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The Habermasian understanding of the public sphere, as explicated in his seminal work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962 in German, translated into English in 1989), is tied to a particular validation of ‘public’ as the ‘rational-critical’ discussion of personally disinterested people occupying the same public spaces. While those 18th century participants might have got their topics of conversation from the early forms of journalism in circulation, Habermas relies on their face-to-face discussion in physical spaces to construct his theory of the ‘public sphere’ and ‘public opinion’. In this study he excludes modern-day media as a space from his delineation of the public sphere because of their commercial, non-conversational and entertainment dimensions. However, in later commentary on this study (1974 and 1989), he qualifies saying “today newspapers and magazines, radio and TV are the media of the public sphere” (quoted by Eley 1992) thus modifying his position somewhat. His study has provoked both a normative understanding of how the media should operate in the public sphere, and a pessimism about whether the media do this task properly, given their modern-day features. In this paper I question the normative ideal, and the pessimistic conclusions about media operations, by drawing on other theorists to make more nuanced and complex the description of ‘the public sphere’ for today. I draw on Arendt for a larger understanding of the ‘social’ and the ‘intimate’; Fraser, Benhabib and Eley for their ideas about counter publics and Other participants. And, for a better understanding of the workings of media, on Thompson’s ideas of non-co-present publicness and ‘visibility’. I use Warner to understand the idea of public subjectivity and the desire to participate vicariously in public bodies through certain kinds of media genres. Finally, I attempt a description of what kind(s) of public sphere(s) and what kinds of media activities we see operating in our world today
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