数字公共领域的作者身份和个性化

IF 1.2 Q3 POLITICAL SCIENCE
Peter J. Verovšek
{"title":"数字公共领域的作者身份和个性化","authors":"Peter J. Verovšek","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12668","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>In September 2022, 60 years after he first released the German edition of <i>The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society</i> (STPS) in 1962, Habermas published <i>A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics</i> (<i>Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik</i>). This “new engagement with an old theme” (Habermas, <span>2022c</span>, 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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 145). This contribution is significant both given the broad reach of the concept of the public sphere (<i>Öffentlichkeit</i>) 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.</p><p>Scholars of Habermas are used to reading long books. This expectation was confirmed in 2019 with the publication of <i>Also a History of Philosophy</i> (<i>Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie</i>), 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.<sup>1</sup> In part, as Habermas points out, this brevity is due to the fact that he has “long been dealing with other issues” (Habermas, <span>2022c</span>, 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 (<i>dafür reichen meine Kräfte nicht mehr aus</i>)” (Habermas, <span>2019</span>, 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.</p><p>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 <i>salons</i>, English coffeehouses and German <i>Tischgesellschaften</i> (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 <i>bourgeois</i> 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, <span>1989</span>, p. 5).</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, 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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 147).</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 (<span>1992</span>, 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 (<span>1996</span>, 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.”</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 150).</p><p>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 (<i>einer friedlichen Seminarveranstaltung</i>)” (Habermas, <span>2022a</span>, p. 151). This misreading is based on Habermas’ claim that political discourses are based on “the goal of reaching an agreement (<i>Einverständnis</i>)” (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 “<i>fallible</i> result of an attempt to determine what is right through a discussion that has been brought to a <i>provisional</i> close under the pressure to decide” (Habermas, <span>1996</span>, 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, <span>2018</span>, p. 875) even when they are in the minority.</p><p>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, <span>2018</span>, 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 <i>improve</i> our beliefs through political disputes and get <i>closer</i> to correct solutions to problems.” As a result, deliberation “is measured <i>in the public sphere</i> by the discursive quality of the contributions, not by the goal of a consensus” (Habermas, <span>2022a</span>, p. 152).