Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

In September 2022, 60 years after he first released the German edition of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (STPS) in 1962, Habermas published A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics (Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik). This “new engagement with an old theme” (Habermas, 2022c, p. 7) has been a long time coming. Not only is STPS—as Habermas wrote in the dedication when he signed my English edition in 2008—“my first and still best-selling book (a kind of self-criticism),” in this new volume he also notes that it has “remained my most successful to date” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 145). This contribution is significant both given the broad reach of the concept of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) and due to the growing interest in how the rise of the internet and digital media has affected public deliberation and the public realm more generally.

Scholars of Habermas are used to reading long books. This expectation was confirmed in 2019 with the publication of Also a History of Philosophy (Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie), which ran a total of 1752 pages across two volumes. By contrast, this bright orange book—which comes in at a slim 109 pages—refutes that same tendency. Additionally, aside from the short Foreword, all three chapters have been published in English elsewhere with only slight modifications.¹ In part, as Habermas points out, this brevity is due to the fact that he has “long been dealing with other issues” (Habermas, 2022c, p. 7) and thus is not up to date on the literature. Additionally, given that he already apologized to his readers for not writing a third (!) volume of his aforementioned study of the relationship between faith and knowledge as “my strength is simply no longer sufficient for that (dafür reichen meine Kräfte nicht mehr aus)” (Habermas, 2019, p. I.10), his advanced age is also a likely a factor, despite his continued and active participation in both scholarly debate and in the German public sphere.

Habermas’ original study of the public sphere worked at three distinct, but interrelated levels. First, it told a story of the historical rise of the public sphere in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, focusing specifically on French salons, English coffeehouses and German Tischgesellschaften (table societies). Second, it presented a sociological model of the public sphere as a space for critical-rational discussion about matters of public interest to all citizens that opened between the “private realm” of self-interested bourgeois individuals and the “sphere of public authority” defined by the state and the court (the society of nobles). Finally, Habermas developed a normative political theory that sought to achieve “a systematic comprehension of our own society from the perspective of one of its central categories” (Habermas, 1989, p. 5).

In this short volume, Habermas focuses on the final point, that is, on “the function of the public sphere in ensuring the sustainability of democratic political community” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 146). Although he rejects the distinction between empirical and normative research—as well as the related bifurcation between ideal and non-ideal theory—as “oversimplified,” Habermas’ concerns lie primarily in the realm of political theory, not history or sociology. However, this does not mean that these two aspects are gone completely, only that they fade into the background of his attempt to explicate a democratic theory based on “reconstruct[ing] the rational content of the norms and practices that have acquired positive validity since the constitutional revolutions of the late 18th century and, as such, have become part of historical reality” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 147).

My comments focus on two aspects of this short book. I start by outlining the misunderstandings of STPS that Habermas seeks to correct in this new volume. I then examine his claim that the rise of the internet has led to “a new structural transformation of the public sphere.” In order to do this, I focus in particular on his comparison of the revolution caused by digitalization to the printing press. Whereas first of these historical turning points turned everyone into potential readers, he argues that the second has made everyone into potential authors. My basic thesis is that while Habermas is right that digitalization has resulted in a new structural transformation, the problem of deliberative politics today is to be found not so much in the transition from readers to authors—as he contends—but in the increased individualization of the public sphere, which prevents citizens from creating the common world necessary for politics.

Despite its broad influence, STPS is controversial on all three levels. Historically speaking, Habermas’ argument regarding the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in 18th-century Europe and its consequences for politics has generated a lively scholarly debate. Whether or not the salons, coffeehouses and table societies he studied actually embodied the new ideals of humanity and public debate that Habermas ascribes to them.

Similarly, his sociological model has come under attack from scholars, who have pointed out the relatively limited reach—both in terms of gender and class—of the public sphere as a space between the private realm of economic self-interest and the state. Most notably, Nancy Fraser (1992, p. 116) has rejected this model as “a masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule.” Finally, his claims about the public sphere as a space of rational debate that could both provide public scrutiny of the state and shape policy through formal institutions have often been ridiculed. For example, rather than engaging in “the search for truth through conversation,” Klein (1996, p. 37, 38) notes that the spaces Habermas identifies as the crucibles of the bourgeois public sphere instead “foster[ed] an anarchy of misinformation and miscomprehension.”

