Page 164 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

Chapter 7
Musical chairs? The three public spheres
in Poland

Karol Jakubowicz

INTRODUCTION
Following Jürgen Habermas, Nicholas Garnham (1986) defines the
public sphere as the network of media, educational, knowledge and
opinion-forming institutions within civil society whose operation is
conducive to the emergence of public opinion as a political power. Of
those, the mass media are today perhaps the most powerful element of
the public sphere. Peter Dahlgren (1987) makes the point that the
components of the public sphere (including prominently the production
of news, views and ideas in public circulation) derive from, mediate and
serve to reproduce the existing social order. The more a society is
integrated and united around the fundamental values of the existing
social order, the more likely it is to have just one public sphere. The
more divided it is, the greater the likelihood of the various groups
within it creating institutions of will- and opinion-formation constituting
different public spheres, taking fundamentally different stands on the
legitimacy of the prevailing social order, and the desirability of its
continued existence (cf. Negt and Kluge 1983; Downing 1984, 1988).
The moot question here is how large the group has to be and how
extensive an institutional network with what social reach (or impact,
which can be far greater, though more difficult to conceptualize and
study) it has to generate for the purpose of opinion-formation and
expression to be recognized as a full-fledged separate public sphere.
Also, it can be assumed that apart from the question of the social order,
ideas circulating within the different public spheres are likely to overlap
to some extent. So, how much overlap can there be without the different
public spheres merging into one? Our remarks can provide only some
pointers in these respects.