The Liquefaction of Publicness: Communication, Democracy and the Public Sphere in the Internet Age, Vol. 25 - 2018, No. 1
Publicness–Privateness: The Liquefaction of “The Great Dichotomy”
A major feature of internetisation and internet-based hybrid modes of communication is the liquefaction of the boundary between publicness and privateness. For the first time in history, the mutual determinacy of publicness and privateness has been materialised within a single technological platform. The permeability of formerly solid boundaries between specific domains of human life regulated by specific regimes raises important questions of who, and how, (re)creates publicness and privateness, and with what social consequences. This article discusses how the traditional concepts of publicness and privateness need to be reconceptualised to capture changes in the public and private modes of relationships among people created in and by internetisation, and to explore affordances and constraints of integrated public–private communication networks for people’s democratic political engagement.
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Debunking Deference: The Delusions of Unmediated Reality in the Contemporary Public Sphere
To compensate for the lack of realism of the participatory models of the public sphere, this paper proposes a more minimalist conceptualisation, which emphasises the ontological necessity of representation and deference in the constitution of imagined communities. In the contemporary public spheres, permeated with distrust, representation and deference are becoming synonymous with deception and estrangement. Debunking institutional mediations and political representation, both the “hacktivist” movement Anonymous and the populist leadership of D. Trump yearn to erase any lingering traces of deference. In doing so, I will argue, they endanger the democratic construction of a common world between strangers and erode the pluralist structure of the public sphere.
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Media, Knowledge and Trust: The Deepening Epistemic Crisis of Democracy
To compensate for the lack of realism of the participatory models of the public sphere, this paper proposes a more minimalist conceptualisation, which emphasises the ontological necessity of representation and deference in the constitution of imagined communities. In the contemporary public spheres, permeated with distrust, representation and deference are becoming synonymous with deception and estrangement. Debunking institutional mediations and political representation, both the “hacktivist” movement Anonymous and the populist leadership of D. Trump yearn to erase any lingering traces of deference. In doing so, I will argue, they endanger the democratic construction of a common world between strangers and erode the pluralist structure of the public sphere.
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Fake Democracy: The Limits of Public Sphere Theory
Liberal democracy has been eviscerated, hollowed out from within and emptied of liberalisms many promises that have failed to materialise. Meanwhile inequality has increased exponentially, ecological crisis beckons and the often unaccountable power of elites (in politics, media, finance, corporations, etc.) increases dramatically. As citizens feel evermore cut adrift from the decisions that make their lives livable so global capital continues to prosper and shape politics. At the same time, the digital age gives us information abundance and unprecedented connectivity. This article considers the critical question: is public sphere theory adequate to address the political, democratic and economic crises we now face? Can a concept dependent on a liberal democratic frame that is now so undone really offer a critical perspective suggestive of democratic futures or is it rather holding us back, capturing us in the comfort zones of liberalism offering no more than fake democracy and in the process threatening to hinder critical theory’s ability to better imagine emancipatory futures?
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Visibility and the Public Sphere: A Normative Conceptualisation
The concept of visibility has been associated with the public sphere conception for a long time. However, the public sphere has not been explicitly defined in terms of visibility. This paper reconstructs from a range of relevant critical and poststructuralist theory a set of public sphere conditions for which the concept of visibility, drawing upon a variety of its connotations, can be understood as central. The paper also suggests roles that communications media, and particularly the new digital “social media,” can play in the conditions’ realisation and identifies some of the current impediments to the fulfilment of these roles.
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Refeudalisation Revisited: The Destruction of Deliberative Democracy
Donald Trump’s election as American President and the successful referendum campaign to exit the EU in Britain have prompted renewed interest in the challenges posed to deliberative democracy by right-wing populism. This paper returns to the research on authoritarianism developed by the Frankfurt School in Germany and the United States, and particularly to their emphasis on the performative construction of appeals, and to Jurgen Habermas’s later characterisation of the translation of citizens into spectating subjects as a refeudalisation of the public sphere, and argues that these analyses continue to provide indispensable resources for understanding contemporary developments.
