Public Sphere Reconsidered: Theories and Practices

Media, Culture & Society, 2013

Media studies' fascination with the concept of the public sphere: critical reflections and emerging debates

MeCCSA2019, 2019

The idea and ideal of a public sphere has long been key to debate and investigation in the field of political communication broadly understood. But in what terms is it still viable? Largely developed in the context of the democratisation of national political spaces bounded by states, public sphere thinking has also been extended to supra- and sub-state levels. Shaped by the era of mass communication, how is it faring in a digital world marked by ‘post-truth’, exclusionary nationalisms, profound socio-economic divisions, global cyber warfare, conflict over the uses of data, the transformative impact of social media, and regulatory overstretch?

The Habermasian understanding of the public sphere, as explicated in his seminal work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962 in German, translated into English in 1989), is tied to a particular validation of ‘public’ as the ‘rational-critical’ discussion of personally disinterested people occupying the same public spaces. While those 18th century participants might have got their topics of conversation from the early forms of journalism in circulation, Habermas relies on their face-to-face discussion in physical spaces to construct his theory of the ‘public sphere’ and ‘public opinion’. In this study he excludes modern-day media as a space from his delineation of the public sphere because of their commercial, non-conversational and entertainment dimensions. However, in later commentary on this study (1974 and 1989), he qualifies saying “today newspapers and magazines, radio and TV are the media of the public sphere” (quoted by Eley 1992) thus modifying his position somewhat. His study has provoked both a normative understanding of how the media should operate in the public sphere, and a pessimism about whether the media do this task properly, given their modern-day features. In this paper I question the normative ideal, and the pessimistic conclusions about media operations, by drawing on other theorists to make more nuanced and complex the description of ‘the public sphere’ for today. I draw on Arendt for a larger understanding of the ‘social’ and the ‘intimate’; Fraser, Benhabib and Eley for their ideas about counter publics and Other participants. And, for a better understanding of the workings of media, on Thompson’s ideas of non-co-present publicness and ‘visibility’. I use Warner to understand the idea of public subjectivity and the desire to participate vicariously in public bodies through certain kinds of media genres. Finally, I attempt a description of what kind(s) of public sphere(s) and what kinds of media activities we see operating in our world today

Perspectives on Politics, 2012

Scope of the Course: The effects of media on the social, economic, political and cultural spheres of life have been increasing significantly since the nineteenth century. In fact, there is a curious overlap between the transformation of the public sphere and the rise of mass media. This course will examine the points of juncture between the public sphere and mass media at the intersection of capitalism, liberal democracy and patriarchy. More specifically, this course will investigate the concepts of the public and the private; the social and the intimate as well as the relationship between public morality, private morality and media; the 'public,' 'publicness' and communications; alternative publics and alternative media through the lenses of different theories of the public sphere. In this course, we will read The main questions this course will ask are: 1) What are the junction points between history and theory in the transformation of the public sphere and the rise of the mass media? 2) What are the (non-)normative implications of different theories of the public sphere on the understanding of media? 3) How can one conceptualize alternative mass media and social media in terms of public-private distinction? 4) What is the significance of public sphere in the mediation of human communication? Why? At the end of the term the students will have accumulated knowledge of the theories of public sphere with a historical perspective; acquired theoretical and methodological knowledge, which are required to assess the effect of the mass media in the construction, narrowing down, extension and transformation of the public sphere; and developed a critical perspective on the function of the mass media in the transformation of the distinction between the public and the private in late-capitalist societies. The course also aims to investigate the possibilities for revealing the immediacy of the connections between the " theoretical " and everyday experiences through communication. In this respect, the course will also offer a venue for a collaborative autoethnographic preliminary study that involves cooperative research agendas of the students and the lecturer. The collaborative study, which will center on the question of the differentiations in the way audience/readers understand and communicate through the public-private distinctions will evolve through three lines: 1. The students' and lecturer's daily notes about the weekly discussions on the theoretical approaches, covered in the course with a view to a. their daily experiences b. which media they use most frequently in conveying these experiences and how; 2. The students' and lecturer's interactive readings of and notes on the three films that will be watched throughout Fall 2016; 3. Discussions on cross-cutting reflections of ethnicity, gender, class and age on the way our subjective and cooperative readings on the public-private distinctions.

