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82-589: According to Habermas, the notion of the " public sphere " began evolving during the Renaissance in Western Europe. Brought on partially by merchants' need for accurate information about distant markets as well as by the growth of democracy and individual liberty and popular sovereignty, the public sphere was a place between private individuals and government authorities in which people could meet and have critical debates about public matters. Such discussions served as

164-467: A bourgeois liberal constitutional order which distinguished between the public and private realms; further, within the private realm, there was a bourgeois public sphere for rational-critical political debate which formed a new phenomenon called public opinion . Spearheading this shift was the growth of a literary public sphere in which the bourgeoisie learned to critically reflect upon itself and its role in society. This first major shift occurred alongside

246-401: A "bourgeois" public sphere based on rational-critical debate and discussion: Habermas stipulates that, due to specific historical circumstances, a new civic society emerged in the eighteenth century. Driven by a need for open commercial arenas where news and matters of common concern could be freely exchanged and discussed—accompanied by growing rates of literacy, accessibility to literature, and

328-405: A battle is fought not only over influence but over the control of communication flows that affect behavior while their strategic intentions are kept hidden as much as possible. Although Structural Transformation was (and is) one of the most influential works in contemporary German philosophy and political science, it took 27 years until an English version appeared on the market in 1989. Based on

410-402: A bourgeois public sphere was particularly supported by the 18th-century liberal democracy making resources available to this new political class to establish a network of institutions like publishing enterprises, newspapers and discussion forums, and the democratic press was the main tool to execute this. The key feature of this public sphere was its separation from the power of both the church and

492-552: A conference on the occasion of the English translation, at which Habermas himself attended, Craig Calhoun (1992) edited Habermas and the Public Sphere – a thorough dissection of Habermas' bourgeois public sphere by scholars from various academic disciplines. The core criticism at the conference was directed towards the above stated "institutional criteria": Nancy Fraser identified the fact that marginalized groups are excluded from

574-417: A counterweight to political authority and happened physically in face-to-face meetings in coffee houses and cafes and public squares as well as in the media in letters, books, drama, and art. Habermas saw a vibrant public sphere as a positive force keeping authorities within bounds lest their rulings be ridiculed. According to the journalist David Randall , "In Habermasian theory, the bourgeois public sphere

656-405: A discussion is called public debate and is defined as the expression of views on matters that are of concern to the public—often, but not always, with opposing or diverging views being expressed by participants in the discussion. Public debate takes place mostly through the mass media, but also at meetings or through social media , academic publications and government policy documents. The term

738-559: A few of its participants and are seldom in contexts where we and they directly interact, we join these exchanges because they are discussing the same matters". In order to communicate within the public sphere, "those who enter any given arena must share a reference world for their discourse to produce awareness for shared interests and public opinions about them". This world consists of common meanings and cultural norms from which interaction can take place. The rhetorical public sphere has several primary features: The rhetorical public sphere

820-511: A group of interested individuals who engage in vernacular discourse about a specific issue. "Publics may be repressed, distorted, or responsible, but any evaluation of their actual state requires that we inspect the rhetorical environment as well as the rhetorical act out of which they evolved, for these are the conditions that constitute their individual character". These people formed rhetorical public spheres that were based in discourse, not necessarily orderly discourse but any interactions whereby

902-399: A lack of representation of marginalized groups that are unable to voice their interests effectively; (c) Experts who are credited with professional or scientific knowledge in some specialized area and are invited to give advice; (d) Moral entrepreneurs who generate public attention for supposedly neglected issues; (e) Intellectuals who have gained, unlike advocates or moral entrepreneurs,

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984-406: A large public sphere, where people can form their own opinions and discuss different things in the comments. The research by Edgerly, et al. found that the analyzed YouTube comments were diverse. They argue that this is a possible indicator that YouTube provides space for public discussion. They also found that YouTube videos' style influences the nature of the commentary. Finally, they concluded that

1066-486: A larger dialectic in which political changes were made in an attempt to save the liberal constitutional order, but had the ultimate effect of destroying the bourgeois public sphere. He highlights the pernicious effects of commercialization and consumerization on the public sphere through the rise of mass media , public relations , and consumer culture . He delineates how these developments thwarted rational-critical political debate, including political parties functioning in

