The Transformation of the Public Sphere: Political Authority, Communicative Freedom, and Internet Publics

Abstract

Two relatively uncontroversial social conditions that have long been widely identified across many different modern theories of democracy: namely, the need for a rich associative life of civil society, and for the technological, institutional, and communicative infrastructure that permits the expression and diffusion of public opinion. Historically, the public sphere as a sphere of public opinion and communication has developed in interaction with a relatively unified structure of political authority: the state and its monopoly powers. Indeed, citizens of modern polities came to regard themselves as members or participants in various publics primarily through the attempts of states to censor and restrict public communication. Along with many other complex factors, the emergence of rights of communication and the democratization of state authority have emerged hand-in-hand. With the advent of new forms of political authority that directly impact the structure of communication across borders, new forms of publicity have also emerged and with them new public spheres. If new forms of communication and structures of publicity do indeed exist across borders, this would give special salience to deliberation as an important basis for democratization, as well as for transnational institutional design. Given the differences between democratic arrangements that presuppose a singular demos and decentered ones that organize demoi , we should not expect that all democracies have exactly the same communicative infrastructure. This means that transnational civil society and public spheres face different difficulties with regard to independently constituted political authority from those faced by ‘strong,’ or state, public spheres.