Page 19 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

8 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

even Habermas’s critical dimension here is perhaps underdeveloped:
there seems to be no point of entry for such intervention.) For the public
sphere, this means not letting the concept become just a flat referent,
reduced to merely signifying what is, losing sight of what should and
could be. The critical dimension—incorporating the other dimensions of
analysis— ideally serves to scramble the existing demarcations between
the manifest and the latent, between what is and what might be, such
that the lines might be redrawn in a way which could take us closer to a
more democratic society.
In order to reconstruct a conceptualization of the public sphere as an
analytic category, with Habermas as a point of departure, it is in my
view productive and even imperative to retain this critical dimension.
This means of course going beyond Habermas’s own analysis. It is
important to be aware of his ambiguity. The romantic notion of a public
sphere composed of individuals speaking face to face or communicating
via small-circulation print media is not of much utility. We live in the
age of electronic media and mass publics and cannot turn back the
historical clock; we can only go forward. Likewise, while much in the
contemporary situation is troubling to say the least, we must not let
pessimism become the all-pervasive motif. The concept of the public
sphere must have evocative power, providing us with concrete visions
of the democratic society which are enabling rather than disabling. In
other words, it must also fuel our utopian imagination, not leave us
apathetic or paralytic. We need to render the public sphere as an object
of citizen concern, scrutiny and intervention. The defence and
expansion of the public sphere always remains a political
accomplishment.
In sum, an understanding which can guide our thinking and research
about the contemporary ‘post-bourgeois’ public sphere needs to
examine the institutional configurations within the media and the social
order as a whole and their relevance for the democratic participation of
citizens. The compelling nexus quality of the concept is central here. It
is important to anchor analysis in the historical realities of today,
continually updating our understanding of the present. For example,
while we cannot ignore the dominance of the mainstream media, we
should be careful not to exaggerate unnecessarily their homogeneity or
monolithic character. Such a view will blind us to other, even incipient
forms of the public sphere. The social order and its political institutions,
and thus the public sphere itself, are today anything but stagnant.
Further, we must also be attentive to the sense-making processes in
daily life, especially in relation to media culture, drawing upon and