1148-453: A means by which many people can gather information about a few and, at the same time, a few can appear before many; thanks to the media, it is primarily those who exercise power, rather than those over whom power is exercised, who are subjected to a certain kind of visibility". However, Thompson also acknowledges that "media and visibility is a double-edged sword" meaning that even though they can be used to show an improved image (by managing

1230-457: A move that changed the dynamics of the largest industrial enterprise in the world, away from technological innovation and towards satisfying market expectations. A criticism of consumer capitalism has been made by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler . He argues that capitalism today is governed not by production but by consumption, and that the techniques used to create consumer behavior amount to

1312-577: A new conceptual framework of the public sphere that acknowledges how both thoughtful discussions as well as ones which express feelings in an overt way needs to be developed. Some, like Colin Sparks, note that a new global public sphere ought to be created in the wake of increasing globalization and global institutions, which operate at the supranational level. However, the key questions for him were, whether any media exists in terms of size and access to fulfil this role. The traditional media, he notes, are close to

1394-494: A new form of "mediated publicness", whose main characteristics are: This mediated publicness has altered the power relations in a way in which not only the many are visible to the few but the few can also now see the many: "Whereas the Panopticon renders many people visible to a few and enables power to be exercised over the many by subjecting them to a state of permanent visibility, the development of communication media provides

1476-423: A new kind of critical journalism—a separate domain from ruling authorities started to evolve across Europe. "In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler's power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by

1558-505: A number of institutional criteria in common": Habermas argued that the bourgeois society cultivated and upheld these criteria. The public sphere was well established in various locations including coffee shops and salons, areas of society where various people could gather and discuss matters that concerned them. The coffee houses in London society at this time became the centers of art and literary criticism, which gradually widened to include even

1640-502: A number of limitations. Edgerly et al. say that the affirmative discourse presupposes that YouTube can be an influential player in the political process and that it can serve as an influential force to politically mobilize young people. YouTube has allowed anyone and everyone to be able to get any political knowledge they wish. The authors mention critiques that say YouTube is built around the popularity of videos with sensationalist content. It has also allowed people to broadcast themselves for

1722-459: A perceived personal reputation in some field (e.g., as writers or academics) and who engage, unlike experts and lobbyists, spontaneously in public discourse with the declared intention of promoting general interests. Libraries have been inextricably tied to educational institutions in the modern era having developed within democratic societies. Libraries took on aspects of the public sphere (as did classrooms), even while public spheres transformed in

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1804-485: A philosophical head in Marx 's astute diagnosis of the contradictions inherent in the liberal constitutional social order. Habermas saw the modified liberalism of Mill and Tocqueville with their ambivalence toward the public sphere as emblematic manifestations of these contradictions. Paralleling this philosophical progression against classical liberalism were major socio-economic transformations based on industrialization, and

1886-543: A public sphere. Discussions about the media have therefore been of particular importance in public sphere theory. According to Habermas, there are two types of actors without whom no political public sphere could be put to work: professionals in the media system and politicians. For Habermas, there are five types of actors who make their appearance on the virtual stage of an established public sphere: (a) Lobbyists who represent special interest groups; (b) Advocates who either represent general interest groups or substitute for

1968-487: A study by S. Edgerly et al. focused on the ability of YouTube to serve as an online public sphere. The researchers examined a large sample of video comments using the California Proposition 8 (2008) as an example. The authors argue that some scholars think the online public sphere is a space where a wide range of voices can be expressed due to the "low barrier of entry" and interactivity. However, they also point at

2050-511: A study in 2009 in order to establish whether the Internet offers a better and broader communication environment compared to quality newspapers. They analyzed how the issue of human genome research was portrayed between 1999 and 2001 in popular quality newspapers in both Germany and the United States in comparison to the way it appeared on search engines at the time of their research. Their intention

2132-442: A universal public sphere, and thus it was impossible to claim that one group would, in fact, be inclusive. However, she claimed that marginalized groups formed their own public spheres, and termed this concept a subaltern counter public or counter-public. Fraser worked from Habermas' basic theory because she saw it to be " an indispensable resource " but questioned the actual structure and attempted to address her concerns. She made

2214-435: A variety of meanings and it implies a spatial concept, the social sites or arenas where meanings are articulated, distributed, and negotiated, as well as the collective body constituted by, and in this process, "the public". The work is still considered the foundation of contemporary public sphere theories, and most theorists cite it when discussing their own theories. The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as