All three of the essays in this new volume seek to correct what Habermas sees as fundamental misunderstandings of STPS. First, he addresses the common critique that this ideal is a fiction. Habermas gladly admits that a public sphere, where all affected are able to discuss issues of common concern openly and freely to reach a rational decision about what to do, never actually existed and is thus something of an ideal type, to speak in Weberian language. However, this is beside the point. What is important for his purposes is not whether these ideals have ever been fully realized in practice, but whether the ideal of the “normative public sphere” has led citizens to believe that the legitimacy of their government depends on their ability to supervise their leaders and shape policy by participating in public debate. Habermas argues that the deep penetration of this ideal is visible in “the historical fact that something like a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ emerged at the same time as liberal democracy, first in England and then in the United States, France and other European countries” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 150).

Second, Habermas pushes back against the claim that his conception of discourse leads to an “idealistic conception of the democratic process as something like a convivial university seminar (einer friedlichen Seminarveranstaltung)” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 151). This misreading is based on Habermas’ claim that political discourses are based on “the goal of reaching an agreement (Einverständnis)” (Habermas, 2018, p. 837). However, in Habermas’ terminology, this idea does not refer to the outcomes of debates in the public sphere or even individual policy decisions. Instead, it denotes the collective agreement to abide by majority rule within political institutions, where decisions are invariably the “fallible result of an attempt to determine what is right through a discussion that has been brought to a provisional close under the pressure to decide” (Habermas, 1996, p. 475). In this sense, citizens are bound together by a preexisting commitment “to adopt each other's perspectives and to orient themselves to generalizable interests or shared values” (Habermas, 2018, p. 875) even when they are in the minority.

Finally—and relatedly—Habermas notes that “the required orientation of participants toward consensus naturally does not mean that those involved are likely to have the unrealistic expectation that they will actually achieve a consensus on political questions” (Habermas, 2018, p. 875). On the contrary—in a move meant to sap the rhetorical power of his agonistic opponents—Habermas argues that “the orientation of reasonable participants to the truth or correctness of their argued convictions adds even more fuel to the fire of political disputes,” allowing “the epistemic potential of conflicting opinions [to] unfold in discourse.” The whole point of deliberation within the informal political public sphere of the media and civil society is that “it enables us to improve our beliefs through political disputes and get closer to correct solutions to problems.” As a result, deliberation “is measured in the public sphere by the discursive quality of the contributions, not by the goal of a consensus” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 152).

Habermas’ attempt to harness the chaotic nature of public debate displaces the notion of consensus in two ways. First, within the informal public sphere, this means that “only one thing is presupposed—the consensus on the shared constitutional principles that legitimises all other disputes” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 152). As long as this institutional, meta-consensus is in place, Habermas argues that all other disputes can be contained within the system. Second, this agonal language also moves consensus from the informal realm of opinion-formation to the formal public sphere of institutional will-formation. The system as a whole can “withstand robust protests or wild forms of conflict” (Habermas, 2018, p. 877) precisely because the informal political public sphere “only make[s] a limited contribution toward legitimate exercises of political rule” (Habermas, 2022b, p. xvi). As a result, strictly speaking, “an orientation to consensus is required only in the deliberations of those institutions in which legally binding decisions are made” (Habermas, 2018, p. 877). Even there, this consensus is limited to questions of fact and other epistemological issues.

These corrections—which reveal the different role that political communication plays in different areas of life—ground Habermas’ understanding of democracy as a “process that as a whole is filtered through deliberation” (Habermas, 2019, p. 877). As a result, two variables—the quality of debate in the public sphere (opinion-formation, in Habermas’ terminology) and the receptiveness of state institutions with decision-making powers (will-formation) to these deliberations—emerge as key criteria for judging the state of democracy within any given polity. This sets the stage for Habermas’ new intervention. The key question is whether the increasing digitalization of the public sphere has decreased the quality and scope of public deliberation in light of the growing use of unreliable sources and the fragmentation of the public sphere into self-enclosed filter-bubbles and echo-chambers.

