Page 434 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Publ c Sphere | 1

depth and quality of the engagement of individual citizens in political debates
and decision making, forcing us to interrogate exactly how the media speaks to,
engages, and involves citizens in the political process.

ThE sTruCTuraL TransFormaTion
oF ThE PuBLiC sPhErE
The concept of the public sphere attracted increasing academic attention in
North America following the translation of Jürgen Habermas’s critical study The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere into English in 1989, nearly three
decades after its original publication. In this first of his major works, Habermas
undertakes a broad historical analysis into the development of public debates
in modern societies. In particular, he identifies the political debates among the
early modern bourgeoisie in England, France, and later Germany, as an ideal
type of public debate. This early modern bourgeois public sphere preceded the
arrival of media industries and their commodification of information and po-
litical debate as well as the emergence of powerful structures of government in
modern nation-states interfering in a range of social, cultural, and economic
processes. Thus, for a brief historical window, political communication, accord-
ing to Habermas, took place in an open, unrestricted fashion, often finding its
locus in publicly accessible coffee houses and salons and through the circulation
of nonprofit media (such as pamphlets) written and circulated by members of
the public. This emerging public sphere was inherently modern by breaking the
feudal control over public communication, which had thus previously not been
public at all.
Moreover, in its earliest manifestation, it embodied the qualities that Haber-
mas identifies as the key features of the public sphere: open, unrestricted access
for all citizens and a rational dialogue among all participants, which in turn is
based on the separation of private and public realms, as citizens met in public
places such as coffee houses where they could congregate to discuss pressing
issues of the day free from coercion. Habermas’s definition of the public sphere
reflects these qualities: “By ‘the public sphere’ we mean first of all a realm of our
social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Ac-
cess is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being
in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public
body” (Habermas 1989, p. 136).
Yet, making his analysis of the structural transformation of the public
sphere foremost a chronology of its historical decline, Habermas suggests
that the forces of modernity also led to its demise: he identifies the increasing
power and hence involvement in a range of social, cultural affairs of the mod-
ern nation and welfare state as the culprit in the downfall of the public sphere.
Drawing on C. W. Mills’s distinction between “public” and “mass,” Habermas
argues that the formation of public opinion shifted from an unrestricted com-
municative environment to a state of mass communication in which opinions
are expressed by a small elite excluding the public from the opinion-making
process: “With the interweaving of public and private realms, not only do the