2296-511: A way that bypassed the public sphere, undermining parliamentary politics. Habermas drew on the cultural critiques of critical theory from the Frankfurt School , which included important thinkers such as Theodor Adorno , who was one of his teachers at the Institute for Social Research from 1956 to 1959. Habermas began his habilitation during this period, but due to intellectual tensions with

2378-426: Is a "realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens". This notion of the public becomes evident in terms such as public health, public education, public opinion or public ownership. They are opposed to the notions of private health, private education, private opinion, and private ownership. The notion of the public is intrinsically connected to

2460-504: Is dominated by (bio- and natural) scientific actors; popular inclusion does not occur". The scholars argue that the search algorithms select the sources of information based on the popularity of their links. "Their gatekeeping, in contrast to the old mass media, relies mainly on technical characteristics of websites". For Gerhards and Schäfer the Internet is not an alternative public sphere because less prominent voices end up being silenced by

2542-436: Is enacted through the medium of talk" and "a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed". Describing the emergence of the public sphere in the 18th century, Habermas noted that the public realm, or sphere, originally was "coextensive with public authority", while "the private sphere comprised civil society in the narrower sense, that is to say, the realm of commodity exchange and of social labor". Whereas

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2624-483: Is known as Habilitationsschrift or habilitation . The work was overseen by the political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth , to whom Habermas dedicated it. Habermas describes the development of a bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as well as its subsequent decline. The first transition occurred in England, France, the United States, and Germany over the course of 150 years or so from

2706-461: Is not" discussed. Benhabib argues for feminists to counter the popular public discourse in their own counter public. The public sphere was long regarded as men's domain whereas women were supposed to inhabit the private domestic sphere. A distinct ideology that prescribed separate spheres for women and men emerged during the Industrial Revolution . The concept of heteronormativity

2788-403: Is used to describe the way in which those who fall outside of the basic male/female dichotomy of gender or whose sexual orientations are other than heterosexual cannot meaningfully claim their identities, causing a disconnect between their public selves and their private selves. Michael Warner made the observation that the idea of an inclusive public sphere makes the assumption that we are all

2870-421: The "sphere of public authority" dealt with the state, or realm of the police, and the ruling class, or the feudal authorities (church, princes and nobility) the "authentic 'public sphere ' ", in a political sense, arose at that time from within the private realm, specifically, in connection with literary activities, the world of letters. This new public sphere spanned the public and the private realms, and "through

2952-668: The Institute's director, philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer , he moved to the University of Marburg, where he completed the work under Wolfgang Abendroth . The book was reprinted many times in German and other languages, and has been enormously influential, especially since its translation into English, for scholars of political science , media studies , and rhetoric . It is also an important work for historians of philosophy and scholars of intellectual history . After publication, Habermas

3034-452: The advantage of sellers. This theory is controversial. It suggests manipulation of consumer demand so potent that it has a coercive effect, amounts to a departure from free-market capitalism , and has an adverse effect on society in general. According to one source, the power of such 'manipulation' is not straightforward. It depends upon a new kind of individualism - projective individualism , where persons use consumer capitalism to project

3116-430: The bases for shared awareness of common issues, shared interests, tendencies of extent and strength of difference and agreement, and self-constitution as a public whose opinions bear on the organization of society." This concept that the public sphere acts as a medium in which public opinion is formed as analogous to a lava lamp. Just as the lamp's structure changes, with its lava separating and forming new shapes, so does

3198-595: The bourgeois public sphere shifted political power from "a repressive mode of domination to a hegemonic one". Rather than rule by power, there was now rule by the majority ideology. To deal with this hegemonic domination, Fraser argues that repressed groups form "Subaltern counter-publics" that are "parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs". Benhabib notes that in Habermas' idea of

3280-446: The channels of mass-market communication and its manipulative power. This development was described as early as the 1920s by Walter Benjamin and related members of the Frankfurt School , who foresaw the commercial, societal and political implications. In business history, the mid-1920s saw Alfred P. Sloan stimulating increased demand for General Motors products by instituting the annual model year change and planned obsolescence ,

3362-480: The citizens in these emerging nation-states. Some critics claim the public sphere, as such, never existed, or existed only in the sense of excluding many important groups, such as the poor, women, slaves, migrants, and criminals. They maintain that the public sphere remains an idealized conception, little changed since Kant, since the ideal is still to a great extent what Habermas might call an unfinished project of modernity. (Cubitt 2005:93) Similar critiques regarding

