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infrastructure of how power and resistance interact in the mediating and mediatized
public sphere connect media use to issues of citizen rights, which are fought for by
social movements in civil society, mobilizing lifeworld networks and using resources
of the public sphere. In such struggles, citizens put pressure on the state system to
legally codify basic rights on a national, international, or even global scale.
Sociologist T.H. Marshall divided citizenship into three elements: civil citizenship
(freedom of expression and assembly, belief, ownership and equal juridical rights),
political citizenship (rights to vote and thus have a share of political power) and social
citizenship (basic economic and social welfare, work and education). Graham
Murdock and many others have added to this list communicative or cultural citizen-
ship, including rights to information, experience, knowledge and participation in
culture and public communication. 35 It should be noted that it was precisely these
rights that the librarian in Solna wished to safeguard, as was mentioned above. In
1958, Raymond Williams was among the first to explore the links between commu-
nication and community, arguing for the need of a ‘common culture’ that is no ‘equal
culture’ but leaves room for ‘multiple transmission’ that encompasses all citizens and
‘is not an attempt to dominate, but to communicate, to achieve reception and
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response’. These ideas had similarities to Jürgen Habermas’s 1962 thoughts on the
public sphere and – much later – on communicative versus strategic action. Williams
understood that this common culture in modern times can ‘not be the simple all-in-
all society of old dream. It will be a very complex organization’, and needs to be
combined with increasing specialization. 37
In Communications (1962), Williams proposed a new, democratic system of
communication, grounded on basic rights to transmit and to receive that together
formed a basis for free speech, participation and discussion. These rights must be
guaranteed by public-service institutions not directly controlled by governments, so
that ‘the active contributors have control of their own means of expression’. Instead
of censorship of irresponsible expressions, he preferred ‘to let the contribution be
made, and let the contributor take responsibility for it’, in order to achieve the need
for a democratic balance between ‘freedom to do and freedom to answer, as an active
process between many individuals’. 38 More specifically, he proposed that public
responsibility in the area of education included teaching speech, writing, creative
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expression, contemporary arts, institutions and criticism. The reforms he proposed
in the area of institutions aimed to ‘make sure that as many people as possible are free
to reply and criticize’, which demanded ‘the right to reply, the right to criticize and
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compare, and the right to distribute alternatives’. To this purpose, he listed specific
proposals for reform of the press, books and magazines, advertising, broadcasting and
television and theatre. Finally, he called for developing alternatives to the two systems
of state control and commercial markets.
Williams outlined a program for a democratizing reinforcement of the public
sphere that could better guarantee ‘genuine freedom and variety’. This plea also had
clear affinities to Habermas’s roughly simultaneous work on the public sphere. 41
Since then, technological, economic, political, social and cultural transformations

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