The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Throughout The Structural Change of the Public Sphere, Habermas talks about how the bourgeois public sphere transformed. He defines the public sphere as a virtual or imaginary community which does not necessarily exist in any recognizable space. In its ideal form, the public sphere is "made up of private people gathered together as a public and expressing the needs of society with the state. Throughout the book Habermas asserts that the bourgeois public sphere is premised on the incorrect identification between human being and bourgeois. The problem is that being a bourgeois is an economic standing, which, Habermas argues, could not be shared collectively by everyone because of tendencies innate in the expansion of capitalism. The economy…

Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics focuses on one key question: What is a public? According to Warner the concept of “public” is usually misunderstood. Warner states that everything has a public. Warner splits his discussion of public and counter publics into seven sections. Warner states that this kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation (like the public of this reflection). The seven sections include: 1. A public is self-organized. It exists just by…

A study which was completed focused on this issue between Canada as well as America it explained “demographic and geographic disparities in Internet use, known as the “digital divide,” led to lower adoption rates among rural, low-income, less-educated, and older individuals” (James, M., Prabir K., N., Rafi M., G., & Josie, B. (2013). The digital divide affects many people worldwide but also throughout Canada. It can be said that “The Internet will expand access to education, good jobs, and…

Habermas, Jürgen, et al. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964).” New German Critique, no. 3, 1974, pp. 49–55. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/487737. The “Encyclopedia Article” by Habermas provides the foundations/ transformation for the public sphere, as a concept, its history, the liberal model, and in the social welfare state mass democracy. The overall thesis for the article by Habermas is to provide a basic, foundational understanding of the public sphere. Habermas…

The formation of a public sphere in societies allowed these to tear down existing feudalism, and build up democracies in its place. German sociologist and philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, explains how the construction of a bourgeois public sphere enables democratic power to be shaped in a civilisation in his book “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” written in German in 1962, and translated to English in 1989. The former thesis became pivotal in the subject area as the media plays…

Gender plays an important role throughout the news discourse of our current and past media. Whether it is in the private or public sphere, the paradoxical role of gender is always questioned by the normative values of society. The representation of women within mass media has been constructed on the ideology of a patriarchal society. Women are undermined and scrutinized due to commodification of their physical appearance and traditional role they are proposed to lead. However where do these…

Members of the public have the opportunity to participate in public dialogue about certain issues. Thus, the quality of the data and the way it is used have a profound impact on how we organize our political and social lives. In the age of technology, patterns of receiving and reacting to information have changed. Social media, mass media and mobile data allow the community to react more quickly than ever…

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, his epic idea of a “single dominant public sphere” where citizens gather in order to debate “common concern.” Due to the inevitability of marginalization, the realities of human nature, and the illusory ideal that citizens are equipped with the necessary knowledge to rationally debate what should be common concern, it is not desirable in a democracy to have a single dominant public sphere. The single public sphere is outrageous because within…

He describes how the social sciences began, first as the answer to the question of how to maintain social order. Wolf maintains that the departure from political economy to separate fields of politics, economics, and sociology was the flawed turning point that has led to theoretical problems within these disciplines. He argues that the specialization has limited the scope of each discipline and that this has led to theories that are inaccurate in their estimation of the ‘real world’. One of the…

The addition of modernity as an onset of globalization has allowed West Bengal women to expand their opportunities and begin to disrupt the patriarchal norms which have bonded them for years. Since the 1970s the heavy promotion of women into the workforce by state officials has been accompanied by an ideology of female empowerment (Scrase 547). The concept of female empowerment is now an immense part of the standard governments vocabulary as women continue to enter into the public sphere. This…