Call for papers: 60th Anniversary of the Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit

Title:  60th Anniversary of the Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit
Submission deadline: 31 May 2021
Publication: first half of 2022

2022 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), a seminal work in 20th-century social sciences which even today is still the subject of intense reflection. Authored by Jürgen Habermas, it has greatly influenced his extensive work, as the author himself stated in the famous preface to the 17th German edition of the book (1990), recognising that his theory was developed “less according to its fundamental features than to its degree of complexity”.

The research, first presented on the occasion of the Habilitationsscrihft exams (1961) at the University of Marburg under the supervision of Wolfgang Abendroth, identifies an ideal type of the bourgeois public sphere in the 18th century in England and France, and in the 19th century in Germany, but whose emancipatory ideal is projected in the analysis of contemporary democracies. It is a structure for discursive interaction, from which public opinion emerges whenever certain practices (publicity, critique and debate) and rules of communication (the inclusion of all potential affected, openness for the themes relevant to the public, and argumentation parity among all participants) are followed. The Public is the most important reference in this discussion (Diskurs): the public “subject” – a new form of sociability that is also the social actor that sets up the discussion – and the public “predicate” – a certain modus operandi of discussions and their own locus. In this twofold dimension, and by way of examples (with references to some of the main historical sources used by the author himself), note the importance of the coffee-houses (Hans Speier), the salons (Arnold Hauser), the cultural societies (Ernest Manheim) and, more transversally, of the press (Stanley Morison) for this new form of sociability, that is to say, to the emergence of the new public sphere and its more direct branches: public communication and public opinion.

However, the most accurate arrow fired by Jürgen Habermas’s work, which has quickly traversed all these decades to the present day, was that of the “structural transformation” of the referred public sphere, as a result of the increasing interpenetration between the public and private domains. At its core is the transmutation of an audience that thinks about culture in a mass of consumers of cultural products, and whose root is publicity that has lost its previous critical dimension of illustration to become staged publicity conveyed by the mass media, produced by public relations, and advertising, at the service of private interests in both the sphere of economics (consumer society) and of politics (mass democracies).

Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, however, was not a consensual work. It highlights the controversial feature usually associated with originality, and has, to the present, triggered criticism from scholars from different areas of social sciences. This has, in turn, made the book the central subject of a major public discussion of ideas in the field of social sciences. Many of these criticisms have been incorporated in the author’s recent works, undoubtedly giving, as a whole, a decisive boost to his new conceptualisation of the public sphere. Published in 1992, Faktizität und Geltung is the final expression of this work, in the framework of a far-reaching political theory built around the idea of deliberative democracy.

The rise of the digital and the communication turmoil around the Internet is today perhaps the most important challenge to the public sphere theory, and the very idea of a public space. The democratic potential of the new communication mechanisms has been (and continues to be) much acclaimed, despite the scepticism shown by Jürgen Habermas as to the possibility of creating a digital public sphere, given the associated fragmentation of publics. But this is only one line of research currently underway. The “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles” of the social media are an obstacle to our ability to communicate through differences; the digital divide is a (new) factor of inequalities and, at the same time, a metaphor also for other social divides, whether educational, cultural, economic, or political. One possible way out of this maze is to accept the operation of the many public spheres in a network, and where the overlapping of publics can help overcome the uncontrolled fragmentation. Other challenges are related to the finding that the Internet and the so-called social media are not always an easy breeding ground for debates void of coercion, given their connotation with uncivilised deliberative practices based on flaming and trolling. In the age of post-truth, of fake news and alternative facts, emotions have their great opportunity for taking revenge over reason: virality – and not the truth (critical-rational) – is the new generator that sets these communication flows in motion and serves as the code of articulation to communication exchanges.

The organisation of this Mediapolis edition is a step towards the core of these communication changes and to the debate they trigger: the upcoming anniversary is the guise for opening a major discussion on the current technosystem and its development potential, the different uses of technologies and their relationship (complex and ambivalent) with the public sphere, on the Internet's “many for many” communication, split between a consumption model and a community model (Andrew Feenberg). The people “formerly known as the audience”, as Jay Rosen puts it, can now be co-authors of information, of comments and opinions shared online, thus circumventing unequal access to the traditional media. Journalists, in turn, have now included blogs and social media in their sources of information, with a widening of the intermedia agenda-setting between digital media, and between the latter and traditional media, forming a hybrid media system – the new media ecology referred by Michael Gurevitch, Stephen Coleman and Jay G. Blumler.

The motto for this edition could then very well be: how do we improve the quality of public communication? More public communication is not synonymous with better public communication, or in the sui generisformulation of Zizi Papacharissi, a voice to listen carefully on these matters, it is not enough to create a public space in order to have a public sphere: an online public space simply improves discussion, but a public sphere should improve democracy.

 

The editors of this edition, João Pissarra Esteves, of the Nova University of Lisbon and ICNOVA, and Susana Borges, of the School of Education - Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra and CEIS20, call for the submission of papers for issue 14 of Mediapolis – Revista de Comunicação, Jornalismo e Espaço Público, on the theme of 60th Anniversary of the Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit and the following topics:

 

• Concepts of public sphere
• Public communication and democracy
• The public/private in the network public sphere
• Spectacle and entertainment vs knowledge and enlightenment
• Cyberdemocracy
• Political participation and net-activism (between citizenship and incivility)
• Online deliberative practices
• Surveillance and control (functional systems and lifeworld)
• Political economy of social media

 

Papers must be submitted by 31 May 2021 to be included in issue 14 of Mediapolis, in the first half of 2022.