Is there a public sphere online - Essay Example

ntensive discussion about the role of the Internet in Habermas’ schema of the public sphere was launched in the early 1990s and continues up to now. The emergence and rapid development of the electronic mass media has seriously influenced the public sphere. Some of the changes that have occurred to the public sphere make many contemporary scholars question the applicability of this concept to the cyberspace. This study intends to identify the most critical limitations of the original Habermasian concept and point out the complexity and huge implications of the public sphere approach for the cyberspace.

Habermas introduced the concept of the public sphere in his book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society published in 1962. Through the book, Habermas provides a detailed historical and sociological account of what he called ‘the bourgeois public sphere’. The German term Öffentlichkeit (Public Sphere) the sociologist used in the original variant of his book encapsulates a wide range of different meanings, but in its essence the public sphere is a spatial concept that relates to the social sites or scenes where people create, distribute, and negotiate meanings which ultimately transform into public opinion.

Habermas (1989) describes the public sphere as “…a network for communicating information and points of view…” (p.15). However, Negt and Kluge (1993) better reflect the essence of this concept in the following definition: “The public sphere denotes specific institutions, agencies, practices; however, it is also a general social horizon of experience in which everything that is actually or seemingly relevant for all members of society is integrated. Understood in the sense, the public sphere is a matter for a handful of professionals (e.g., politicians, editors, union officials) on the one hand, but, on the other, it is something that concerns everyone and that realises itself only in