Page 97 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

92 Jürgen Habermas

of the role of a reconstructed media space in the realisation of those
prospects. I shall touch on each of these issues in turn.
(1) According to Thompson, the rise of communications media
ushered in an era characterised by the ascendancy of ‘mediated quasi-
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interaction’. Where face-to-face interaction occurs in a common
physical locale and may in principle gesture towards reciprocal speech
relations, communications media have enabled the ‘disembedding’
of social relations which is characteristic of modernity, where
interaction is uprooted from shared spatial and temporal contexts.
Thompson distinguishes two types of mediated interaction. One type
(for example, telephony, e-mail or letter-writing) facilitates dialogic
encounters across space and/or time (although it also reconfi gures
face-to-face interaction, engendering new conventions, constraints
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and opportunities). By contrast, ‘mediated quasi-interaction’
describes institutionalised communication which is not analogous
to the dialogical encounter:
there are two key respects in which mediated quasi-interaction differs from
both face-to-face interaction and mediated interaction. In the first place, the
participants in face-to-face interaction and mediated interaction are oriented
towards specific others, for whom they produce utterances, expressions,
etc.; but in the case of mediated quasi-interaction, symbolic forms are
produced for an indefinite range of potential recipients. Second, whereas
face-to-face interaction and mediated interaction are dialogical, mediated
quasi-interaction is monological in character, in the sense that the flow of
communication is predominantly one way … But mediated quasi-interaction
is, none the less, a form of interaction … It is a structured situation in which
some individuals are engaged primarily in producing symbolic forms for
others who are not physically present, while others are involved primarily in
receiving symbolic forms produced by others to whom they cannot respond,
but with whom they can form bonds of friendship, affection or loyalty. 9

(2) In privileging dialogue, Habermas also fails to account for the
increasing prevalence of media and the role they play in contemporary
social and political life. Thompson’s thesis is not that mediated
quasi-interaction replaces face-to-face interaction. He recognises
that it serves to stimulate and inform localised dialogue, that media
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products, that is, become the subject of ‘discursive elaboration’
– a process of fundamental importance to Habermas’s narrative of
the bourgeois public sphere. But neither, in that case, does it merely
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supplement older forms of social interaction. The rise of mass

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