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Standpoint, Mediation and the Working-Class Public Sphere
Habermasian public sphere theory has been challenged widely and persistently on the basis of its rationalist universalism, which brackets off material concerns in the process of deliberation for an ostensibly common good. Against a relativist tendency in these critiques, I argue here for an alternative, materialist model of radically democratic counterpublicity as a standard for the adjudication of a public’s fidelity to the interests of those it hails. To this end, I draw from Negt and Kluge’s description of proletarian public spheres and Lukács’ theory of mediation to theorise, describe, explain and intervene as political actors in working-class public spheres. We must retain the ability to fathom a concept of publicness tied to a socialist, anti-capitalist political project.
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Dissonant and Disconnected Public Spheres as Challenge for Political Communication Research
Diversity of opinion can be understood as a fundamental condition of public debate in politics and civil society. It always has been a typical feature of pluralist societies. However, as we witness ever-more-fiercely negative campaigns, increasing political polarisation, and public debates filled with prejudices and false assumptions, dissonance and disconnection have evolved as characteristic features of contemporary mediatised public spheres. In this article, it is argued that the Internet is a driver of this development. Therefore, analysis of political communications demands an analytical shift—from the study of consonance to the study of dissonance, and from the study of connections to the study of disconnections and their consequences for democracy. Scholars should investigate online and offline dissonant public spheres and ask how they relate to inclusion demands and counterpublics and when they eventually shift into populism.
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A Youth-Driven Virtual Civic Public Sphere for the Arab World
The past three decades have been highly climactic for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The advent of satellite television and the Web, coupled with emerging democratic orientations, marked the region’s first political engagement with digital communications at a global scale. The failure of the digital public sphere, however, to deliver on democratisation promises during the so-called Arab Spring suggested a broader failure of the region’s traditional elites to properly address emerging challenges. In this article, the writer argues that the MENA’s youth, with their progressive civic outlook and extensive digital social engagement, hold a good promise for better governance in the region. Research has shown Arab youth to be developing a hybrid identity that lends itself to both local and global features such as diversity, co-existence, women empowerment, innovation, freedom, national pride and tolerance. A review of an online sample of young Arab bloggers and influencers suggests a huge potential to leverage virtual space to promote civic culture in the region. The article concludes that a convergence of young demographics, cyber engagements and progressive orientations is likely to give rise to a sound civic culture with significant implications for good governance. As future leaders in media, education, culture, business and politics, Arab youth will most likely bring their progressive civic views to positively bear on the realities of their communities.
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Family Feud: Who’s Still Fighting about Dewey and Lippmann?
The usual narrative of the John Dewey–Walter Lippmann debate has been disputed by Michael Schudson and Sue Curry Jansen, who claim the debate and Lippmann’s portrayal as an elitist and anti-democratic were fabricated by James Carey. Others, however, made similar claims about Lippmann, including Schudson. Dewey had long before the 1922–1927 period in question laid out his philosophy of democracy and the public, and the two had other public disagreements that continued after Dewey’s death. Lippmann came to claim that natural law (in contrast to Dewey’s pragmatism) provides the best grounds for maintaining social order, the public needed only for consent to be governed. The Jansen–Schudson feud with Carey exposes the epistemological grounds for political differences about the public.
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The Crisis of Public Communication, 1995–2017
The article asks where stands the notion of a crisis of public communication, first promulgated by Blumler and Gurevitch in 1995, in the new communications ecology of 2017. Its focus is a “crisis of communication for citizenship.” It maintains that the sources of that crisis, spotted in 1995, still apply and have been joined by others. However, today’s political communication system has been radically transformed by digitisation, social media and the Internet, allied to accelerating and multi-faceted currents of social change. Its pluses and minuses for effective citizenship are canvassed in detail. Despite the opening up of many constructive avenues, in two fundamental respects, the prevailing system is still enmeshed in crisis.
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Democracy and the Internet: A Retrospective
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the emerging internet and World Wide Web inspired both popular and scholarly optimism that these new communication technologies would inevitably “democratise”—in local organisations, larger civic and political institutions, and, indeed, the world itself. The especially Habermas- and feminist-inspired notions of deliberative democracy in an electronic public sphere at work here are subsequently challenged, however, by both theoretical and empirical developments such as the Arab Winter and platform imperialism. Nonetheless, a range of other developments—from Edward Snowden to the emergence of virtue ethics and slow tech as increasingly central to the design of ICTs—argue that resistance in the name of democracy and emancipation is not futile.
