Public sphere (Communication)

Quote as: Salvatore, Armando, Oliver Schmidtke and Hans-Jörg Trenz. 2013 “Introduction: Rethinking the Public Sphere Through Transnationalizing Processes: Europe and Beyond,” in Rethinking the Public Sphere Through Transnationalizing Processes: Europe and Beyond, ed. Armando Salvatore, Oliver Schmidtke and Hans-Jörg Trenz, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-24. Public sphere reloaded — reevaluating its claims in response to transnationalization. The public sphere has emerged as a key concept in recent social scientific debates on the performance of liberal democracy and the democratic self-constitution of society. Building on Habermas’ (1989 [1962]) seminal work on the transformation of the public sphere, this notion has been employed to conceptualize the social and communicative underpinnings of democratic politics in modern societies. Based on the separation between the public and the private, the public sphere provides a historically bound and culturally specific solution for the creation of social bonds beyond the family (Eder 2006). Specifically, the public sphere offers a bridge between the fragmentation of modern social life on the one hand and the concept of a solidarity-oriented and democratically organized society on the other. The key ingredient to this solution is theorized as rational public discourse that provides the communicative link between autonomous individuals as ‘citizens’, unifies them as ‘the people’, and integrates them into a mode of collective self-government (Eder 2003; 2006; Peters 1994; Somers 1995). Questions have been raised, however, about the generalizability of the public sphere model in terms of understanding how different societies construct social bonds and constitute themselves as democratic ‘publics’.

Public deliberation depends on how skillful communicators are in establishing their version of what is known to be publicly acceptable. This volume provides rhetorical analyses of institutional websites, political speeches, scientific presentations, journalistic accounts or visual entertainment. It shows the significance of rhetorical construction of knowledge in the public sphere. It addresses the issues of citizenship and social participation, media agendas, surveillance and verbal or visual manipulation. It offers rhetorical critiques of current trends in specialist communication and of devices used when contested interests or ideologies are presented.

This document consists of fifteen workbook entries collected with the intention to provide further clarification of the problem of the public and triple contingency that I had introduced originally in a publication in Philosophy and Social Criticism in 1999 which, subsequently, enjoyed quite wide-ranging reception. To reflect the resonance and uptake of this problem complex of the threefold structure of communication in which the public embodies the third point of view, an appendix containing a bibliography of triple contingency selected from the much larger body of available material is included. As to the content, the notion of the public is placed in historical context and the contributions of authors like Kant, Habermas, Honneth, Krasnoff, Brunkhorst, Leydesdorff and others are discussed, while the complementary concept of triple contingency is related to sociocultural evolution and the epigenetic learning and constructive processes underpinning it. The core argument of the document, presented from a cognitive-sociological perspective, is that the historical emergence of the public in the 18th century entailed not simply the appearance of a significant empirical phenomenon, but simultaneously also the establishment of different levels of related cultural structures. Among these are the context-immanent cultural model of the public and, concomitantly, other related cultural models, such as those of the constitution, the constitutional state, civil society and so forth. In line with Kant’s suggestion regarding the orientation of the French Revolution’s spectators toward ‘right’, however, these cultural structures include also a series of cognitively available higher-level context-transcendent concepts and principles. These are crucial for overcoming the tendency in the literature to over-emphasize the multiplicity and fragmentation of the public.

Digital Democracy, Social Media and Disinformation discusses some of the political, regulatory and technological issues which arise from the increased power of internet intermediaries (such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) and the impact of the spread of digital disinformation, especially in the midst of a health pandemic. The volume provides a detailed account of the main areas surrounding digital democracy, disinformation and fake news, freedom of expression and post-truth politics. It addresses the major theoretical and regulatory concepts of digital democracy and the ‘network society’ before offering potential socio-political and technological solutions to the fight against disinformation and fake news. These solutions include self-regulation, rebuttals and myth-busting, news literacy, policy recommendations, awareness and communication strategies and the potential of recent technologies such as the blockchain and public interest algorithms to counter disinformation. After addressing what has currently been done to combat disinformation and fake news, the volume argues that digital disinformation needs to be identified as a multifaceted problem, one that requires multiple approaches to resolve. Governments, regulators, think tanks, the academy and technology providers need to take more steps to better shape the next internet with as little digital disinformation as possible by means of a regional analysis. In this context, two cases concerning Russia and Ukraine are presented regarding disinformation and the ways it was handled. Written in a clear and direct style, this volume will appeal to students and researchers within the social sciences, computer science, law and business studies, as well as policy makers engaged in combating what constitutes one of the most pressing issues of the digital age.

The present article examines the relationship between political philosophy and theory of communication in Habermas`s paradigm of public sphere. It focuses on the connection between public and individual reason, public spheres and state and, finally, between discursive practices and the structure of modern communication. The most important objective of the article is to explore what are the conditions in which political subjects take part in the public arena. Without pretensions to compile all possible critics to Habermas`s theory, this article relates opinions of prominent authors like Chantal Mouffe, John B. Thompson, Jacques Rancière, among others.

