Page 26 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

INTRODUCTION 15

political democracy is also followed by vast and rapid investments from
western media entrepreneurs. No doubt new configurations of dominant
and alternative media will take shape, giving rise to new struggles over
the public sphere.

THE REALM OF SENSE-MAKING
The institutional configurations of the public sphere grasp the
phenomenon at the macro-level of structures. However, an
understanding of its dynamics requires that we also consider the
processes and conditions of sense-making, whereby subjects link
experience and reflection to generate meaning (political or otherwise).
This involves considering the interactions between members of the
public, the media-public interface, as well as media output itself.
If we begin with the idea of a public, Habermas, much like John
Dewey—who can be seen as his American counterpart in this regard—
underscores the importance of conceptualizing the public as a process
within the framework of a community. (See Dewey 1927 and also Carey
1989 and Rosen 1986 for discussions of Dewey’s relevance.) Habermas
was reacting against technocratic rationality, especially prevalent in the
contexts of the major media, which reduces the idea of publics to that of
media-consuming audience. The public thus becomes a commodity to
be delivered to advertisers or an object of social engineering, potential
buyers for advertised products or voters whose behaviour is to be
steered. Escalating commercial and instrumental logic contributes to
mutual cynicism between media and audiences, further corroding the
public sphere (cf. Miller 1987). The very idea of opinion, for example,
becomes increasingly vacuous in the context of polling (cf. Bourdieu
1979).
Such constricted perceptions of the public, often reinforced and
reproduced by discourses in commercial, political and academic
contexts, have an obvious ideological valence. Also they deflect
sociological awareness away from a number of very salient issues.
Among them are how publics are constituted, the media’s role in the
process, the nature of the social bonds between members of the public
and the ways in which journalism and other media output help or hinder
in stimulating dialogue and debate. Publics, in other words, have
specific socio-cultural traits and contingencies—they do not consist of
abstract collectives of ‘talking heads’—and the media in turn are central
agents in the shaping of publics. It is important to underscore that the
media’s centrality here has not just to do with its journalism and current