Deliberative Democracy and Public Sphere Typology

Public Sphere The third kind of public sphere, named by Habermas as the “abstract public sphere”, is produced by media, which connects singular and globally spread readers, listeners and spectators (BFN, 1996: 308). In the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Habermas conceives the small press as an important institution for the conveyance of ideas and the establishment of the rational political debate within bourgeois society. In diagnosing the upsurge of market-oriented mass communication organizations, molded by the logic of the cultural industry, he concludes that the public sphere came to be completely dominated by political and economic powers. In later writings, however, Habermas reformulates this viewpoint. For instance, in the Theory of Communicative Action, he no longer conceives media as mere instruments of the reproduction of the social order, as manipulation agents or as the voice of powerful groups, hostile to democratic participation. Instead, he acknowledges the ambiguous potential of the mass media: The mass media belong to these generalized forms of communication. They free communication processes from the provinciality of spatiotemporally restricted contexts and permit public spheres to emerge, through establishing the abstract simultaneity of a virtually present network of communication contents far removed in space and time and through keeping messages available for manifold contexts (TCA, v. II, 1987: 390) Media remove the communicative process from specific contexts and, differently from what is the case in simple interactions of the face-to-face type, it