eighteenth-century studies. In their nuanced readings of eighteenth-century literary and cultural production, Dalton, Johns, and Spacks question the prevalent interpretation of Habermas as establishing a strict binary opposition between the public and the private and, perhaps even more importantly, an equation of the private with the domestic and the public with the political. While Habermas has coined these terms and injected them into the critical discourse about the eighteenth century, the strict demarcation of supposedly separate spheres is more a product of Strukturwandel's subsequent reception than of Habermas' theory itself, prompted by critics' desire to establish some kind of coherent categorization for the complex nature of eighteenth-century life and letters. Habermas himself discusses the intersections of the public and private spheres and explores the arising ambivalences. He argues that the opposition between the "intimate sphere of the conjugal family" (51) and the "public sphere" was, above all, a discursive construct because the intimate/domestic sphere formed part of the private sphere of the gradually developing market economy. Even though the domestic was imagined as unaffected by the workings of the private realm of the market economy due to the accelerating division of labor and family life in the eighteenth century, both were connected not only to each other, but also to what Habermas calls the "public sphere in the world of letters" and "the public sphere in the political realm" (51). While the ideological construction of these separate spheres affected reality to some extent and women became increasingly equated with the domestic in the discourse of the time, an analysis of this reality also shows how porous and connected these areas were. Habermas' discussion of these intersections serves as the starting point for the studies of eighteenth-century literature and culture by Dalton, Johns, and Spacks. They explore the space which Habermas himself highlights but which has often been overlooked: the third space where public and private aspects meet in complex and ambivalent ways. The authors' well-reasoned and compelling analyses of these intersections [End Page 394] in British, French, German, and Italian writings underline the complexity of eighteenth-century textual production by men and women. In Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Susan Dalton looks with a historian's eye at the correspondence of four French and Italian salon women, Julie de Lespinasse, Marie-Jeanne Roland, Giustina Renier Michiel, and Elisabetta Mosconi Contarini. Dalton explores the communities formed by social networking and polite sociability in the eighteenth-century republic of letters and investigates salon women's engagement with the political and philosophical debates of their time. Her argument perceptively unravels the ambivalence that characterizes these elite women's theoretical writings and their practical applications. Yet, rather than classifying these ambivalent moments as contradictions, Dalton disentangles these women's strategic negotiation of gender discourses. This mediation allowed them to express their political views at the same time that it enabled them to echo discourses of propriety and...

The Public Sphere

The public sphere in India has undergone significant changes during colonial rule and the national movement, leading to its susceptibility to the recent rise of Hindutva. The current state of the public sphere in India is shaped by the ambiguities of the national movement, which were influenced by nationalist responses to colonial rule. To fully understand the public sphere, its relationship with the private sphere must be considered, as the public sphere’s definition and shape are derived from this relationship. To institutionalize multiculturalism in the public sphere, it is necessary to renegotiate the relationship between the public and private spheres. Therefore, it is imperative to explore ways to recreate the public sphere in a manner that reflects the country’s diversity effectively.

In contemporary political, cultural and communicational debates, the idea of the public sphere has a notable presence. According to the classical Habermasian perspective, the public sphere is the realm of social life in which public opinion can be shaped by principles such as free access for all citizens, inclusion, reciprocity, reflection, equality and the rational justification of arguments. In this domain, people act as public when they discuss topics of general interest in conditions of equality and without coercion. These conditions guarantee, in normative terms, that the citizens can meet freely to express their opinions and points of view (Habermas, 1989). Nancy Fraser defends the influence of public discussions on decision-making and believes that the formation of public opinion can be a counterweight to discourses in formal deliberative arenas. He adds that sometimes the arguments put forward by civil society actors succeed in influencing the decisions of executive and legislative powers (Fraser, 1993). Reinforcing that idea, Avritzer and Costa (2004) argue that issues, positions and arguments defended by the new social actors must infiltrate the State through institutional mechanisms, and thus democratize and put it under the control of citizens. However, not all real public spheres are democratic, since cultural and material inequalities determine the differentiation between publics and their capacities, especially in spaces characterized by dependency relations and state interference (Chaguaceda, 2011). It has been pointed out that a merely conversational public sphere will not succeed in subverting power relations or guaranteeing the pursuit of the common good. The Habermasian model has also been criticized because it is confined to the analysis of the bourgeois public sphere and ignores that, together with the formation of the dominant bourgeois public, they suggested that the publics were composed of peasants, workers, women and nationalists, who constituted competing public spheres (Fraser, 1993) and complement each other. Therefore, one should not speak of sphere (singular) but of public (plural) spheres that together form the public space.In later texts, Habermas admits the coexistence of various public spheres and the need to observe the dynamics of the communicative processes that occur outside the dominant spaces of discussion. Now the public sphere is defined as a complex network formed by a diversity of forums for public discussion - both in formal institutions and outside of these, articulated through communicative activity, when different publics come together in organized networks to debate topics of common interest, contrasting points of view and assuming or reaffirming positions (Marques, 2008). Whatever position one takes within that debate, the notion of the public sphere reveals its value not only for critical social theory and democratic practice, but also for understanding the limits of democracy within existing capitalism and for the construction of alternative democratic projects (Fraser, 1993), both to the present neoliberal order and to socialist experiences of Soviet court. However, the Habermasian theory did not propose a universal law applicable to any context: it is a normative model to which existing societies approach or not. As has been stated (Chaguaceda, 2011), the concept must be anchored in specific contexts and subjects, given that the analysis of the public sphere in concrete spaces shows its normative limits. Limits appear when one analyses some countries, such as Cuba, that are not governed by the principles of liberal democracy, such as Cuba.

Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

Background and Aims: The term 'Öffentlichkeit' or 'Public Sphere' is a German concept used to elucidate the societal development of public consciousness. However, an examination of successful community problem-solving initiatives in Thailand reveals that the 'public sphere' plays a critical and dynamic role in fostering the success of community problem-solving. It serves as a crucial arena for pursuing consensus through deliberative democracy, facilitating the process of reaching agreements that contribute to resolving community challenges. This article presents the results of a research study on 'Public Sphere' stemming from a spatial readiness analysis. Methodology: The action plan involves organizing a forum to explain the research project, holding group discussions, conducting in-depth interviews with individuals involved or playing significant roles in driving community-strengthening processes, and meeting with provincial subgroups to advance provincial development. Results: Structured around four key topics, the article discusses: 1. The Construction of Strong Communities as a Foundation of Thai Democracy Development; 2. Utilizing the 'Public Sphere' as a Tool and Mechanism to Establish the Foundation of Thai Democracy; 3. Self-management practices in Successful Strong Communities across Various Regions; 4. Guidelines for Constructing the 'Public Sphere' to Cultivate Strong Communities. Each of these topics will be elaborated upon in the following sections." Conclusion: The article's main goal appears to be to examine how strengthening communities and creating a vibrant "Public Sphere" are essential to the advancement of Thai democracy. The text underscores the importance of community self-management practices and guides fostering an inclusive 'Public Sphere' to fortify Thai society's democratic foundation.

У статті розкрито зміст поняття «публічні фінанси» через розширення рамок цієї категорії від традиційних відносин, які формують потоки фінансових ресурсів у межах бюджетної системи України до фінансових відносин, які передбачають взаємодію(партнерство) інших суб’єктів приватного та публічного секторів економіки на користь реалізації функцій держави. Зазначається, що усі суб’єкти фінансових відносин можуть діяти як у вітчизняному, так і у міжнародному правовому полі за умови обов’язкового та чіткого нормативно-законодавчого регламенту фінансової діяльності у публічній сфері. Досліджено зміст суміжних категорій, таких як «бюджетний менеджмент», «державний фінансовий менеджмент» та «публічний фінансовий менеджмент», доведена їхня відмінність через змістовну розрізненість публічних фінансів як об’єкта управління. Запропонована уточнена дефініція «фінансовий менеджмент у публічній сфері», яка дозволяє врегулювати питання фінансового менеджменту на всій площині публічної сфери та врахувати зазначені складові публічних фінансів як об’єкта управління. Доведена необхідність формування спеціального комплексного інструментарію реалізації функцій фінансового менеджменту у публічній сфері по відношенню до окремих суб’єктів фінансових відносин, які через рух фінансових ресурсів приймають участь у реалізації публічних функцій.

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.

From Café Culture to Tweets

The right be forgotten has aroused widespread concern since its first appeared in the cornerstone case of Google vs. Spain. For the right to be forgotten, one seemingly irreconcilable conflict is with the value of the freedom of expression, which would be further characterized as a matter of public interest. Therefore, for both European Union and the United States, the underlying problem of how to reconcile the right to be forgotten with freedom of expression is to distinguish public and private sphere. While the EU is in support of the idea to enhance individuals’ control over personal information, the U.S. stance shaped by the newsworthiness has created a ubiquitous and robust public sphere. These two approaches have their intrinsic deficiencies for they provide either too excessive or too narrow protection for the public sphere. In the meantime, China has also made great leap forward in the protection of personal information. After exploring the current legal frameworks and cases of the right to be forgotten in China, this article argues that the current right to be forgotten in China provides a third way to distinguish the public and private sphere, which applies neither EU way nor American idea. The right to be forgotten in China is constructed in the context of rejecting the traditional distinction between the public and private spheres. In a reductive manner, Chinese law has outsourced the justifications for forgetting or deleting to current laws, regulations and agreements. In essence, China attempts to formulate the public sphere from the expectation of both individual and community by balancing various interests behind the personal information.

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

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

Education is one of the topics widely discussed in the society as different issues are addressed by different groups, in different contexts. Most often such discussions are initiated by a variety of educational issues in the public sphere, some of which become known to the public only through the media, which is one of the most important contributors to the dominant attitude in the society, or social networks. Research shows that both of them have become an integral part of life and sometimes are trusted more than other sources. The article deals with the following issues: what is public educational discourse and what is the image of the school and the teacher in today’s public educational discourse? Taking into account these problematic questions, the subject of the research was the image of the school and the teacher created in the public discourse. The aim of the research is to present the image of the school and the teacher created in the public educational discourse. The article presents the research carried out following the methodological provisions of qualitative research. Method of discourse analysis was used to collect and analyse research data. Only the news portals that received the largest number of readers during the research that was conducted between January and February of 2020 were selected for the analysis, using a targeted sampling approach. The fact that only publicly presented presentations of individual education issues reflecting the context of Lithuanian education were selected limited the research as well as the pandemic that started in 2020 that overshadowed the ongoing debates in the public sphere with discussions focused exclusively on certain areas of social life related to the pandemic. Definite conclusions were drawn following the research: a) public education discourse is a holistic situation modelled on the basis of scientific knowledge and educational experience of human and societal development powers, contextually and consistently presented and discussed in the public sphere; in addition, it is shaped by narratives and their interpretations that dominate the said sphere (on mass media and social networks); b) positive attitudes towards education are formed by public presentations of individual phenomena and pedagogical successes inspired by educators while negative ones are shaped by attempts to search and present only sensational, resonant events in education to increase readability and comment rates for the mass media. Thus, one-sided expert comments and evaluations, criticism without much analysis and suggestions contribute little to the development of the positive attitude. One of the ways to develop objective public education discourse is the proper use of social networks.