Page 117 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

112 Jürgen Habermas

on the topic which, itself, carries more links to other destinations.
But this example threatens to obscure the point, because it is not
really the apparent ‘communicative transparency’ engendered by
these encounters (such as the privilege of accessing ‘primary’ sources
alongside their journalistic interpretations) that is most interesting
here: in fact, we need to be deeply sceptical of the mythology of
transparency which digital culture can seduce us with. Rather, what
is most interesting is the prospect that the ‘culture of unfi nish’ may,
more broadly, help to foster a sense of being more at ease with the
provisional, partial and decentred nature of our ways of viewing
the world. Similarly, to respond that, on a macro scale, there exist
high levels of circularity in evidence in the linking structures of the
Internet and that there are many areas of the digital mediascape
more generally that resemble walled gardens is really to miss the
point. When an expanding and networked mediascape increasingly
lays bare the limitations of our insights, we might experience
anxieties and insecurities, responding fatalistically to the information
blizzards we find ourselves caught up in … or we might learn to

better appreciate the provisional nature of our views such that we
might become better listeners when we encounter difference and
dissent. An appropriately provisional suggestion, then, is that digital
culture may contribute to the enrichment of discourse ethics by
foregrounding an ‘ethic of unfinish’. A realistic assessment cautions

strongly against the Deleuzian vision of the infinite concatenations of

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the digital ‘rhizome’ that inspires many digital artists and activists.
But where cultural pessimists see the digital mediascape comprising
only cultural enclosures, an internal critique of the contradictions of
digital culture reveals at least the possibility that it can militate against
closure just as it promotes it.
This resonates most strongly with Habermas’s notion of ‘refl exive
publicity’ in Structural Transformation. The digital age may not equip
us to see through the ‘distortions’ of mediated communication
and unravel an objective (that is, unmediated) version of reality
– in fact, it multiplies mediation. Indeed, as Jay David Bolter and
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Richard Grusin have argued, we can always understand putatively
‘new’ communications technologies and media forms in terms
of ‘remediation’. In the drive for more ‘authentic’ modes of
communication, new media forms invariably borrow and remix the
codes and conventions for organising reality from preceding forms. But
rather than simply conceiving these multiplying layers of mediation
in terms of a tragic loss of the ‘real’, we can instead consider how

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