2018

Communication of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), where she is Vicedean of Infraestructures and she lectures in Online Media, Newswriting and Online Communication Research. Director of Gureiker, a consolidated research group recognized by Basque University System (IT 1112(IT /2021)). She is an active member of several funded research projects focused on political communication, online journalism and innovation in journalism education (UPV/EHU, Spanish MINECO, European Regional Development Fund-FEDER, etc.). She was a visiting researcher at the CCPR of the University of Glasgow in 2012 year. She is author and co-author of books (Genres in Journalistic Newswriting, Shaping the News Online, etc.) and articles in journals such as Media, Culture & Society, Communication & Society, EPI, Journalism or Journalism Studies. 2 Irati Agirreazkuenaga-Onaindia, international PhD in Media and Minority Languages (2013, University of the Basque Country). She performed part of her thesis at the Centre for Cultural Policy Research in the University of Glasgow (2011) and she afterwards stayed as a postdoctoral visiting fellow at the same centre (2014). She has developed her research on public media and participation during a postdoctoral stay in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics (2015). She has published articles on communication strategies for immigrants' radios and the role of the media in empowering minority identities among others (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies; Media, Culture & Society) and co-authored books on audience participation and media convergence (Active Audiences and Journalism; Convergence strategies at EiTB); she has published a book on the first relevant Basque-language radios during Francoism (Pamiela, 2016). 3 Koldobika Meso-Ayerdi, PhD in Journalism (UPV/EHU) and Senior Lecturer. Head of Department of Journalism II at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). Member of Gureiker research group (UPV/EHU) and main researcher of national and international research projects (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness-MINECO and the European Regional Development Fund-FEDER). Visiting researcher at the University Federal of Bahia (Brazil) and coordinator of a research network Brazil-Spain in cooperation with professor

Media, Culture & Society, 2020

The idea of a public sphere has long been central to discussion of political communication. Its present condition is the topic of this essay. Debate about the public sphere has been shaped by the boundary-policing of competing political systems and ideologies. Current discussion reflects the accelerating transition from the mass media era to the ramifying entrenchment of the Internet age. It has also been influenced by the vogue for analysing populism. The present transitional phase, whose outcome remains unclear, is best described as an unstable ‘post-public sphere’. This instability is not unusual as, over time, conceptions of the public sphere’s underpinnings and scope have continually shifted. Latterly, states’ responses to the development of the Internet have given rise to a new shift of focus, a ‘regulatory turn’. This is likely to influence the future shape of the public sphere.

DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 2005

In this paper, I am attempting to throw into relief significant aspects of the function of television debate as a public sphere. My working assumption is that public dialogue, including its televised versions, involves primarily the establishment of a meaning horizon which delimits what is to be said and known, and which authorises as true certain meanings and knowledges at the expense of others. Put differently, there is a 'politics of truth' at play in every mediated debate which is central in the constitution of the debate as a public sphere. It is precisely this politics that I want to examine in this article. Using empirical material from a prime-time debate programme in Danish television, which is concerned with the right to privacy of public personalities, I analyse the forms of interactional control and dialogic organisation employed in the debate, so as to address the following questions: What are the communicative practices which confer upon the television debate g...

Comunicação e Sociedade, 2016

In an age marked by multiple distribution platforms of content, oligopoly of media sectors and transnational nature of cultural industries it is not any longer enough for the Public Broadcast to inform, educate and entertain with independence and technical, ethics and aesthetics quality, as proposed by the British BBC in 1927. Public Radio and Television need to find a new social function that distinguishes them from the private media and justify state investment in communication. A rising number of scholars point out that this new function is the creation and strengthening of a broad media public sphere able to guarantee citizens a space for debate on common issues, a process that encourages citizen participation and transformative action. This article examines the role of Public Broadcasting in the twenty-first century according to the media theories influenced by the thought of the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, whose concept of the public sphere has become c...