Page 123 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

118 Jürgen Habermas

dynamics at stake in the ongoing development of intensively
technologised social interactions, and a more nuanced conceptual
framework that acknowledges the tensions between public and
private, system and lifeworld and so forth, in terms of complex
boundary disputes that are subject to ongoing mediation and do not
necessarily admit of interpretive or ontological closure. To that
extent, our concern with ‘mediation’ has moved beyond the either/or
purview of intersubjectivity versus money and power, to acknowledge
the array of technologies and cultural forms that intervene and are
taken up as weapons (by all sides) in these ongoing disputes. My
biased emphasis on the public–private and system–lifeworld fault-
lines, not to mention my perverse fascination with the mobile phone,
is not intended to obscure the many other lines of inquiry that vie
for our attention. For example, we know that Internet chat rooms,
listservs and virtual communities are littered with boundary disputes
involving anonymity and embodiment, experts and non-experts, the
local and global, to name a few. There is much existing and ongoing
research that demonstrates how pervasive these boundary disputes
are. The Internet has, for instance, played to dreams of a zone where ‘I
can really be me’ or, at least, where ‘I can explore and experiment with
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various narratives of me’ free from the prohibitions and inhibitions
of face-to-face encounters – the ‘Other’ can be generalised so that I
can truly be ‘concrete’. It’s also a zone where dreams of authorship
and ‘audience-oriented subjectivity’ can run amok – the imagined
audience and the delusions of transcendence or disembodiment
afforded by the Internet paints Homo digitalis as something akin
to Gutenberg Man on steroids. And yet, because so much of what
goes on in these forums falls between the poles of the face-to-face
community and the generalised other of the broadcast model, all

sorts of conflicts ensue as possibilities for abuse and power games
multiply under the shroud of anonymity. To outsiders, the tensions

around online ‘flaming’, ‘trolling’, gender-bending and identity play
may look like nerdish trivia, and yet they are rich case studies in

conflicts surrounding the ethics of the ‘Other’ which are instructive
for our understanding of the public sphere and its cultural context.
The proliferation of online pornography provides a useful counter
to what may sound like a dangerously sanguine take on the potential
for digital culture to stimulate greater reflexivity in respect of these

boundary disputes. If (gendered) dreams of transcendence and
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disembodiment flow abundantly through the Internet, so too do
bodies. It has been (plausibly) suggested that the Internet affords a

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