</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, 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, <span>2018</span>, p. 877) precisely because the informal political public sphere “only make[s] a <i>limited contribution</i> toward legitimate exercises of political rule” (Habermas, <span>2022b</span>, p. xvi). As a result, strictly speaking, “<i>an orientation</i> to consensus is required only in the deliberations of those institutions in which legally binding decisions are made” (Habermas, <span>2018</span>, p. 877). Even there, this consensus is limited to questions of fact and other epistemological issues.</p><p>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 <i>as a whole is filtered through deliberation</i>” (Habermas, <span>2019</span>, 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.</p><p>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, <span>2018</span>, 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 <i>deliberative quality</i> 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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 157, 158).</p><p>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, <span>1974</span>, p. 54).</p><p>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, <span>1974</span>, p. 54) through demonstrative forms of publicity (<i>demonstrative Publizität</i>), 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, <span>1989</span>, pp. 193–194, 36).</p><p>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 (<i>Unpolitische</i>)” (Habermas, <span>1961</span>, 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 (<i>Mitbestimmung</i>)” (quoted in Specter, <span>2010</span>, p. 68).</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 160, 167, 163).</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, 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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 159).</p><p>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 <i>inclusiveness</i> of the formation of public opinions and the <i>rationality</i> of the prominent opinions in the public sphere” (Habermas, <span>2022a</span>, 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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 160, 159).</p><p>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.</p><p>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, <span>2022b</span>, 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 <i>scope</i> and the deliberative <i>quality</i> of the offerings” in the public sphere (Habermas, <span>2022a</span>, p. 156).</p><p>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, <span>1989</span>, 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 <i>readers into potential authors</i>” (<span>2022b</span>, 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, <span>2022a</span>, 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.</p><p>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 (<i>Querdenken</i> or “lateral thinking” in German).