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3444-593: The department store is also explored in Émile Zola 's 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames , which describes the workings and the appeal of a fictionalized version of Le Bon Marché . In 1919 Edward Bernays began his career as the 'father of public relations ' and successfully applied the developing principles of psychology, sociology and motivational research to manipulate public opinion in favor of products like cigarettes, soap, and Calvin Coolidge . New techniques of mechanical reproduction developed in these decades improved

3526-462: The development of American department stores from the mid 19th Century, notably the advertising and marketing innovations at Wanamaker's in Philadelphia . Author William Leach describes a deliberate, coordinated effort among American ' captains of industry ' to detach consumer demand from 'needs' (which can be satisfied) to 'wants' (which may remain unsatisfied). This cultural shift represented by

3608-422: The economic and the political disputes as matters of discussion. In French salons, as Habermas says, "opinion became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence". Any new work, or a book or a musical composition had to get its legitimacy in these places. It not only paved a forum for self-expression but in fact had become a platform for airing one's opinions and agendas for public discussion. The emergence of

3690-410: The exclusivity of the bourgeois public sphere have been made by feminist and post-colonial authors. Public sphere The public sphere ( German : Öffentlichkeit ) is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. A "Public" is "of or concerning the people as a whole." Such

3772-495: The government due to its access to a variety of resources, both economic and social. As Habermas argues, in due course, this sphere of rational and universalistic politics , free from both the economy and the State, was destroyed by the same forces that initially established it. This collapse was due to the consumeristic drive that infiltrated society, so citizens became more concerned about consumption than political actions. Furthermore,

3854-399: The growth of capitalistic economy led to an uneven distribution of wealth, thus widening economic polarity. Suddenly the media became a tool of political forces and a medium for advertising rather than the medium from which the public got their information on political matters. This resulted in limiting access to the public sphere and the political control of the public sphere was inevitable for

3936-415: The interested public engages each other. This interaction can take the form of institutional actors as well as the basic "street rhetoric" that "open[s] a dialogue between competing factions." The spheres themselves formed around the issues that were being deliberated. The discussion itself would reproduce itself across the spectrum of interested publics "even though we lack personal acquaintance with all but

4018-416: The kind of person who they want to be. Some use the phrase as shorthand for the broader idea that the interests of other non-business entities (governments, religions, the military, educational institutions) are intertwined with corporate business interests, and that those entities also participate in the management of social expectations through mass media. The origins of consumer capitalism are found in

4100-599: The late seventeenth century. England led the way in the early eighteenth century, with Germany following in the late eighteenth century. Habermas tries to explain the growth and decline of the public sphere by relating political, social, cultural and philosophical developments to each other in a multi-disciplinary approach. Initially, there were monarchical and feudal societies which made no distinction between state and society or between public and private, and which had organized themselves politically around symbolic representation and status. These feudal societies were transformed into

4182-418: The link between content and user engagement. Through both content and sentiment analysis, it was suggested that the sentiment of the language used in the titles of the videos had an impact upon the public, with negatively sentimented titles generated more user engagement. Buckley suggested that due to the aspect of emotionality that is present in news content that due to the ongoing process of media hybridization,

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4264-406: The macro sense. These contextual conditions led to a fundamental conservative rethinking of civil society institutions like schools and libraries. Habermas argues that under certain conditions, the media act to facilitate discourse in a public sphere. The rise of the Internet has brought about a resurgence of scholars applying theories of the public sphere to Internet technologies. For example,

4346-407: The majority of users". They also stress that some critics have voiced the concern that there is a lack of seriousness in political communication on social media platforms . Moreover, lines between professional media coverage and user-generated content would blur on social media. The authors conclude that social media provides new opportunities for political participation; however, they warn users of

4428-451: The modern capitalistic forces to operate and thrive in the competitive economy. Therewith emerged a new sort of influence, i.e., media power, which, used for purposes of manipulation, once and for all took care of the innocence of the principle of publicity. The public sphere, simultaneously restructured and dominated by the mass media, developed into an arena infiltrated by power in which, by means of topic selection and topical contributions,

