Page 103 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

98 Jürgen Habermas

are asked to invest a large degree of faith in the way media institutions
select, gather, construct and configure information and symbols on

their behalf. Citizens are dependent on media personnel to render
a complex world at least partially accessible, and to disseminate
information and symbols proficiently and responsibly.

It could easily be objected that Thompson’s critique and alternative
emphasis misses the increasingly digitised mediascape that was
emerging at the time he was developing it. With the benefi t of
hindsight, it might look like a discourse that belongs to the analogue
era, privileging mass media at the expense of the myriad interactive,
niche and DIY media forms that have since become pervasive. But
although I will return to the realm of the digital in the following
section, I think this really misses the point. One of the serious pitfalls
of all the millennial huff and puff around digitisation and the Internet
characteristic of the past decade has been precisely that it privileges
questions of access to the means of expression and the distribution of
‘discourse chances’. Thompson’s pragmatic corrective to Habermas is
a timely reminder that in order to assess the democratic dimensions
of the mediascape, we must in fact avoid an exclusive focus on either
the wondrous potentials or the existent shortcomings of public access
and interactivity, whether it’s manifested in the various DIY media
sweeping the Internet, the rise and rise of talk radio and reality TV
in broadcasting, or the ersatz ‘interactivities’ of ‘narrowcasting’,
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media-on-demand, and the digital ‘me channel’. The empires of
Murdoch and Berlusconi; the narrowness of the CNN and BBC world-
views; the massive entertainment, news and advertising synergies
in the global mediascape: in the digital age, these things all face an
array of competitors for the critical attentions of communication
scholars, but they most certainly are not relics of an analogue ‘mass
communications’ era in terminal decline.
We continue to live with and to depend upon dizzyingly huge
and opaque media complexes. As with the other ‘expert systems’
which we expect the media to shed some light on, the extent to
which the media themselves could be organised in a participatory
fashion remains strictly limited. Rather than visualising the media
simply as a deterritorialised agora writ large, democrats must look
beyond classical ideals and engage with the fact that, collectively
at least, immense power accrues to the media. That this power
could never simply be dissolved, and that the democratic project
therefore demands imaginative but realistic proposals to improve
media accountability and diversity, is all but lost in the utopian vision

23/8/05 09:36:10
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Goode 02 chap04 98 23/8/05 09:36:10