Geoscience Reference
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decades of research, the mainstream mass media is thus necessarily cen-
tral to determining the speed and character of social stability and social
change. In part, this is because it has a connective imperative with the
existence of the public sphere and civil society, both of which, as I'll now
detail, are (like the mass media itself) key contributors to the political life of
nations.
MASS MEDIATED PUBLICS
...
If 'Democracy [is]
the idea that political rule should, in some sense,
be in the hands of ordinary people' (Barnett and Low, 2004: 1), then the
existence of the public sphere is a
sine qua non
. The public sphere is the
arena in which individuals can come together freely to discuss societal chal-
lenges and goals and, through that discussion, influence the political actions
of elected representatives. Despite my use of the word 'arena', the public
sphere is not a physical place. Instead, it's virtual (nowhere and every-
where), though no less real than any site of face-to-face assembly for all
that. This is well illustrated by the websites of 'serious' newspapers. Most
offer readers the chance to post comments on the arguments made by
columnists.
Study Task:
Try to identify the main reasons why modern public spheres
do not resemble the face-to-face ones of the Ancient Greek city states where
democracy was first invented. It may help to refer back to the start of
The reason why modern public spheres are necessarily 'stretched out' is
obvious: most democracies are physically large and well populated, meaning
that people simply lack the ability to have direct encounters with even a
tiny fraction of their fellow citizens. Furthermore, given how things like
climate change and the 2008-9 financial crisis stand to affect everyone on
the planet, the public sphere is now in some sense global. 'The public' is,
today, thoroughly multi-scalar - a dynamic
composite
of overlapping publics
with no fixed geographical address.
The public sphere, publics and publicity
In his influential history of the public sphere in Europe, Jurgen Habermas
(1962/1989) located it functionally between what he later called 'lifeworld'
and 'system' (see
Box 3.4)
. People, he argued, inhabit a
private lifeworld
(the
family and community), a
private system-world
(work and commodity con-
sumption, linking people to the 'invisible hand' of the capitalist market),
and a
public system-world
(their submission to the law and to the regulations