4510-455: The notion of the private. Habermas stresses that the notion of the public is related to the notion of the common. For Hannah Arendt , the public sphere is therefore "the common world" that "gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other". Habermas defines the public sphere as a "society engaged in critical public debate". Conditions of the public sphere are according to Habermas: Most contemporary conceptualizations of

4592-408: The observation that "Habermas stops short of developing a new, post-bourgeois model of the public sphere". Fraser attempted to evaluate Habermas' bourgeois public sphere, discuss some assumptions within his model, and offer a modern conception of the public sphere. In the historical reevaluation of the bourgeois public sphere, Fraser argues that rather than opening up the political realm to everyone,

4674-526: The people". In his historical analysis, Habermas points out three so-called "'institutional criteria" as preconditions for the emergence of the new public sphere. The discursive arenas, such as Britain's coffee houses, France's salons, and Germany's Tischgesellschaften "may have differed in the size and compositions of their publics, the style of their proceedings, the climate of their debates, and their topical orientations", but "they all organized discussion among people that tended to be ongoing; hence they had

4756-461: The public sphere are based on the ideas expressed in Jürgen Habermas ' book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society , which is a translation of his Habilitationsschrift , Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit:Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft . The German term Öffentlichkeit (public sphere) encompasses

4838-407: The public sphere as a regulatory institution against the authority of the state. The study of the public sphere centers on the idea of participatory democracy , and how public opinion becomes political action. The ideology of the public sphere theory is that the government's laws and policies should be steered by the public sphere and that the only legitimate governments are those that listen to

4920-487: The public sphere in this true sense. Nevertheless, limitations are imposed by the market and concentration of ownership. At present, the global media fail to constitute the basis of a public sphere for at least three reasons. Similarly, he notes that the internet, for all its potential, does not meet the criteria for a public sphere and that unless these are "overcome, there will be no sign of a global public sphere". German scholars Jürgen Gerhards and Mike S. Schäfer conducted

5002-446: The public sphere than previous models. He foregrounds the rhetorical nature of public spheres, suggesting that public spheres form around "the ongoing dialogue on public issues" rather than the identity of the group engaged in the discourse. Rather than arguing for an all-inclusive public sphere, or the analysis of tension between public spheres, he suggested that publics were formed by active members of society around issues. They are

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5084-463: The public sphere's creation of opportunities for discourse to address public opinion, thereby forming new discussions of rhetoric. The lava of the public which holds together the public arguments is the public conversation. Habermas argues that the public sphere requires "specific means for transmitting information and influencing those who receive it". Habermas' argument shows that the media are of particular importance for constituting and maintaining

5166-425: The public sphere, the distinction between public and private issues separates issues that normally affect women (issues of "reproduction, nurture and care for the young, the sick, and the elderly") into the private realm and out of the discussion in the public sphere. She argues that if the public sphere is to be open to any discussion that affects the population, there cannot be distinctions between "what is" and "what

5248-512: The public sphere. "Democratic governance rests on the capacity of and opportunity for citizens to engage in enlightened debate". Much of the debate over the public sphere involves what is the basic theoretical structure of the public sphere, how information is deliberated in the public sphere, and what influence the public sphere has over society. Jürgen Habermas claims "We call events and occasions 'public' when they are open to all, in contrast to closed or exclusive affairs". This 'public sphere'

5330-475: The public sphere. The sociologists Brian Loader and Dan Mercea give an overview of this discussion. They argue that social media offers increasing opportunities for political communication and enable democratic capacities for political discussion within the virtual public sphere. The effect would be that citizens could challenge governments and corporations' political and economic power. Additionally, new forms of political participation and information sources for

5412-420: The result was the rise of mass societies characterized by consumer capitalism in the twentieth century. Clear demarcations between public and private and between state and society became blurred. The bourgeois public sphere was transformed by the increasing re-integration and entwining of state and society that resulted in the modern social welfare state . This shift, according to Habermas, can be seen as part of

5494-518: The rise of early non-industrial capitalism and the philosophical articulation of political liberalism by such thinkers as Hobbes , Locke , Montesquieu (See: The Spirit of the Laws ), Rousseau , and then Kant . The bourgeois public sphere flourished within the early laissez-faire , free-market, largely pre-industrial capitalist order of liberalism from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. The second part of Habermas' account traces

