“Just as printing made everyone a potential reader, today, digitalisation is making everyone into a potential author. But how long did it take until everyone was able to read?”
The German philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas asks this question in his recent book, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Famous for his critical theorising of the public sphere as a space for communicative reasoning between state and society in liberal democracies, his book asks whether and how that that function can survive in the new political economy of social media.
His original research on this question was published in German in 1962 in a book entitled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. It was highly influential in academic and policy discussion of media and democracy. After its translation into English in 1989, it amplified Habermas’s worldwide reputation as a political theorist of constitutional patriotism and European integration.
By then, he had moved from his starting point in Frankfurt Marxism towards a critical liberalism influenced by John Rawls and US pragmatism. He developed his abiding influence from the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant from private towards public reasoning, giving its liberalism a social democratic frame.
All this makes his latest work at the age of 93 – and in response to an edited volume discussing his ideas – interesting as a reflection on digital media compared to previous periods of print and television. A central focus of his discussion is the statement that “the new media neither produce nor edit nor select. They furnish platforms where all can connect using profit-oriented algorithms”.
This contrasts with the transformation tracked in his first work between the print-oriented bourgeois public sphere that matured in eighteenth century British, French and German capitalist society and the development of mass media and democracy from the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries.
Driven by advertising revenue and mass sales, the potential deterioration of rational standards arising from that profit-oriented transition was mitigated, Habermas argues, by the development of media gatekeepers with professional standards of truthfulness, accuracy and public argument in their journalistic reporting, editing and selecting. They offset pressures to commodify news and public opinion, enabling democratic communication. They also moderated boundaries between private and public communication, between gossip and legally regulated dialogue.
The loss of such a gatekeeping role in the digital media is what most concerns Habermas. He contrasts the mass media readership model of top-down, one-to-many communication with the many-to-many logic of communication between digital networks. The transformation from printing to reading took 300 years in print capitalism but can the later one we are living through fulfil its promise to make everyone an author?
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He doubts that it can on four main grounds. Platforms as a business model neglect any responsibility for civic exchanges by denying they are publishers. Their free availability reduces reading attention in the public and encourages misstatements and distortions. Algorithms personalise, divide and manipulate public opinion. And erosion of the distinction between the private and public spheres creates an identitarian logic favouring populism.
This fragmentation of integrated public spheres and privatisation into more emotional worlds by platform oligopolies undermines the emancipatory potential of a more generalised authorship, according to Habermas. The pessimistic conclusion echoes his earlier one about the transition to mass media. It makes his suggested correctives of greater media literacy and more active regulation of platforms weaker in the face of such powerful forces.
Criticisms along these lines are made in a stimulating discussion of Habermas’s book by sympathetic media researchers in the latest issue of the Constellations journal, published in New York and freely available online.
They welcome how he locates his analysis in structural change affecting evolving capitalist technology, communications markets and audience participation. They show, however, how mainstream gatekeeper editing roles survive and become more trusted in reaction to digital fragmentation; how more effective regulatory change is in Europe than the US; and how polarising populism is driven there by factors other than technology alone.
Just as television did not undermine print media and reading, so may digital change not do so either. All media gatekeepers are subject to their own power structures of class, ideology and gender too, more so than he is inclined to allow.
Nevertheless, Habermas’s insistence that political communication must be judged by the cognitive standards of judgments rather than the commercial logic of profitmaking stands as a relevant and valuable critique of media practice in this digital age.