</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, 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 &amp; Verovšek, <span>2021</span>, pp. 360–362 and citations therein), the danger Habermas identifies is clear nonetheless.</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, 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.</p><p>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 <i>distinction between private and public spheres</i>” (Habermas, <span>2022a</span>, 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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, <span>2021</span>).</p><p>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 &amp; Verovšek, <span>2021</span>, 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.</p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12668","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere\",\"authors\":\"Peter J. Verovšek\",\"doi\":\"10.1111/1467-8675.12668\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<p>In September 2022, 60 years after he first released the German edition of <i>The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society</i> (STPS) in 1962, Habermas published <i>A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics</i> (<i>Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik</i>). This “new engagement with an old theme” (Habermas, <span>2022c</span>, 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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 145). This contribution is significant both given the broad reach of the concept of the public sphere (<i>Öffentlichkeit</i>) 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.</p><p>Scholars of Habermas are used to reading long books. This expectation was confirmed in 2019 with the publication of <i>Also a History of Philosophy</i> (<i>Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie</i>), 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.<sup>1</sup> In part, as Habermas points out, this brevity is due to the fact that he has “long been dealing with other issues” (Habermas, <span>2022c</span>, 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 (<i>dafür reichen meine Kräfte nicht mehr aus</i>)” (Habermas, <span>2019</span>, 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.</p><p>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 <i>salons</i>, English coffeehouses and German <i>Tischgesellschaften</i> (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 <i>bourgeois</i> 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, <span>1989</span>, p. 5).</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, 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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 147).</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 (<span>1992</span>, 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 (<span>1996</span>, 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.”</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 150).