Page 119 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

114 Jürgen Habermas

lines and brings them to the fore as important sites of contemporary
political, cultural and theoretical tension and struggle.
Most discussions of the new mediascape and the public sphere have
highlighted the role of, say, the Internet as a public sphere, focusing
on how well or how poorly the practices it embodies live up to the
values of Habermasian discourse ethics. But the problem here is that
such enquiries highlight just part of the equation. They tend to treat
the public sphere in abstraction from the broader socio-political and
cultural context. I would like to suggest a complementary line of
analysis that probes a little deeper and interrogates the mediascape
as context and not merely as text, as foundation and not merely
as edifi ce, as langue and not merely as parole. I take my cue for this
from Habermas’s own (albeit problematic) analysis, in Structural
Transformation of the reconfiguration of (sub)urban spaces, the
changing architectures of domestic space, the shifting nature of the
culture industries and other related trends that underpinned the
rise of ‘privatism’ and radically recontextualised the public sphere,
its meanings and its locations. I take my cue also from Raymond
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Williams’ contemporaneous work on ‘mobile privatisation’ that
implicated the television, the motor car and the rise of suburbia in
fundamentally altered orientations towards the public world outside.
By focusing on the rise of the digital mediascape (as opposed to, say,
the rise of new urbanism), my comments risk betraying a media-
centric world-view. This is not the intention. I want simply to suggest
that rich analysis must try to rescue the mediascape from our rather
one-dimensional and utilitarian urge to make it over in the image of
the Habermasian public sphere by critically engaging its everyday and
contextual aspects. My points here are meant to be forward-looking
rather than summative: they offer just a few fragmented illustrations
with the goal of stimulating further inquiry.
The mobile phone seems precisely to fit the bill of a profoundly

quotidian technology and cultural form that has little to offer any
analysis of the public sphere: the cellular networks are rarely alive with
the sound of vigorous public debate (although there is nothing essential
in the technology to make the development of new genres of cell-
phone public discourse unimaginable). Yet, as something increasingly
woven into the fabric of everyday existence in contemporary societies,
the mobile phone, metonymically perhaps, raises important questions
about the way we live and communicate in the world, which can be
grasped at least partially in terms of a problematisation of ‘public’
and ‘private’. An intuitive reading of the mobile phone might frame

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