Page 99 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

94 Jürgen Habermas

significant information (they are gatekeepers and agenda setters),

discursively interrogating decision makers (they serve as advocates),
and making accessible the world ‘out there’ (or, rather, selecting
segments and constructing versions of it) on behalf of a more or less
diffuse audience.
(3) As filtered networks of visibility and ‘quasi-interactive’
encounters, media institutions and technologies constitute the sine
qua non of a democratic public culture in modern complex societies.
But Habermas’s theory of the public sphere is found wanting when it
comes to an understanding of the types of interaction that the media
institute between citizens and decision makers or public fi gures. In
modern democratic societies, systems of representative democracy
emerge precisely because societal complexity dictates a division of
labour between the specialised roles of decision makers, on the one
hand, and a diffuse citizenry as a source of legitimation, on the

other. Media confi gure that division of labour in a specific way. They
produce, gather, process and distribute information and discourse;
they engender ‘visibility’ by painting or sketching, rather than simply

revealing, public figures and social processes. But societal complexity
limits the scope for challenging hierarchies of expert knowledge

and the media fulfill an essential function as they fi lter, confi gure,
compress and render accessible for the lay citizen vast and complex
networks of information and accountability. Selective visibility, by
definition, prohibits the emergence of communicative transparency:

the mass media do not serve as a window on the inner workings of
each and every significant decision-making process: the mediated

transmission of information and expert knowledge and the scope

for ‘discursively testing’ the claims of public figures are curtailed by
limits to supply (factors include technical constraints, the available
quantity of media space etc.) and by limits to demand (factors include
citizens’ free time, motivation, etc.). The democratic imagination is
often reluctant to acknowledge that the demeanour, the image and
the reputations of public figures are the symbolic tokens in which a

highly mediated public culture primarily deals.
In a world of complex, specialised decision-making processes,
democracy, we might say, is founded not upon communicative
transparency but upon the establishment of channels of visibility
through which feelings of ‘trust’ and ‘mistrust’ circulate. ‘Trust’, in
this sense, implies a balancing act between acquiring knowledge
and understanding of decision-making processes and investing a
degree of faith in the integrity, acumen and expertise of decision

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