In recent years, democratic theorists and scholars of democracy have become increasingly interested in the effects of digitalization on public discourse. Much of this literature has sought to grapple with the fact that “cafés as centers of communication and exchange have been replaced in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century by technology, by the Internet and social media” (Pinsker, 2018, pp. 306–307). This is the impetus for Habermas’ return to the topic of the public sphere. While he admits that the exact effect of these changes on “the deliberative quality of public debate is an open question,” as “‘deliberative quality’ is…difficult to operationalise for the unregulated communication processes in extensive national public spheres,” he affirms that “the signs of political regression are there for everyone to see” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 157, 158).

Habermas’ desire to use deliberative quality—and his theory of popular legitimation based on the public sphere more generally—to evaluate democratic practice is hardly new. On the contrary, it dates back to SPTS. In the second half of this original work, Habermas applied his concept of the public sphere to developments in postwar Europe at the time. As a result of the “massification” of the public sphere due to the spread of literacy, he argued that the distinction between private and public was gradually being eroded. In light of these changes the public sphere “becomes a field for the competition of interests” in which institutional will-formation “can scarcely still be understood as arising from the consensus of private individuals engaged in public discussion” (Habermas, 1974, p. 54).

In 1962, Habermas attributed a twofold effect to this change. On the one hand, it pushed companies and other large organizations to negotiate directly with the state, thus bypassing the public sphere altogether. On the other, given that the idealized expectation of democratization through the public sphere still existed, it also meant that these organizations still sought to “assure themselves of at least plebiscitary support from the mass of the population” (Habermas, 1974, p. 54) through demonstrative forms of publicity (demonstrative Publizität), thus further eroding the ideal of the public sphere by turning it into an arena of “opinion management” that operates through the “engineering of consent.” This led to what Habermas called a “refeudalization” of modern society, as publicity was once again associated with the “aura” of personal prestige, rather than being a space where “the authority of the better argument could assert itself” (Habermas, 1989, pp. 193–194, 36).

Although Habermas has subsequently expressed some reticence about his original analysis—a fact that helps to explain the 27-year lag in the translation of STPS into English—he argues that the advent of corporate news media, which competes for attention in order to sell advertising, rather than serving as a conduit for the dissemination of information as well as opinion-formation, plays a crucial role in this initial “structural transformation.” In light of these trends, Habermas feared that the democracies of post-1945 western Europe are becoming “elective monarchies” in which “scientifically-led marketing makes political advertising into a component of a consumer culture for un-political individuals (Unpolitische)” (Habermas, 1961, p. 28). He concluded that propaganda and naked, capitalistic self-interest increasingly govern the public sphere, not rational debate about common interest. As a result, “one gets the impression that citizens of the so-called consumer society are also viewed juristically as customers….outfitted with these rights, and as good as excluded from real political power (Mitbestimmung)” (quoted in Specter, 2010, p. 68).

On one level, the new structural transformation Habermas diagnoses in this latest volume is similar to the one he describes in the latter half of STPS. Despite the further expansion and access offered by digital technology, Habermas worries that this further “massification”—to use his original negatively tinged terminology—has only reinforced the trends that he already detected in 1962. While he acknowledges the anti-authoritarian motivations and egalitarian potential of the “new” media enabled by the rise of the internet, in practice these developments have only reinforced Habermas’ worries about the commodification of the public sphere. In passages that recall the overt Marxism of some of Habermas’ early writings, he speaks of the “libertarian grimace of world-dominating digital corporations” emerging from Silicon Valley, in which the algorithmic control of “communication” feeds a growing “concentration of market power of the large internet corporations.” Whereas the already distorted postwar public sphere of corporate media was driven by the desire to sell advertising alongside the news, in the digital public sphere the flows of communication are mere by-products of what these companies are really after, namely “the personal data their customers leave behind on the internet….which they sell for advertising purposes (or otherwise as goods)” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 160, 167, 163).

