Page 115 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

110 Jürgen Habermas

to intervene in a putative ‘real world’ that is no longer our ontological
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centre of gravity.
The obvious response to this bleak prognosis would be to rattle
off an impressive list of examples of citizens and activists using the
Internet to intervene in that so-called ‘real world’ and, in doing
so, fostering remarkably egalitarian – though rarely dispassionate or
conflict-free – interactions. The distinction between the ‘virtual’ and

the ‘real’ has been badly overplayed, most especially in pessimistic,
rather than optimistic, discourses on digital culture: the digital
pessimists would do well to spend a little more time online to acquaint
themselves with some ‘real world’ examples! But rather than taking
the standard option of trying to make a one-sided diagnosis look a
little more balanced, I wish to take a slightly different turn here and
raise the question of whether the increasing ubiquity, connectivity
and self-referential nature of a digitised mediascape could actually be
productive for our understanding of the Habermasian public sphere.
Indeed, I want to suggest that there are two key ways in which the
implications of this might be grasped differently as potentially
positive moments in the transformation of the public sphere, whilst
maintaining a critical eye for the dangers.
The first moment of positivity reflects back on something we

discussed in Chapter 1: ‘reflexive publicity’ means applying the
norms of critical publicity to the very institutions that are perceived

to fulfil that role in respect of other institutions and power holders,
not least the institutions of the media. The second moment is an

outgrowth of the first and requires us to acknowledge the increasingly
pervasive role that communications technologies play in struggles
over the very ‘fault-lines’ – public–private and system–lifeworld, for
example – which a Habermasian notion of politics emphasises.
Digital culture is precisely not just a mass of atomised cultural
enclaves. The cultural industries may indeed invest a great deal of
resources into profiling and niching consumers. We should also add

that interest groups, subcultural communities and fandoms are often
amenable to self-enclosure and exclusivity. But this has never been
(and, I believe, will never be) the whole story. For a start, the profi ling
and niching processes characteristic of the digital age are increasingly
automated through algorithms that are indifferent to questions of
cultural atomism and increasingly hail consumers as nodes on a
differential matrix rather than assigning them a categorical pigeon-
hole, as mainstream market research in the cultural industries has
previously tended to do. Internet cookies and Amazon.com (or TiVo)

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