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Internet and the Public Sphere

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Habermas blows off question about the Internet and the Public Sphere

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November 5th, 2007

12c

by Howard Rheingold

I recently asked Jurgen Habermas in a public forum what his current opinion is about the state of the public
sphere, now that the broadcast era has been supplanted by the many-to-many media that enable so many
people to use the Internet as a means of political expression. He blew off the question without explanation,
and a little further investigation into the very sparse pronouncements he has made in this regard has led me to
understand that he simply does not understand the Internet. His ideas about the relationship between public
opinion and democracy and the role of communication media, and the commodification and manipulation of
political opinion via public relations, are still vitally important. But I think it’s important now to build new
theories and not simply to rely on Habermas, who is signalling his ignorance of the meaning of the changes
in the infosphere that have taken place in recent decades. He did his part in his time, but the ideal public
sphere he described — a bourgeois public sphere dominated by broadcast media — should not be taken as
the model for the formation of public opinion in 21st century democracies. Some background on my interest
in this subject and Habermas’ personal opinion follows. And then I’ll briefly describe my recent encounter
with the man himself.

When I wrote The Virtual Community in 1992, the most important question to me was whether or not the
advent of many-to-many communication via the Internet would lead to stronger or weaker democracies,
more or less personal liberty, which led me to the work of Jurgen Habermas on what he called “the public
sphere.” I quoted him in the final chapter:

Here is what the preeminent contemporary writer about the public sphere, social critic and
philosopher Jurgen Habermas, had to say about the meaning of this abstraction:

By “public sphere,” we mean first of all a domain of our social life in which such a
thing as public opinion can be formed. Access to the public sphere is open in
principle to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere is constituted in every
conversation in which private persons come together to form a public. They are

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17/08/2018 Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Habermas blows off question about the Internet and the Public Sphere

then acting neither as business or professional people conducting their private


affairs, nor as legal consociates subject to the legal regulations of a state
bureaucracy and obligated to obedience. Citizens act as a public when they deal
with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion; thus with the
guarantee that they may assemble and unite freely, and express and publicize their
opinions freely.

In this definition, Habermas formalized what people in free societies mean when we say “The
public wouldn’t stand for that” or “It depends on public opinion.” And he drew attention to the
intimate connection between this web of free, informal, personal communications and the
foundations of democratic society. People can govern themselves only if they communicate
widely, freely, and in groups–publicly. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of
Rights protects citizens from government interference in their communications–the rights of
speech, press, and assembly are communication rights. Without those rights, there is no public
sphere. Ask any citizen of Prague, Budapest, or Moscow.

Because the public sphere depends on free communication and discussion of ideas, as soon as
your political entity grows larger than the number of citizens you can fit into a modest town hall,
this vital marketplace for political ideas can be powerfully influenced by changes in
communications technology. According to Habermas,

When the public is large, this kind of communication requires certain means of
dissemination and influence; today, newspapers and periodicals, radio and
television are the media of the public sphere. . . . The term “public opinion” refers
to the functions of criticism and control or organized state authority that the public
exercises informally, as well as formally during periodic elections. Regulations
concerning the publicness (or publicity [Publizitat] in its original meaning) of state-
related activities, as, for instance, the public accessibility required of legal
proceedings, are also connected with this function of public opinion. To the public
sphere as a sphere mediating between state and society, a sphere in which the public
as the vehicle of publicness–the publicness that once had to win out against the
secret politics of monarchs and that since then has permitted democratic control of
state activity.

Although I got up at 6 AM last Friday to prepare and commute to a 9-noon class at Berkeley, I added two
hours more driving to my day to drive to Stanford to hear Habermas speak at the Richard Rorty memorial
lecture. The central question about the meaning of my own work — does Internet communication improve
the public sphere, and therefore, democracy, or does it not? — revolves around ideas he is credited with
inventing. The lecture was abstruse analytical philosophy. When he finished, only one person stepped up to
the microphone to ask a question. This was in one of Stanford’s largest auditoriums — Cubberley — and it
was a standing-room crowd. The questioner was the chair of the philosophy department. It’s a big deal
among academics that Rorty, the famous pragmatist, was hired by the comparative literature department —
because Stanford philosophy professors are all analytical. So Habermas and this prof went back and forth
about that. Nobody else stepped up to the mike! I could never forgive myself if I failed to step up, but I have
to say that my heart was pounding in my chest. Everybody at Stanford who cares about Habermas was
watching. I begged his forgiveness for a brief digression from the discussion of Rorty’s philosophy but said
that I could not forego the opportunity to ask what he thought of the future and health of the public sphere,
now that the broadcast era he wrote about has been supplanted by an infosphere in which so many people use
the infosphere to express political opinion.

