Page 13 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

2 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

active agents in the political process. How well the public sphere
functions becomes a concrete manifestation of society’s democratic
character and thus in a sense the most immediately visible indicator of
our admittedly imperfect democracies.
The concept of the public sphere can be used in a very general and
common-sense manner, as, for example, a synonym for the processes of
public opinion or for the news media themselves. In its more ambitious
guise, however, as it was developed by Jürgen Habermas, the public
sphere should be understood as an analytic category, a conceptual
device which, while pointing to a specific social phenomenon can also aid
us in analysing and researching the phenomenon. For Habermas, the
concept of the bourgeois public sphere signifies a specific social space,
which arose under the development of capitalism in Western Europe.
The modifying adjective is not an epithet but points rather to the
particular historical circumstances and class character of the
phenomenon. As an analytic category, the bourgeois public sphere
consists of a dynamic nexus which links a variety of actors, factors and
contexts together in a cohesive theoretic framework. It is this
configurational quality, with its emphasis on institutional and discursive
contingencies, which gives the concept its analytical power. Habermas’s
analysis incorporates, among other things, theoretical perspectives on
history, social structure, politics, media sociology, as well as the nature
of opinion, to give some sense of the notion’s entwinement.
Habermas’s study ends with his depiction of the decline of the
bourgeois public sphere and its final ‘disintegration’ in the modern
industrialized welfare states of advanced capitalism. One could in
principle accept Habermas’s evaluation as definitive for our own ‘post-
bourgeois’ age and for the future as well, in which case there is little
more to be said or done. But there is no point in merely going on
repeating Habermas’s conclusions. History is not static, and the public
sphere in the contemporary situation is conditioned by other historical
circumstances and is (hopefully) imbued with other potentialities. To
the extent that one is concerned about the dynamics of democracy, we
need an understanding of the public sphere which is congruent with the
emerging realities of today, and serviceable for both research and
politics. This involves coming to terms with Habermas’s analysis,
incorporating it and modifying it within new intellectual and political
horizons.
While the full text of Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit
(1962) has only recently become available in English as The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), the central features of his