This development is clearly important, but it seems to be more a matter of degree—“a further advance towards the commodification of lifeworld contexts” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 163)—rather than a fundamental transformation. Getting at what Habermas thinks is actually revolutionary about digital media requires moving beyond the issue of commercialization. Instead, what truly explains the dangers posed by developments at the start of the 21st century is the platform-based character of these “new” media. In fact, unlike the increasingly commercialized and corporatized media of the 20th century, these new platforms do not produce content at all. Instead, they merely provide a network that allows users to form direct connections between each other. Because they do not help to crystalize arguments, fact-check information or take responsibility for what is “published” on their sites, Habermas notes that these “new media are not ‘media’ in the established sense” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 159).

Despite the clear benefits of speed and connectivity offered by these changes, digitalization has equally obvious drawbacks for both of the key characteristics of the public sphere, that is “the inclusiveness of the formation of public opinions and the rationality of the prominent opinions in the public sphere” (Habermas, 2022a, pp. 157–158). While the “gatekeeper function” played by journalists and editors within traditional media could also be problematic due to the undeniable elitist tendencies of these groups, they did provide for “the professional selection and discursive examination of contents based on generally accepted cognitive standards.” This not only ensured that the information conveyed was accurate, but also that all good arguments—not merely those voiced by celebrities or that spread due to their outrageousness—received a fair hearing. By contrast, platforms do little or nothing to ensure that what is posted on their sites meets “generally accepted cognitive standards,” thus “profoundly alter[ing] the character of public communication itself” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 160, 159).

It is certainly true that one can find excellent information on platforms like Twitter, where many experts offer profound insights in an unmediated, direct fashion. The problem is that deciding which of these experts is worthy of trust is left completely up to the user. While this does empower individuals to “do their own research,” it also increases the chances that they will be led astray by bad information—as was clearly visible during the coronavirus pandemic. On the one hand, their individualized, algorithmically fragmented network is programmed to only offer them opinions from those who confirm their preexisting inclination; on the other, experts are increasingly incentivized to become influencers whose opinions “go viral” because they stand out from the orthodoxy of their fields and tell individuals what they want to hear, not because of their accuracy or the quality of their arguments.

This issue could be ameliorated by the fact that most users of these platforms still get their news from traditional newspapers and other media, even if it increasingly comes in digital form. However, this potentially reassuring piece of information is undermined by the fact that social media has shattered the economic base of classical journalism by redirecting advertising and audiences to their platforms, where articles are posted for free without compensating the journalists and editors that produced them. In addition to undercutting “demand for quality programs and professional services” (Habermas, 2022b, p. xviii), these platforms also have also changed how media works. In the wake of the so-called “audience turn,” social media are pushing traditional sources of information to cater to the desires of their customers, rather than to the discursive opinion- and will-formation of citizens. As a result of the growing importance of what is happening on digital platforms, news organizations now spend much of their time reporting on what is trending on social media, rather than on fulfilling their gatekeeper role by ensuring “the scope and the deliberative quality of the offerings” in the public sphere (Habermas, 2022a, p. 156).

These reflections lead Habermas to his ultimate and most interesting diagnosis of this “new structural transformation.” Although Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press is mentioned only once in the original text (Habermas, 1989, p. 185), it plays a crucial role in this follow-up. In one of the most insightful passages, Habermas notes, “While the invention of the press gave every potential addressee the chance to eventually learn how to read, the digital revolution immediately turned readers into potential authors” (2022b, p. xviii). This transition is crucial because much like reading, writing is also a skill that needs to be learned. While a “politically appropriate perception of the author role…tends to increase the awareness of deficits in one's own level of knowledge” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 160), Habermas worries that just the opposite is happening on digital platforms, where users are encouraged to give unpremeditated hot-takes rather than engaging in the kind of critical self-reflection that the role of the author requires.

This is an interesting point. After all, learning to argue well—and to do so on the basis of good evidence—is a skill that can only be acquired with time and effort. The fact that authorship on social media is driven less by quality and more by the amount of attention one is able to draw, as most authors today are paid for clicks by advertisers, means that nuance and good argumentation often take a backseat to snappy phrasing and controversial positions that go against the grain (Querdenken or “lateral thinking” in German).

