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Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café 97

an extension of the critical debates taking place in Europe’s salons
and coffee houses (and in characterising the later development of
the broadcast media and more commercialised, larger-scale print
media as an ‘historical fall from grace’), Habermas obscures the
fact that the development of mass printing actually heralded the
waning significance of public dialogue. The very emergence of a

politically active public within complex, differentiated and politically
centralised societies was only possible with the rise of mass printing

which, by definition, dealt in the diffuse circulation of information
and symbols, targeted towards relatively anonymous and generic
audiences, and which was characterised by a radical separation
and numerical disparity between producers and receivers, that is, by
the dynamic of specialisation. The eighteenth-century publics that
Habermas cautiously celebrated may have engaged in critical dialogue
within specifi c localised contexts (such as the coffee house) but, taken
as a whole – and in contrast to the Greek polis – they were engaged
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in the project of building imagined communities.
(5) Thompson is well aware that in Habermasian critical theory,
discourse ethics have a counterfactual status and serve as a means
of gaining some critical purchase on the shortcomings of extant
communications. Yet, for him, this really constitutes a theoretical
and political ‘red herring’ because, in its utopian attachment to the
dilution of power and to the ideals of reciprocity, it has little to
tell us about real issues concerning the distribution and legitimation
of power, the possibility of constructing more effective modes of
representative democracy and the manner in which communications
media might realistically serve to make power relations and decision-
making processes more visible and accountable in complex,
differentiated societies.
Thompson has no trouble finding common ground with the ‘radical

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democrat’ media theorists who, largely inspired by Habermas’s
Structural Transformation, have argued strenuously for pluralistic
and decentred public service media institutions that are funded
but not governed by the state, and which can serve as independent
bulwarks against the pervasive commodification of the mediascape

(internationally, few such institutions – even the noble BBC – have
scored well on both counts simultaneously). But he also alerts us to
a more realistic and focused view of the potential democratisation of
the media. For in navigating (rather than dissolving) the gulf between
specialist decision-making spheres and the citizenry, vital specialist
functions accrue to media personnel themselves. As citizens, audiences

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