Page 111 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

106 Jürgen Habermas

the role of large-scale communications media in ‘stirring up’ and
reconfi guring localised lifeworlds, destabilising cultural boundaries
and eroding the internal coherence of geographically bounded
communities. The way in which media symbols feed into localised
sites of discourse and deliberation is largely obscured and we are
left with both a problematic conceptual binary (between what is
‘internal’ and what is ‘external’ to a cultural community) and a
reductive political binary (between localisms concerned with purely
local issues and a purely representative and mass-mediated political
system designed to deal with large-scale problems). The image of a
less rigidly conceived ‘bottom-up’ political culture, in which localised
discourses feed into those representative structures, is lost, as too is
the critical purchase we need to gain on large-scale communications
media as simultaneously of (and not simply between) both ‘system’
and ‘lifeworld’.
What is clear, though, is that the democratic imagination demands
that we do not demonise large-scale and professionalised media
simply because they do not conform to the Socratic ideals which
are often assumed to enjoy a monopoly on virtue in Habermasian
thought – an assumption which is neither entirely accurate nor
comprehensively rebutted by Habermas himself. What it demands
is an ongoing critical analysis of the cultural frames and the political
economy of the mediascape; the diversity and inclusivity of media
networks; and the disjunctures that prevail between our realistic
aspirations for a mediascape that makes an increasingly complex
world intelligible, more amenable to intervention, and open to
new and unfamiliar ways of seeing, on the one hand, and ‘actually
existing’ mediations, on the other.

A PUBLIC SPHERE IN BITS?

One suspects that Habermas is no e-mail junky, that he does not
readily cut short the regular late-night discussions he convenes with
colleagues and students in his favourite Greek restaurant in order to
boot up and log on to a philsophically themed chat room or surf
through the latest entries on his favourite blogs. His distaste for the
online world can be glimpsed in a recent remark dismissing the
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Internet as a series of ‘global villages’ that, far from contributing
towards the emergence of a global public sphere, reflect and
exacerbate the fragmentation of public life and the proliferation of
cultural enclaves. Though we may want to dismiss this as irrational

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