Page 106 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café 101

assume is that in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
Habermas is not, as Thompson alleges, concerned solely with ‘a

relatively superficial aspect of politics – namely, the cultivation of
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image and the preoccupation with showy presentation’, but also
with the dynamics that, in late modernity, obstruct the development
of independent spaces of deliberation within civil society through
the unchecked expansion of administrative and corporate logic, and
the hollowing out of formal arenas of democratic deliberation. The
‘risks’ to which Thompson refers will often have more to do with

the precarious careers of individual public figures than with the
vulnerability of societal power structures.
Neither of these ambiguities, however, detract from Thompon’s
central thesis, namely that where large-scale decision-making processes
are at stake, democratic citizenship presupposes large-scale (which is
not to say, centralised) networks of mediated visibility. Contemporary
patterns of globalisation serve to reinforce such an assertion. As socio-
economic and cultural connectivities stretch ever further beyond the
parameters of the nation state, democrats are faced with the daunting
task of imagining new institutions (including media systems) which
can hold increasingly globalised power relations in check. Can a
democratic media system (such as the public service broadcasting

model exemplified by the BBC) confer genuine rights of citizenship
if it remains rooted to a national political arena whose sovereignty is
under increasing strain? It is true that the increased pressures upon
the nation state should not be confused with the end of the nation
state, given the abiding significance of the national political arena, the

many renaissances of nationalism and protectionism, and – obvious
but crucial to media policy debates – the commonplace (though
not universal) congruence between linguistic and national territorial
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boundaries. And yet the problems and issues which citizens face
today – complex global inequalities, environmental issues, the arms
industries, terrorist networks or human rights, for example – cannot
be confined to the national arena of public deliberation and policy

formation. For radical democrats, the complexities this brings to
media policy debates are immense. Along which dimensions should
democratic media systems be constructed? How are they to be funded
and constitutionally protected? How are the funding bodies and
media systems themselves to be held accountable? How are linguistic
and cultural barriers to be addressed? How do media systems deal
with the incongruence between economic, cultural and political
patterns of globalisation?

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