</p><p>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 (<i>einer friedlichen Seminarveranstaltung</i>)” (Habermas, <span>2022a</span>, p. 151). This misreading is based on Habermas’ claim that political discourses are based on “the goal of reaching an agreement (<i>Einverständnis</i>)” (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 “<i>fallible</i> result of an attempt to determine what is right through a discussion that has been brought to a <i>provisional</i> close under the pressure to decide” (Habermas, <span>1996</span>, 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, <span>2018</span>, p. 875) even when they are in the minority.</p><p>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, <span>2018</span>, 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 <i>improve</i> our beliefs through political disputes and get <i>closer</i> to correct solutions to problems.” As a result, deliberation “is measured <i>in the public sphere</i> by the discursive quality of the contributions, not by the goal of a consensus” (Habermas, <span>2022a</span>, p. 152).</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, 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, <span>2018</span>, p. 877) precisely because the informal political public sphere “only make[s] a <i>limited contribution</i> toward legitimate exercises of political rule” (Habermas, <span>2022b</span>, p. xvi). As a result, strictly speaking, “<i>an orientation</i> to consensus is required only in the deliberations of those institutions in which legally binding decisions are made” (Habermas, <span>2018</span>, p. 877). Even there, this consensus is limited to questions of fact and other epistemological issues.</p><p>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 <i>as a whole is filtered through deliberation</i>” (Habermas, <span>2019</span>, 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.</p><p>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, <span>2018</span>, 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 <i>deliberative quality</i> 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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 157, 158).</p><p>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, <span>1974</span>, p. 54).</p><p>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, <span>1974</span>, p. 54) through demonstrative forms of publicity (<i>demonstrative Publizität</i>), 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, <span>1989</span>, pp. 193–194, 36).</p><p>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 (<i>Unpolitische</i>)” (Habermas, <span>1961</span>, 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 (<i>Mitbestimmung</i>)” (quoted in Specter, <span>2010</span>, p. 68).</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 160, 167, 163).</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, 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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 159).</p><p>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 <i>inclusiveness</i> of the formation of public opinions and the <i>rationality</i> of the prominent opinions in the public sphere” (Habermas, <span>2022a</span>, 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, <span>2022a</span>, p. 160, 159).</p><p>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.