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Post-Globalisation
This paper argues that the period from the mid 2000s to the present marks the end of “peak globalisation,” and that we need to move beyond globalisation paradigms and consider the implications for communication and media studies of being in a period of post-globalisation. This does not mean that globalising forces have necessarily declined, but that we need to be more alert to how nation-states and national cultures are shaping as well as being shaped by such forces.
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Modern Political Communication and Web 2.0 in Representative Democracies
During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the social media has facilitated interactive communications between the political elites and public. In the 2016 UK Referendum, the social media became a vehicle for contested political arguments and post-truth positions defined the Remain and Leave camps. For instance, it was claimed that the United Kingdom Independence Party former leader Nigel Farage’s anti-migrant tweets influenced many voters. In the 2016 US Presidential election, the victorious celebrity property tycoon Donald Trump maintained a controversial online presence. He posted tweets about his campaign and engaged in a blatantly hateful online discourse aimed at his political opponents. Therefore, does such a usage of the social media aid democratic representation or contribute to a greater destabilisation of modern politics?
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Revisiting Digital News Audiences with a Political Magnifying Glass
This paper argues that the emergence of digital audiences as members of the Polis have to be readdressed. First, it summarises the results of quantitative surveys and calls for more qualitative studies placing the social uses of news in a wider social context. Second, it hypothesises that the evolution of social classes plays a major role in the appropriation of news and in the digital participatory devices. Third, it examines paradoxes in the digital pubic sphere at a time when populist voices infiltrate the political debate. The article finally advocates interdisciplinary research and the practice approach as means to better understand social factors shaping these trends.
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Translation as Politics
The experience of translation is read through the experience of Untranslatables, as symptoms of differences between languages: not what one does not translate, but what one does not stop (not) translating. The Dictionary of Untranslatables shows how we philosophise not only, or not primarily, in concepts, but in tongues. It provides a way between Globish, which pays no attention to languages as such, and ontological nationalism, Heidggerian type, for which Greek and German are the only philosophical languages. Translation could then be defined as a know-how with differences. As such, it has to be considered as a good paradigm for human sciences as well as a political committment for contemporary citizenship.
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The Alt-Right as a Community of Discourse
This paper suggests ways to examine the American Alt-Right as a community of discourse. It relies on Michel Foucault’s notion that discourse is marked by external procedures of prohibition, division and will to truth, and it shows how the Alt-Right owes its powerful emergence in the public sphere to these procedures. It concludes with a brief recall that internal procedures also shape a community of discourse, by giving its actors access to commentary, providing the community with a sense of shared authorship and leading to a “fellowship” of discourse. This paper was researched and written before the Charlottesville fracas (12 August 2017) that propelled the Alt-Right into the limelight, and further obscured its discursive construction.
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Post-Communism, Democratisation and the Media: (Nearly) Thirty Years On
This article reviews the debates about the end of dictatorships that pre-occupied this journal in its early years. It is argued that the issues debated then remain of central importance for understanding the role of the media in contemporary societies. Two central arguments that remain extremely influential in the study of the media—that all societies are undergoing necessary evolution towards democracy and that marketisation is a key accompaniment to this process, in the media as much as anywhere else. This article demonstrates that the evidence does not support the claims of this “transitological” perspective. There is no evidence of a uniform development towards democracy and no evidence of a necessary link between political democracy and the market. The contradictory developments that have marked the last 30 years are better understood as various attempts by ruling classes to maintain their power and influence through a range of strategies from the embrace of political democracy through various degrees of authoritarian rule to the continuation of unquestioned Communist Party rule. The fate of the media is dependent upon these broader struggles, but it remains everywhere subservient either to political or economic power.
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Putin's Slangy Newspeak as a Paradox of his Public Communication
The article analyses the rhetoric of Putin's public discourse of recent years that paradoxically combines various registers of speech such as criminal slang of marginal groups, non-normative vocabulary and official diplomatic discourse. While some researchers estimate this flamboyant mixture as a pure desire to attract the electorate's attention, others deduce more complex and profound processes behind. The article analyses the instrumentality of this discursive mixture in implicating the loyal national community and excluding international opponents.