Recent studies of moral discourse and argumentation highlight the pervasiveness of morality in everyday life, and how the public sphere is shaped by moral ‘stuff’: speech acts, narratives, accounts and the like. By taking a discourse analytic orientation, this article joins this line of research, and delineates the situated and interactional nature of moral argumentations and rhetoric. The article focuses on the role moral discourse plays in the formation of the public sphere, as conceptualized by Habermas, and specifically on moral discourse (co-)produced by museums and by their visitors. As cultural public institutions, museums play an important role in shaping the public sphere both thematically topically) and materially (communication technologies and materialities of display and participation). In recent years, museums have shifted to more interactive modes of operation, where visitors are invited to participate in the public sphere by producing discourse in situ. This study explores museum questions and visitors responses in a large Jewish cultural/heritage museum in the Unites States. The study first looks at the museum apparatuses, through which discourse is publicly invited, produced and presented, to then study visitors’ responses as moral discourse. The analysis critically highlights the dramatic quality inherent to moral scenes, and depicts and discusses how visitors’ texts selectively address the moral Actor, Action and Motive as parts of the social moral drama they evaluate.

Cet article se propose de montrer comment les intellectuels publics ont adapt leurs moyens d’expression et de communication dans la nouvelle sphère publique numérique et comment le débat d’idées a été redéfini dans ce nouveau contexte, avec une analyse comparative de cette évolution entre la France et la Roumanie.

Deşifre edilmiş ve basılmış konuşma, katıldığım bir konferansta kahvehanelerin kendi tabirimle "duygulanımsal kamusal alan", Mübeccel Kıray'ın tabiriyle "tampon mekanizma" olarak devlet ve özel alanın arasında devlet ile toplum arasında nasıl bir müzakere alanı inşa edebileceğini tarihsel ve sosyolojik olarak tartışmaktadır.

Anahtar konuşmacı olarak yer aldığım konferans konuşması, Türkiye tarihinde kahvehanelerin, kendi tabirimle "duygulanımsal bir kamusal alan" olarak devlet ve toplum arasında nasıl bir müzakere alanı,  Mübeccel Kıray'ın kavramıyla nasıl bir "tampon mekanizma" olduğunu tartışmakta.

“Afterword: Traveling Worlds to Engage Rhetoric’s Perennial Questions,” (Coauthor: Gerard A. Hauser). In Candice Rai and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Eds., Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion. University of Alabama Press, 2018, pp. 253-263.

Rodney Benson, "Journalism and Inclusion," pp. 91-104, in M. Powers and A. Russell, eds., Rethinking Media Research for Changing Societies. Cambridge University Press, 2020
Journalism is said to exist to serve the public, the implication being “all the
public.” This normative vision of journalism’s civic purpose is inclusive.
And yet all too often, journalism serves as a powerful force for exclusion,
for keeping quality information away from those who need it most, and
for discouraging anyone but the richest, most educated citizens from
participating in the public conversation

Public deliberation depends on how skillful communicators are in establishing their version of what is known to be publicly acceptable. This volume provides rhetorical analyses of institutional websites, political speeches, scientific presentations, journalistic accounts or visual entertainment. It shows the significance of rhetorical construction of knowledge in the public sphere. It addresses the issues of citizenship and social participation, media agendas, surveillance and verbal or visual manipulation. It offers rhetorical critiques of current trends in specialist communication and of devices used when contested interests or ideologies are presented.

تعد الشبكات الاجتماعية الرقمية أحد تطبيقات الانترنت الأكثر استخداما في الوقت الراهن كفضاء رمزي لمناقشة القضايا ذات الاهتمام المشترك، ويحاول هذا المقال، بالاعتماد على ما توفره هذه الوسائط الاتصالية من إمكانات تسمح بتحقيق الشروط التي وضعها هابرماس لتشكل المجال العام (الاستقلالية، حرية الوصول والمشاركة، المساواة وغياب التراتبية)، تشخيص ملامح المجال العام الرقمي المتشكل عبرها، وذلك من خلال التركيز على  الإمكانات والأبعاد الاتصالية والبنيوية التي منحتها هذه الشبكات للمجال العام إضافة إلى حدوده ومواضع الضعف التي يمتاز بها خاصة ما تعلق بعقلانية الحوار وديمقراطيته.
كلمات مفتاحية: الاعلام الاجتماعي، الشبكات الاجتماعية الرقمية، المجال العام، المجال العام الافتراضي/ الرقمي، هابرماس.
Abstract:
    Based on the capacities provided by digital social networks to achieve the key features of public sphere indicated by Habermas (independence, free access and participation, equality, lack of hierarchy), This article attempts to diagnose the digital public sphere formed through it ; by focusing on the connectivity and structural potentials that these networks have given to the public sphere ; but also its limitations and weaknesses, especially those attached to rationality and democracy of dialogue.
Keywords: social media; digital social networks; public sphere; virtual / digital public sphere; Habermas.