He blew me off! He didn’t say “out of respect for Rorty, I will decline to discuss my own work.” He didn’t
say “that’s complicated and would take more time than I have.” He didn’t say, “I’m working on that and wish
to remain silent until I publish.” He rather inelegantly said that he wouldn’t answer that, and I should perhaps
refer to the recent book of interviews with Rorty. I couldn’t let it go at that, so I said, before walking away —
in front of all of Stanford, it seemed to me — that many people in the world are very interested in his answer
to this question and hope that he will address it in some way.

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17/08/2018 Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Habermas blows off question about the Internet and the Public Sphere

But right now, I think he has invalidated himself. Abstruse philosophical and obscure academic feuds are
more important than the future of democracy? He proved to me by his actions that philosophy is rendering
itself irrelevant. He was the last bastion for those who feel that philosophy speaks to the real problems of the
modern world.

Afterward, my friend Mike Love pointed me to this long and thoughtful blog post about Habermas’
statement to the International Communication Association, which quoted Habermas:

The Internet has certainly reactivated the grassroots of an egalitarian public of writers and
readers. However, computer-mediated communication in the web can claim unequivocal
democratic merits only for a special context: It can undermine the censorship of authoritarian
regimes that try to control and repress public opinion. In the context of liberal regimes, the rise
of millions of fragmented chat rooms across the world tend instead to lead to the fragmentation
of large but politically focused mass audiences into a huge number of isolated issue publics.
Within established national public spheres, the online debates of web users only promote
political communication, when news groups crystallize around the focal points of the quality
press, for example, national newspapers and political magazines. (A nice indicator for the
critical function of such a parasitical role of online communication is the bill for €2088,00
that the anchor of Bildblog.de recently sent to the director of Bild.T-Online for “services”: The
bloggers claimed they improved the work of the editorial staff of the Bildzeitung with useful
criticisms and corrections … ).
(p. 423-4, fn. 3 in the published article; p. 9, fn. 14 in the transcript)

This fear of fragmentation is similar to the fear articulated by Cass Sunstein about “the Daily We,” in which
the ability to choose one’s own sources online could lead to a world in which everyone only pays attention to
like-minded thinkers (also known as the “echo chamber” — a notion that David Weinberger questioned
articulately in Salon). I believe this is a serious concern and should not be dismissed prematurely. I also
believe that there is plenty of evidence to the contrary — how much of the blogosphere consists of critiques
that link directly to the sources that the blogger disagrees with? Yochai Benkler has offered his own
counterargument to what he calls “the Babel objection.“)

However, Habermas — a man whose theory of communicative action places high priority on precision of
communication — describes Internet discourse as “a series of chat rooms,” which is a telltale that he doesn’t
understand the phenomenon he is describing. Certainly, the Internet hosts chat rooms, many of which are the
site of political discussion of varying degrees of rationality and civility. But as millions of people know, there
are mailing lists, wiki talk pages, blogs and blog comments, and message boards as well. What I wish
Habermas had said, since he clearly does not understand a phenomenon that is central to the applicability of
his theory in the 21st century, is “I leave that work to younger scholars, who can build contemporary theories
on the foundations of my earlier work about the role of the public sphere in an infosphere dominated by mass
media.” But that is indeed what needs to be done. I have no pretensions to fulfilling that role myself, but
unless we know, and know soon, whether or not the web as it is developing can revitalize the public sphere,
all other philosophical conversations may be mooted by the rise of disinfotainment, disinformocracy, and the
actual emergence of the simulation that we don’t recognize as a simulation described by Baudrillard.

(I recognize that significant critiques of Habermas exist, such as Nancy Fraser’s, and that some, like Mark
Poster, Pieter Boeder, and Douglas Kellner, have tackled the question of Habermas’ relevance to Internet
discourse. Nevertheless, I believe further work is needed.)

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