Page 104 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café 99

of the public sphere driven by the ideals of unbounded reciprocity.
Thompson’s corrective is certainly a useful one. There are, however,
some blind spots contained within it.
The central role modernity carves out for ‘mediated publicness’
is double-edged. The overwhelmingly negative conclusions which
Habermas drew in his early work on the rise of a mass-mediated
public sphere, Thompson claims, are shortsighted and politically
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impotent. Habermas characterises the increasing ubiquity of
the mass media (especially the broadcast media) in terms of a
‘refeudalisation of the public sphere’ such that the ‘principle of
publicity’ undergoes a transformation away from reasoned critical
debate towards its contemporary association with public relations
and marketing techniques.

In the measure that it is shaped by public relations, the public sphere of civil
society again takes on feudal features. The ‘suppliers’ display a showy pomp
before customers ready to follow. Publicity initiates the kind of aura proper
to the personal prestige and supernatural authority once bestowed by the
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kind of publicity involved in [feudal] representation.
Thompson criticises Habermas’s ‘refeudalisation thesis’ on a number
of grounds. Whilst the prevalence of mediated quasi-interaction
may offer political leaders and dominant groups new possibilities
for engaging in calculated political marketing, slick presentation and
rehearsed ‘debate’, it also creates new threats to the strategic successes
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of political communication. In comparison with print, electronic
media certainly lend themselves to different – often more frenetic and
less sober or contemplative – temporalities (though this thesis can be
overstated if we consider, for example, the rather rigid temporalities
and daily production cycles of the traditional daily newspaper against
the way in which many digital media accrue automated archival and
non-linear retrieval functions). Broadcasters, for instance, may largely
control the timing, pace and rhythms at which media messages are
transmitted (time-shifting consumer gadgets such as VCR or TiVo
have dented but not eliminated this scheduling function) in a way
which sets electronic broadcasting apart from print media. But unlike
the ‘representative publicness’ characteristic of the feudal era, the
break between speaker and hearer also limits the control media

personnel or public figures themselves exercise over factors such as
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the reception context or audience composition. In addition, new
media technologies progressively erode the control politicians and

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Goode 02 chap04 99 23/8/05 09:36:10