5576-405: The risks of accessing unreliable sources. The Internet impacts the virtual public sphere in many ways, but is not a free utopian platform as some observers argued at the beginning of its history. John Thompson criticises the traditional idea of public sphere by Habermas, as it is centred mainly in face-to-face interactions. On the contrary, Thompson argues that modern society is characterized by

5658-417: The same without judgments about our fellows. He argues that we must achieve some sort of disembodied state in order to participate in a universal public sphere without being judged. His observations point to a homosexual counter public, and offers the idea that homosexuals must otherwise remain "closeted" in order to participate in the larger public discourse. Gerard Hauser proposed a different direction for

5740-479: The search engines' algorithms. "Search engines might actually silence societal debate by giving more space to established actors and institutions". Another tactic that supports this view is astroturfing . The Guardian columnist George Monbiot said that Astroturfing software, "has the potential to destroy the internet as a forum for constructive debate. It jeopardizes the notion of online democracy". There has been an academic debate about how social media impacts

5822-435: The sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. Through this work, he gave a historical-sociological account of the creation, brief flourishing, and demise of

5904-425: The transition from the liberal bourgeois public sphere to the modern mass society of the social welfare state . Starting in the 1830s, extending from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, a new constellation of social, cultural, political, and philosophical developments took shape. Hegel 's critique of Kant's liberal philosophy anticipated the shift, according to Habermas, and this shift came to

5986-405: The users emerge with the Internet that can be used, for example, in online campaigns. However, the two authors point out that social media's dominant uses are entertainment, consumerism, and content sharing among friends. Loader and Mercea point out that "individual preferences reveal an unequal spread of social ties with a few giant nodes such as Google , Yahoo , Facebook and YouTube attracting

6068-642: The vehicle of public opinion it put the state in touch with the needs of society". "This area is conceptually distinct from the state: it [is] a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state." The public sphere "is also distinct from the official economy; it is not an arena of market relations but rather one of the discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling". These distinctions between "state apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic associations... are essential to democratic theory". The people themselves came to see

6150-404: The video's ideological stances influenced the language of the comments. The findings of the work suggest that YouTube is a public sphere platform. Additional work by S. Buckley reflected on the role that news content, specifically US cable news, contributed towards the formation of the public sphere. His research analysed a total of 1239 videos uploaded by five news organisations and investigated

6232-449: The visibility), individuals are not in full control of their self-presentation. Mistakes, gaffes or scandals are now recorded therefore they are harder to deny, as they can be replayed by the media. Consumer capitalism Consumer capitalism is a theoretical economic and social political condition in which consumer demand is manipulated in a deliberate and coordinated way on a very large scale through mass-marketing techniques, to

6314-423: Was characterized by five rhetorical norms from which it can be gauged and criticized. How well the public sphere adheres to these norms determine the effectiveness of the public sphere under the rhetorical model. Those norms are: In all this Hauser believes a public sphere is a "discursive space in which strangers discuss issues they perceive to be of consequence for them and their group. Its rhetorical exchanges are

6396-473: Was identified as an important philosopher of the twentieth century. Since publication, the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has been critiqued for Habermas’s formulation of the concept of a public sphere which he claimed "stood or fell with the principle of universal access ... A public sphere from which specific groups would be eo ipso excluded was less than merely incomplete; it

6478-426: Was not a public sphere at all." (Habermas 1962:85) However, the bourgeois public sphere required as preconditions of entry an excellent education and property ownership – which correlated to membership of the upper classes. Critics have argued that the bourgeois public sphere cannot be considered an ideal form of politics, since the public sphere was limited to upper-class strata of society and did not represent most of

6560-523: Was originally coined by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas who defined the public sphere as "made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state". Communication scholar Gerard A. Hauser defines it as "a discursive space in which individuals and groups associate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment about them". The public sphere can be seen as "a theater in modern societies in which political participation

6642-526: Was preceded by a literary public sphere whose favored genres revealed the interiority of the self and emphasized an audience-oriented subjectivity." The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was Habermas's first major work. It also satisfied the rigorous requirements for a professorship in Germany; in this system, independent scholarly research, usually resulting in a published book, must be submitted, and defended before an academic committee; this process

6724-422: Was to analyze what actors and what sort of opinions the subject generated in both print and the Internet and verify whether the online space proved to be a more democratic public sphere, with a wider range of sources and views. Gerhards and Schäfer say they have found "only minimal evidence to support the idea that the internet is a better communication space as compared to print media". "In both media, communication

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