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Digital Media, Contentious Politics and Party Systems in Italy and Spain
In this contribution, we discuss the role of the digital public sphere in social and political mobilisations in Italy and Spain since the beginning of 2000. Both countries experienced the emergence of successful parties relying heavily on digital media, linked to previous social mobilisations and protest milieu. We highlight the changing role of digital media and their shifting function from facilitating protest cycles with limited impact on party politics to becoming a tool for challenging the established political actors. Our main questions concern the extent to which digital media allowed social movements to express grievances that were later incorporated into the electoral programmes of new political parties.
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The Detached Observer: On a Necessary Change to the Self-Image of Journalists in the Digital World
The difference between non-partisanship (in the sense of striving for independence) on the one hand and being uninvolved on the other is something which has up until now been seldom reflected upon during the everyday work of journalism. After the digital revolution’s huge expansion of opportunities for live reporting with impressive imagery, a being-involved has become altogether inevitable, since a great deal occurs in this context only so that it can be reported. Journalism has become a structural condition of the event which it is to report. The factual relationship of an unavoidable being-involved - the relevance of which has eminently increased in digital media society - is often misjudged. To cope with this situation, professional practice must face up to the inevitability of this being-involved; it must respond to the question of which expectations can, on the basis of this inevitability, be set for the self-image from which journalists allow their professional behaviour to be guided. What needs to be developed is a self-image of the journalist as an observer and reporter who is involved in the event; who within the event is committed to the work for publicness and who for this reason strives for non-partisanship and independence.
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The Double Hermeneutics of Communication Research
Communication research engages in double hermeneutics, interpreting a social reality that has already been interpreted by individuals and institutions in and through communication, and feeding its reinterpretations back to society. This article stakes stock of the field as an instance of what Aristotle had referred to as productive sciences, a practical discipline exploring not only what communication is, but also what it could be. In the digital media environment, the interplay of metadata with standard types of communication—one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many—is key to what communication could become, but remains undertheorised and understudied. In conclusion, the article calls for a reinvention—reinterpretation—of a field that emerged in response to mass communication.
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Fast-Capitalist Veils from Communication Theory for “The Public” and Its “Discourse”
Old and new terminologies in communication studies spin mercantile metaphors of transportation and distribution that cover like a veil the field’s rootedness in a capitalist lexicon and a capitalist history. Its threads bewilder enough to have spurred harmonising and differentiating accounts in communication theory and conceptions of the public—veils of capitalist justifications firmly tethered in the evolution of capitalist society. Thus an industrialising past of commercial interests also knits accounts today of “communication” and “the public.” Woven as a well-conventionalised lexicon, a few threads tether the rest, obdurately, in plain sight. “Message,” “network,” “audience,” “content,” among others, support a capitalist past and a fast-capitalist present. Communication theory thus becomes a useful tool of fast capitalism.
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Reframing the Paradox of Pluralism as a Communication Problem
As both a fact of complex modern society and a normative principle of democratic communication, pluralism is often framed as a paradox: mysterious, self-contradictory or potentially self-defeating. Does the paradox of pluralism undermine its normative potential? The essay proceeds from an empirical look at the paradox of pluralism as it appears in practical discourses of faith, politics and institutions, to a theoretical exploration of pluralism in philosophy and communication theory. Arguing that paradox is a framing problem, I deploy pluralistic communication theory to reframe the paradox of pluralism as a practical communication problem. I distinguish four theoretical ideals of pluralistic communication and explore the dialectic tensions among them for their heuristic potential to inform pluralistic praxis.
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New Technologies, Old Questions: The Enduring Issues of Communications Research
Technological change in communications and media has been substantial and dramatic in recent years, particularly arising from the growth of the internet and “social media.” This can lead analysis to give undue emphasis to technological innovation at the expense of the enduring patterns of social structure which lie behind them. This article stresses the importance of such continuities by briefly illustrating the importance of power, inequality, identity and social change in relation to communications processes and institutions.