</p><p>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, <span>2022b</span>, 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 <i>scope</i> and the deliberative <i>quality</i> of the offerings” in the public sphere (Habermas, <span>2022a</span>, p. 156).</p><p>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, <span>1989</span>, 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 <i>readers into potential authors</i>” (<span>2022b</span>, 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, <span>2022a</span>, 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.</p><p>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 (<i>Querdenken</i> or “lateral thinking” in German).</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, 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 &amp; Verovšek, <span>2021</span>, pp. 360–362 and citations therein), the danger Habermas identifies is clear nonetheless.</p><p>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, <span>2022a</span>, 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.</p><p>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 <i>distinction between private and public spheres</i>” (Habermas, <span>2022a</span>, 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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, <span>2021</span>).</p><p>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 &amp; Verovšek, <span>2021</span>, 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.</p><p>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.</p>\",\"PeriodicalId\":51578,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory\",\"volume\":null,\"pages\":null},\"PeriodicalIF\":1.2000,\"publicationDate\":\"2023-03-30\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12668\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.12668\",\"RegionNum\":0,\"RegionCategory\":null,\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q3\",\"JCRName\":\"POLITICAL SCIENCE\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.12668","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
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摘要

2022年9月,哈贝马斯在1962年首次出版德版《公共领域的结构转型:对资产阶级社会一个范畴的探究》(STPS) 60年后,又出版了《公共领域和协商政治的新结构转型》(Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die Deliberative Politik)。这种“与旧主题的新接触”(Habermas, 2022c,第7页)已经出现了很长时间。正如哈贝马斯在2008年为我的英文版签名时所写的那样,《stps》不仅是“我的第一本也是迄今为止最畅销的书(一种自我批评)”,而且在这本新书中,他还指出,它“仍然是我迄今为止最成功的”(哈贝马斯,2022a,第145页)。鉴于公共领域概念的广泛影响(Öffentlichkeit),以及互联网和数字媒体的兴起如何更广泛地影响公共审议和公共领域,这一贡献意义重大。研究哈贝马斯的学者习惯于阅读长篇书籍。这一预期在2019年出版的《也是一部哲学史》(Also a History of Philosophy)中得到了证实,这本书共有两卷,共1752页。相比之下,这本亮橙色的书——只有薄薄的109页——驳斥了同样的倾向。此外,除了简短的前言外,所有三章都已在其他地方以英文出版,只作了轻微的修改在某种程度上,正如哈贝马斯指出的那样,这种简洁是由于他“长期以来一直在处理其他问题”(哈贝马斯,2022c,第7页),因此不是最新的文献。此外,鉴于他已经向读者道歉,因为他没有写他前面提到的关于信仰与知识之间关系的研究的第三卷(!),因为“我的力量根本不再足以(daf<e:1> r reichen meine Kräfte nicht mehr aus)”(哈贝马斯,2019年,第I.10页),他的高龄也可能是一个因素,尽管他继续积极参与学术辩论和德国公共领域。哈贝马斯对公共领域的原始研究在三个不同但又相互关联的层面上进行。首先,它讲述了17世纪和18世纪欧洲公共领域的历史崛起,特别关注法国的沙龙、英国的咖啡馆和德国的餐桌协会。其次,它提出了一个公共领域的社会学模型,作为一个批判理性的空间,讨论所有公民的公共利益问题,它在自利的资产阶级个人的“私人领域”和由国家和法院(贵族社会)定义的“公共权威领域”之间开放。最后,哈贝马斯发展了一种规范的政治理论,试图实现“从其中心范畴之一的角度对我们自己的社会的系统理解”(哈贝马斯,1989,第5页)。在这本简短的书中,哈贝马斯关注的是最后一点,即“公共领域在确保民主政治共同体可持续性方面的功能”(哈贝马斯,2022a,第146页)。