In this sense, there has indeed been a structural shift away from “the unforced force of the better argument” toward fake news that “can no longer even be identified as such” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 167). The fact that even the established media that still have gatekeepers often have to respond to claims about fake news, thus only serving to spread it further by repeating it, means that the public sphere today is saturated by these claims. As a result, Habermas is concerned that the “great emancipatory promise” of the public sphere is “being drowned out by the desolate cacophony in fragmented, self-enclosed echo chambers” (p. 159). Although some empirical research on these issues questions the idea that an ever growing proportion of individuals are enclosed in communal filter bubbles or echo-chambers (Dommett & Verovšek, 2021, pp. 360–362 and citations therein), the danger Habermas identifies is clear nonetheless.

With that being said, the true problem for Habermas seems to lie in what I call the “individualization of the public sphere.” This phenomenon has two related features. First, it means that everyone's experience of the digital public sphere is unique. Unlike printed newspapers, which appeared in one or two editions that everyone read and that could be archived for subsequent study, everybody's timeline on social and digital media is different, since it is shaped by an algorithm designed to maximize engagement (not the quality of the information presented) in order to sell ever more personalized advertising at a higher price. As a result, it is increasingly difficult for the digital public sphere to serve as the grounding for a common “world” that can “direct the citizens’ attention to the relevant issues that need to be decided and, moreover, ensure the formation of competing public opinions” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 167). In this sense, it is not filter bubbles and echo chambers that are the problem, but the fact that every individual exists in their own filter bubble algorithmically created for them by the platforms they use.

Second, this individualization of the public sphere also means that it is left up to everyone to decide what information they consider reliable on their own. While previous media were able to engage in vetting processes that were costly both in terms of time and money, this process has also been outsourced to the solitary neoliberal citizen. Moreover, any click on an unreliable source is compounded by the fact that it leads the algorithm feed the user further information that reinforces this claim. As a result, the problem is not so much the loss of “the hitherto customary conceptual distinction between private and public spheres” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 165) that Habermas bemoans, but the fact that the connectivity enabled by social and digital media has created individuals who are increasingly isolated and unable to build the common social and political “world” that is necessary for political life.

Habermas’ decision to revisit the themes of his first book is most welcome. I have long thought that STPS was the key to understanding Habermas’ broader, lifelong theoretical project. In many ways, this new volume's focus on political theory validates this intuition by bringing his early, historical sociology into closer contact with his attempts to develop a more “quasi-transcendental” theory of communicative interaction in the wake of his 1971 Gauss lectures. This return is particularly welcome given both the impact his concept of the public sphere has had on the literature on deliberative democracy and the growing interest in the effects of the rise of the internet and the digital public sphere on political life.

Overall, this short volume provides an excellent introduction to Habermas’ discursive conception of democracy based on active participation in the public realm. It clearly demonstrates how the quality of deliberation in the public sphere and the receptiveness of public policy to these discussions can serve as indicators of the state of political life. In 2022, the signs of decay are clear for all to see. Habermas’ diagnoses are clear and thought-provoking, as befits someone who has spent his whole life both theorizing the public sphere and participating vigorously in debates within it as a public intellectual (Verovšek, 2021).

On the one hand, I think that Habermas is right to stress the platform character of the new digital and social media, which do not curate the content they host or take responsibility for it in any meaningful way. This puts onus on individual citizens to both have the skill and education—as well as the time—to ensure the quality of the information they use to form the opinions that will drive their participation in public life (Dommett & Verovšek, 2021, p. 369). On the other, I am not convinced that the switch from readers to authors is really the most important change driving this “new structural transformation.” The problem is not that everyone is now an author, but that everyone can now disseminate bad information and bad arguments, which are often more available and accessible than reliable that produced by professional media, which is often hidden behind paywalls. Rather, as I have suggested, I think that the individualization of the public sphere is crucial, as it inhibits the creation of the common, intersubjective world necessary for citizens to engage in politics in the first place.

Ultimately, this disagreement is more about how Habermas applies his ideas to the contemporary situation, rather than about these ideas themselves. Ultimately, I agree with the core insight of this volume, namely that “maintaining a media structure that ensures the inclusive character of the public sphere and the deliberative character of the formation of public opinion and political will is not a matter of political preference but a constitutional imperative” (p. 168). If democracy is to survive this new structural transformation, it will have to start to treat digital and social media as public utilities, rather than merely allowing them to operate as data brokers that profit from the political breakdown of democracy.