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A Critical Perspective on the Post-Internet World
This article addresses the transformation of the Internet from a loosely organised, decentralised and pluralistic system to a tightly controlled, centralised and commodified system under corporate and government control. Drawing on a political economy perspective, it begins by addressing key technical systems, including cloud computing, big data analytics and the Internet of Things. The paper explores how their convergence raises significant military, environmental, economic, privacy and labour issues. It concludes by considering the challenge of governing the Next Internet as a public utility like water and electricity, available to all as a citizenship right, rather than continuing to treat this vital resource as a commercial commodity, governed by private corporations driven to maximise profit.
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Communication Research: Resignation or Optimism?
The key argument is that in order to rescue our future we need to advance our understanding of human communicative behaviour in contemporary societies. Whatever the shortcomings of our academic efforts may be, in the face of current existential risks, resignation is no option. Communication research has made little or no advance towards a useful understanding of human communicative behaviour. Most important obstacles have been (and continue to be) the disciplinary approach, the lack of a “creative opportunistic” methodology, the marginalisation of the earth and life sciences, and the neo-liberal transformation of universities into bureaucratic protocol-driven organisations. As an international scholarly community, we have to commit ourselves to “desperate optimism” (Stanislav Andreski).
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On Human Communication
The study of human communication often focuses on a one-dimensional process of human-to-human interaction through messages. This article presents a five-dimensional model of human communication and argues that human communication can be understood best if we take into account the multidimensionality and the integrated nature of this process as a whole. Looking at the universe of human communication, it is possible through this model to assess some relevant aspects of the individual and the society’s cultural variations and development. In the study of any areas of human communication, and in exploring new avenues and voices of knowledge, we should not be deceived by the illusion of the vastness of the literature; we need to concentrate on the diversity of cultural views in order to make the field more valid, legitimate and challenging.
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Studying Political Economies of Communication in the Twenty-First Century
This article celebrates the anniversary of Javost—The Public by briefly noting the continuing growth and contribution of the critical study of political economies of media and communication. The discussion includes some of the variations and critiques, of this approach, as well as current trends and directions. The main argument is that critical approaches to understand the political economy of media/communication are still valuable and needed to fully understand issues relating to democracy and the public sphere.
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Expanding the Epistemological Horizon: Institutionalised Visual Knowledge and Human Rights
This paper discusses how institutions like journalism, the law and advocacy are increasingly turning to images as a unique form of evidence and a mode of information relay, institutionalising visual knowledge in the process. It then examines how this institutionalisation of visual knowledge brings to light long unresolved questions about the status of images that become more intricate when new technologies, platforms and actors enter the landscape. It argues that shaping the horizon of epistemological possibilities in ways that take visual modes of knowing seriously, especially when human rights concerns are at stake, is an important ethical and social project.
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Researching Fake News: A Selective Examination of Empirical Studies
The term “fake news” came to dominate public political discourse in late 2016 regarding possible efforts by Russian agents to manipulate the US Presidential election. A similar alarm was raised during subsequent European elections the following year. This widespread concern was twisted into an epithet by some political figures, particularly President Trump, to describe traditional news outlets. Eventually, the alarm and name-calling transformed into a serious topic for empirical research, and the initial fruits of that work are beginning to appear. This short article provides a panorama of the scholarship emerging around fake news and illustrates this work by examining in more detail two radically different studies. The article concludes with suggestions for extending this initial research. But first, some background is provided to set the stage.
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Gendering Media Policy Research and Communication Governance
The nexus between media gender inequalities and media policy has not been a central concern for researchers, practitioners, media organisations and decision-making bodies over the past years. Yet normative frameworks, national media policies and measures adopted at the level of media organisations are crucial to define principles and goals, reflect normative orientations and develop mechanisms to assess progress and change in response to persisting and plural forms of gender inequality in and through the media. In this contribution, I discuss why and how gendering media policy research can be seen as both a way to enrich our understanding of media operations in knowledge societies, and a means to engage scholarly knowledge with multi-dimensional structures of communication governance that are all too often gender-blind. Starting from a short review of international normative references and of existing scholarly contributions, I discuss how communication governance from a gender perspective can be conceptualised; and I propose the adoption of a “media gender equality regimes” approach to foster the critical knowledge that is needed to make media and communication governing arrangements gender-responsive.
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