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Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café 105

universalising ideas (for that is all they are) such as ‘humanity’,
the ‘cosmopolis’ or an ethic of ‘global responsibility’, could be
significantly challenged or unsettled were citizens to depend solely

upon those large-scale media for ‘imagined’ encounters with ‘Others’
and to ‘discursively elaborate’ those media symbols only within the

confines of a homogenous, privatised lifeworld.
Whilst Habermas, since Structural Transformation, has been
notoriously vague and unforthcoming on the nature and
democratic role of communications media, Craig Calhoun has
proposed a corrective that accords them their rightful place within
Habermas’s system–lifeworld framework. His thesis is that large-
scale communications media are crucial for establishing shared
interpretative frameworks (including stereotypes), for condensing

and filtering information, and for granting citizens a degree of access
to communities with which they are otherwise connected only via
abstract systems, enabling them to make informed choices within
the system of representative democracy. Calhoun is at pains to
highlight the limitations of communitarian thought, which is prone
to underplay the structural limitations of participatory democracy, to
dismiss the problem of societal complexity and to treat the system in
lifeworld terms: ‘This is the fundamental misrecognition built into
the bulk of localist, populist politics today.’ 34
However, there is a sense in which Calhoun tries to achieve the
impossible: that is, to slot the mass media neatly into the system–
lifeworld model and use it as a kind of neutral bridge between two
separate domains. There are, I think, a number of problems with this
approach. Because he deals only with the communications media in
relation to systemic or ‘large-scale’ societal integration, he obscures
the role they play in day-to-day lived experience, the way the global

becomes part of the local. Large-scale media play a significant role in the
‘uprooting’ and differentiation of modern lifeworlds. This is not the
35
place to engage with the vast literature on media reception: suffi ce
it to say that studies show modes and contexts of reception, patterns
of demand, the background experiences and expectations brought
into the reception context and the ways media products are ‘used’
as cultural and discursive scaffolds in everyday life, to be extremely
diverse and complex. To neglect these local–global interactions is
unwittingly to reinforce precisely the static and culturally segmented
notion of ‘community’ characteristic of communitarian thinking.
Such an account, then, provides no tools for distinguishing between
conservative and progressive localisms and, crucially, neglects

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Goode 02 chap04 105
Goode 02 chap04 105 23/8/05 09:36:11