尽管他拒绝区分实证研究和规范研究——以及理想理论和非理想理论之间的相关分歧——认为这是“过度简化”,但哈贝马斯的关注点主要在于政治理论领域,而不是历史或社会学领域。然而,这并不意味着这两个方面完全消失了,只是它们消失在他试图解释一种民主理论的背景中,这种理论的基础是“重建规范和实践的理性内容,这些规范和实践自18世纪末的宪政革命以来获得了积极的有效性,并因此成为历史现实的一部分”(哈贝马斯,2022a,第147页)。我的评论主要集中在这本小书的两个方面。我首先概述了哈贝马斯在这本新书中试图纠正的对STPS的误解。然后,我考察了他的观点,即互联网的兴起导致了“公共领域的新结构转型”。为了做到这一点,我特别关注他对数字化引起的革命与印刷机的比较。他认为,第一个历史转折点使每个人都成为潜在的读者,而第二个转折点使每个人都成为潜在的作者。我的基本论点是,虽然哈贝马斯关于数字化导致了一种新的结构转型的观点是正确的,但正如他所主张的那样,今天协商政治的问题并不在于从读者到作者的转变,而是在于公共领域日益个性化,这阻碍了公民创造政治所必需的共同世界。尽管STPS影响广泛,但在这三个层面上都存在争议。 从历史上讲,哈贝马斯关于18世纪欧洲资产阶级公共领域的兴起及其对政治的影响的论点引发了一场热烈的学术辩论。无论他所研究的沙龙、咖啡馆和餐桌社会是否真正体现了哈贝马斯所认为的人类和公共辩论的新理想。同样,他的社会学模型也受到了学者们的攻击,他们指出,公共领域作为经济私利和国家之间的私人领域,在性别和阶级方面的影响相对有限。最值得注意的是,南希·弗雷泽(1992,第116页)拒绝了这种模式,认为它是“一种男性主义的意识形态概念,其功能是使一种新兴的阶级统治形式合法化。”最后,他声称公共领域是一个理性辩论的空间,既可以提供对国家的公众监督,又可以通过正式机构形成政策,这经常受到嘲笑。例如,Klein (1996, p. 37,38)指出,哈贝马斯认定的空间是资产阶级公共领域的熔炉,而不是“通过对话寻求真理”,而是“助长了错误信息和误解的无政府状态”。这本新书中的所有三篇文章都试图纠正哈贝马斯认为的对STPS的根本误解。首先,他提出了一种普遍的批评,即这种理想是虚构的。哈贝马斯欣然承认,一个所有受影响的人都能公开、自由地讨论共同关心的问题,并就该做什么做出理性决定的公共领域,实际上从未存在过,因此,用韦伯的语言来说,这是一种理想类型。然而,这不是重点。对他的目的来说,重要的不是这些理想是否在实践中得到充分实现,而是“规范的公共领域”的理想是否使公民相信,他们政府的合法性取决于他们监督领导人和通过参与公共辩论来制定政策的能力。哈贝马斯认为,这种理想的深刻渗透可见于“像‘资产阶级公共领域’这样的历史事实与自由民主同时出现,首先在英国,然后在美国、法国和其他欧洲国家”(哈贝马斯,2022a,第150页)。其次,哈贝马斯反驳了他的话语概念导致“民主过程的理想主义概念,就像一个欢乐的大学研讨会(einer friedlichen Seminarveranstaltung)”的说法(哈贝马斯,2022a,第151页)。这种误读是基于哈贝马斯的说法,即政治话语是基于“达成协议的目标(Einverständnis)”(哈贝马斯,2018,第837页)。然而,在哈贝马斯的术语中,这一观点并不是指公共领域辩论的结果,甚至也不是指个人的政策决定。相反,它指的是在政治机构内遵守多数人统治的集体协议,其中的决定总是“在决定的压力下暂时结束的讨论中,试图确定什么是正确的,结果是错误的”(哈贝马斯,1996,第475页)。从这个意义上说,公民被一种预先存在的承诺联系在一起,“接受彼此的观点,并使自己适应可概括的利益或共同的价值观”(哈贝马斯,2018,第875页),即使他们是少数。最后——也是相关的——哈贝马斯指出,“参与者对共识的必要取向自然并不意味着参与者可能会不切实际地期望他们实际上会在政治问题上达成共识”(哈贝马斯,2018,第875页)。相反,哈贝马斯认为,“理性的参与者对他们所争论的信念的真理或正确性的取向,甚至给政治争端的火上浇油”,允许“相互冲突的观点在话语中展开的认知潜力。”这一举动意在削弱他的敌对对手的修辞力量。在媒体和公民社会等非正式政治公共领域内进行讨论的全部意义在于,“它使我们能够通过政治争端改善我们的信念,并更接近问题的正确解决方案。”因此,审议“在公共领域是通过贡献的话语质量来衡量的,而不是通过达成共识的目标来衡量的”(哈贝马斯,2022a,第152页)。哈贝马斯试图利用公共辩论的混乱本质,以两种方式取代了共识的概念。首先,在非正式的公共领域内,这意味着“只有一件事是预先假定的——对使所有其他争端合法化的共同宪法原则的共识”(Habermas, 2022a,第152页)。哈贝马斯认为,只要这种制度性的元共识存在,所有其他争议都可以被包含在体系内。 其次,这种语言也将共识从非正式的意见形成领域转移到正式的制度性意志形成的公共领域。这个体系作为一个整体能够“承受强烈的抗议或激烈的冲突形式”(哈贝马斯,2018,第877页),正是因为非正式的政治公共领域“对政治统治的合法行使只做出有限的贡献”(哈贝马斯,2022b,第xvi页)。因此,严格地说,“只有在那些做出具有法律约束力的决定的机构的审议中,才需要达成共识的方向”(哈贝马斯,2018,第877页)。即使在那里,这种共识也仅限于事实问题和其他认识论问题。这些修正——揭示了政治沟通在生活的不同领域中发挥的不同作用——奠定了哈贝马斯对民主的理解,即“作为一个整体,通过审议过滤的过程”(哈贝马斯,2019,第877页)。因此,两个变量——公共领域辩论的质量(用哈贝马斯的术语来说是舆论形成)和拥有决策权的国家机构对这些审议的接受程度(意志形成)——成为判断任何给定政体内民主状态的关键标准。这为哈贝马斯的新干预奠定了基础。关键问题是,鉴于越来越多地使用不可靠的信息来源,以及公共领域分裂为自我封闭的过滤气泡和回声室,公共领域的日益数字化是否降低了公共审议的质量和范围。近年来,民主理论家和民主学者对数字化对公共话语的影响越来越感兴趣。这些文献中的大部分都试图解决这样一个事实:“在20世纪末和21世纪初,作为交流和交流中心的咖啡机已经被技术、互联网和社交媒体所取代”(Pinsker, 2018,第306-307页)。这是哈贝马斯回归公共领域话题的动力。虽然他承认,这些变化对“公共辩论的审议质量的确切影响是一个有待解决的问题”,因为“‘审议质量’……很难在广泛的国家公共领域中对不受管制的沟通过程进行操作”,但他肯定“政治倒退的迹象是每个人都能看到的”(哈贝马斯,2022a,第157、158页)。哈贝马斯希望利用协商的质量——以及他更普遍地基于公共领域的大众合法化理论——来评估民主实践,这并不是什么新鲜事。相反,它可以追溯到SPTS。在这部原著的后半部分,哈贝马斯将他的公共领域概念应用于战后欧洲的发展。他认为,由于读写能力的普及,公共领域“大众化”,私人和公共领域之间的区别正在逐渐被侵蚀。鉴于这些变化,公共领域“成为利益竞争的领域”,在其中,制度意志的形成“几乎仍然不能被理解为源于参与公共讨论的个人的共识”(哈贝马斯,1974年,第54页)。1962年,哈贝马斯将这种变化归因于双重影响。一方面,它促使公司和其他大型组织直接与政府谈判,从而完全绕过公共领域。另一方面,考虑到通过公共领域实现民主化的理想化期望仍然存在,这也意味着这些组织仍然试图通过展示形式的宣传(demonstrative Publizität)“确保自己至少得到广大民众的全民投票支持”(哈贝马斯,1974,第54页),从而进一步侵蚀公共领域的理想,将其变成一个通过“同意工程”运作的“舆论管理”舞台。