Page 157 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

152 Jürgen Habermas

4 MEDIATIONS:
FROM THE COFFEE HOUSE TO THE INTERNET CAFÉ

1. J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action vol. 2: Lifeworld
and System: The Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987 [1981]), p. 390.
2. J.D. Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
3. J.B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Theory in the Era
of Mass Communication (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); ‘The theory
of the public sphere’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 10, no. 3 (1993);
‘Social theory and the media’, in D. Crowley and D. Mitchell (eds),
Communication Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); The Media
and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1995).
4. See, for example, M. Poster, The Second Media Age (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1995).
5. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, p. 120.
6. Ibid., p. 120.
7. Ibid., pp. 228ff.
8. Thompson, ‘Social theory and the media’, p. 35.
9. Ibid., p. 36.
10. Ibid., p. 37; see also P. Scannell, ‘Public service broadcasting: the history
of a concept’, in A. Goodwin and G. Whannel (eds), Understanding
Television (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 11–29.
11. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, p. 225.
12. F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(London: Verso, 1990).
13. A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern
Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 187–8.
14. It is important that we do not make the ontological assumption that
physical distance is always a problem for which communication
technologies such as the phone offer a remedy. The telephone may
help to overcome the physical distance of two people; but the phone
can also be used to create distance between the user and the people in
his immediate physical vicinity; and it can be used to exploit distance,
as in the case of the text-message flirting between two people only

yards apart. Distance is not always a pathology, and communication
technologies are not always used to overcome it.
15. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 33.
16. I shall return to this issue in the fi nal chapter.
17. Thompson, ‘The theory of the public sphere’, pp. 186–7.
18. See, for example, P. Scannell, ‘Public service broadcasting and modern
public life’, in P. Scannell et al. (eds), Culture and Power (London: Sage,
1991); J. Keane, The Media and Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1991); P. Golding and G. Murdock, ‘Culture, communications and
political economy’, in J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds), Mass Media
and Society, 2nd edn (London: Arnold, 1991); P. Dahlgren and C. Sparks

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