这导致了哈贝马斯所说的现代社会的“再封建化”,因为公共性再次与个人声望的“光环”联系在一起,而不是一个“更好的论点的权威可以维护自己”的空间(哈贝马斯,1989,pp. 193 - 194,36)。尽管哈贝马斯后来对他最初的分析有所保留——这一事实有助于解释《STPS》翻译成英语的27年滞后——但他认为,企业新闻媒体的出现在最初的“结构转型”中起着至关重要的作用,这些媒体为了销售广告而竞争注意力,而不是作为信息传播和舆论形成的渠道。 一方面,他们的个性化、算法碎片化的网络被编程为只向他们提供那些证实他们先前存在的倾向的人的意见;另一方面,专家们越来越有动力成为有影响力的人,他们的观点“病毒式传播”,因为他们在各自领域的正统观念中脱颖而出,告诉人们他们想听的东西,而不是因为他们的准确性或论点的质量。这些平台的大多数用户仍然从传统报纸和其他媒体获取新闻,即使这些新闻越来越多地以数字形式出现,这一事实可能会改善这个问题。然而,社交媒体将广告和受众重新定向到它们的平台上,从而破坏了传统新闻业的经济基础。在这些平台上,文章免费发布,而不补偿制作这些文章的记者和编辑。除了削弱“对优质节目和专业服务的需求”(Habermas, 2022b, p. xviii),这些平台也改变了媒体的运作方式。在所谓的“受众转向”之后,社交媒体正在推动传统信息来源迎合其客户的愿望,而不是公民的话语性意见和意志形成。由于数字平台上正在发生的事情越来越重要,新闻机构现在花费大量时间报道社交媒体上的趋势,而不是通过确保公共领域“产品的范围和审议质量”来履行其看门人的角色(Habermas, 2022a,第156页)。这些反思将哈贝马斯引向了他对这种“新结构转型”的最终和最有趣的诊断。虽然约翰内斯·古腾堡发明的印刷机在原文中只被提及一次(哈贝马斯,1989年,第185页),但它在这一后续行动中发挥了至关重要的作用。哈贝马斯在其中一段极具洞察力的段落中指出:“虽然媒体的发明给了每个潜在的收件人最终学习如何阅读的机会,但数字革命立即将读者变成了潜在的作者”(2022b,第xviii页)。这种转变至关重要,因为就像阅读一样,写作也是一种需要学习的技能。虽然“对作者角色的政治上适当的认知……往往会增加人们对自己知识水平不足的认识”(Habermas, 2022a,第160页),但哈贝马斯担心,数字平台上的情况恰恰相反,用户被鼓励发表未经考虑的热评,而不是参与作者角色所要求的那种批判性自我反思。这是一个有趣的观点。毕竟,学会好好辩论——而且是在充分证据的基础上进行辩论——是一种只有花时间和努力才能获得的技能。事实上,社交媒体上的作者资格与其说是由质量决定的,不如说是由吸引的关注量决定的,因为今天大多数作者都是通过点击获得报酬的,这意味着细微差别和良好的论证往往让位于时髦的措辞和有争议的立场,而这些立场违背了他们的意愿(Querdenken,德语“横向思维”)。从这个意义上说,确实有一种结构性的转变,从“更好的论点的非强制性力量”转向“甚至不能再被识别为这样”的假新闻(哈贝马斯,2022a,第167页)。即使是仍有守门人的老牌媒体,也经常不得不对有关假新闻的说法做出回应,从而只会通过重复假新闻来进一步传播假新闻,这一事实意味着,如今的公共领域充斥着这些说法。因此,哈贝马斯担心公共领域的“伟大的解放承诺”正在“被破碎的、自我封闭的回音室中荒凉的杂音所淹没”(第159页)。尽管一些关于这些问题的实证研究质疑越来越多的个人被封闭在公共过滤气泡或回声室中的观点(Dommett &Verovšek, 2021, pp. 360-362,引文在其中),尽管如此,哈贝马斯指出的危险是明确的。话虽如此,哈贝马斯的真正问题似乎在于我所说的“公共领域的个体化”。这种现象有两个相关特征。首先,这意味着每个人在数字公共领域的体验都是独一无二的。印刷版报纸只有一两个版本,每个人都能阅读,而且可以存档以备后续研究。与印刷版报纸不同,每个人在社交媒体和数字媒体上的时间轴是不同的,因为它是由一种算法塑造的,这种算法旨在最大限度地提高参与度(而不是所呈现信息的质量),以便以更高的价格出售更个性化的广告。 因此,数字公共领域越来越难以作为一个共同“世界”的基础,这个“世界”可以“引导公民的注意力到需要决定的相关问题上,并且确保形成相互竞争的公共意见”(Habermas, 2022a, p. 167)。从这个意义上说,问题不是过滤气泡和回音室,而是每个人都存在于他们自己的过滤气泡中,这是他们使用的平台通过算法为他们创造的。其次,公共领域的这种个体化也意味着,每个人都可以自行决定他们认为哪些信息是可靠的。虽然以前的媒体能够参与在时间和金钱上都很昂贵的审查过程,但这个过程也被外包给了孤独的新自由主义公民。此外,任何不可靠来源的点击都会导致算法向用户提供进一步的信息,从而强化这种说法。因此,问题不在于哈贝马斯所哀叹的“私人领域和公共领域之间迄今习惯的概念区分”(Habermas, 2022a, p. 165)的丧失,而在于这样一个事实,即社交和数字媒体所带来的连通性创造了越来越孤立的个人,无法建立政治生活所必需的共同社会和政治“世界”。哈贝马斯决定重新审视他的第一本书的主题是最受欢迎的。我一直认为STPS是理解哈贝马斯更广泛的终身理论项目的关键。在许多方面,这个新的卷的重点政治理论验证了这种直觉带来了他的早期,历史社会学更密切的接触,他试图发展一个更“准先验”理论的交流互动在他的1971年高斯讲座之后。考虑到他的公共领域概念对协商民主文学的影响,以及人们对互联网和数字公共领域的兴起对政治生活的影响越来越感兴趣,他的回归尤其受欢迎。总的来说,这个简短的卷提供了一个很好的介绍哈贝马斯的话语概念的民主基于积极参与公共领域。它清楚地表明,公共领域的审议质量和公共政策对这些讨论的接受程度如何可以作为政治生活状况的指标。到2022年,衰退的迹象显而易见。哈贝马斯的诊断清晰而发人深省,这与他一生都在理论化公共领域,并作为公共知识分子积极参与公共领域辩论的人是相称的(Verovšek, 2021)。一方面,我认为哈贝马斯强调新数字和社交媒体的平台特征是正确的,这些媒体并不以任何有意义的方式管理它们所托管的内容或对其承担责任。这就要求公民个人既要有技能,又要有教育,还要有时间来确保他们用来形成意见的信息的质量,这些意见将推动他们参与公共生活(Dommett &;Verovšek, 2021,第369页)。另一方面,我不相信从读者到作者的转变真的是推动这种“新结构转型”的最重要的变化。问题不在于现在每个人都是作者,而是现在每个人都可以传播不良信息和不良观点,这些信息和观点往往比专业媒体产生的可靠信息更容易获得和获取,而专业媒体往往隐藏在付费墙后面。相反,正如我所建议的,我认为公共领域的个体化是至关重要的,因为它抑制了公民首先参与政治所必需的共同的、主体间性的世界的创造。最终,这种分歧更多的是关于哈贝马斯如何将他的观点应用于当代形势,而不是这些观点本身。最后,我同意这本书的核心观点,即“维持一个确保公共领域的包容性和公众舆论和政治意愿形成的审议性的媒体结构,不是政治偏好的问题,而是宪法上的必要”(第168页)。如果民主要在这种新的结构转型中生存下来,它就必须开始把数字和社交媒体视为公用事业,而不仅仅是允许它们作为数据经纪人运作,从民主的政治崩溃中获利。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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.

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