Carolien Lindeman S1565419
MA Journalism Rijksuniversiteit Groningen Supervisor: Prof. Dr. M.J. Broersma
Abstract
Twitter’s democratic potential was first considered on a large scale after its visible role during protests of the Arab Spring in 2010 and 2011 when citizens and journalists used it as a tool to connect. Using public sphere theory, this thesis also explores this democratic role. I argue for the existence of a virtual public sphere where citizens meet and deliberate so as to come to well-informed opinions and decisions about the democracy they live in. I furthermore argue that the presence of network journalism is conducive to a well-working virtual public sphere. Network journalism means the interaction between, among others, journalists and citizens who together in a processual nature bring and alter the news through Twitter.
Through a grounded theory analysis of fourteen elite tweeters during the November-December 2012 protests in Egypt, this thesis finds that some of the behavior found on Twitter is in accordance with normative standards for a virtual public sphere. I theorize these to be information dissemination; the possibility to ask critical questions; equality; accessibility; and the idea that deliberation can end in dissensus. Moreover, the role of network journalism within this virtual public sphere is of vital importance as it means that through the interconnection of, in this case, citizens and journalists, citizens can come to more informed opinions. Lastly, I extrapolate three theoretical themes – power, emotion and morality – that are important for a more effective use of Twitter.
Exploring Twitter’s potential as a democratic tool for citizens and journalists advances our theoretical knowledge of potential new public spheres. This leads to new insights of how Twitter can be most advantageously used by journalists thus improving the quality of the virtual public sphere and democracies in general.
List of Contents
Abstract 1
List of Contents 2
List of Figures 4
“What are you doing?”: Introducing Twitter’s democratic potential 5
Chapter 1 The Public Sphere and the News Media 10
1.1 An Ideal Public Sphere?
1.2 Transformations of the Habermasian Public Sphere 1.2.2 The two critiques
1.3 The News Media and the Public Sphere 1.3.2 Dismissing Lifeworld and System
1.3.3 Multiple Spheres and the Role of Journalism
Chapter 2 A Virtual Public Sphere 22
2.1 A Virtual Public Sphere
2.1.2 Arguments Against a Virtual Public Sphere 2.1.3 The Internet is a Public Sphere
2.1.4 A Normative Vision of the Virtual Public Sphere 2.2 Journalism in a Virtual Public Sphere
2.2.2 User Generated Content 2.2.3 Citizen Journalism 2.2.4 Participatory Journalism
Chapter 3 If Habermas Would Tweet 39
3.1 Twitter
3.2 Twitter as a tool of a Virtual Public Sphere 3.3 Twitter as a Tool in a Network
3.3.2 Journalists and Twitter 3.3.3 Citizens and Twitter 3.4 Twitter and Egypt
Chapter 4 An Egyptian Network: A Methodology 60
4.1 Grounded Theory 4.2 Developing the Codes 4.3 The Dataset
Chapter 5 #MorsiMubarak: Analyzing the Egyptian Twitter Elite 78
5.1 Results
5.1.2 Citizens and Journalists 5.1.3 Main themes
5.2 Discussion
5.2.2 Twitter is a Tool in a Virtual Public Sphere 5.2.3 Network Journalism on Twitter
5.2.4 Learning from the Themes 5.3 Conclusion
Habermas Should Join: A Look at Twitter’s Democratic Potential 117
Bibliography 121
Appendices 132
Appendix A – Morsi’s consitutional decree issued on November 22
Appendix B – Number of connections between elite tweeters from the sample Appendix C – Coded Documents
Appendix D – Lists of Codes
List of Figures
Figure 5.1 Screencapture of Morsillini interactive poster 78
Figure 5.2 Percentage critical tweets of each user’s overall tweets 83
Figure 5.3 Twitter discussion Gsquare86 84
Figure 5.4 Twitter conversation between SherineT and 87
TheEvertBopp
Figure 5.5 EitenZeerban’s tweet and a four day later reaction 88 Figure 5.6 The interconnection between top citizen and journalist
Tweeters 90
Figure 5.7 Citizen discussion and analysis, including Mosaaberizing 91
Figure 5.8 Discussion between Mosaaberizing and Evanchill 92
Figure 5.9A Photo New York Times 93
Figure 5.9B Photo New York Times 93
Figure 5.10 The interconnection between elite citizen and journalist 94
tweeters from Cairo, Egypt
Figure 5.11 Number of total connections per elite tweeter 95
Figure 5.12 Distribution of categories over themes 97
Figure 5.13 Overview of the theme power and its categories 98 Figure 5.14 Overview of the theme emotion and its categories 101
Figure 5.15 Parody of Morsi’s Time cover 102
“What are you doing?”: Introducing Twitter’s democratic potential
A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?1
This was Twitter’s original tagline when it was launched in 2006. It was developed as a micro blogging tool to stay in touch with friends. By posting 140 character messages users could let their followers know what they were up to. These humble beginnings, however, have led to a medium being used for far more wide-ranging political goals than simply letting each other know what you are doing. In 2009 Twitter’s tagline had evolved to the question “What’s happening?” thus subtly changing the focus from only personal experiences to engagement in everything happening outside your own experience. This modification of the phrase was mirrored by a changed use of the medium during protests in dictatorial countries. During the 2009 Iranian’s protests against their authoritarian government, Twitter was called the “Medium of the Movement” as it functioned as a source for people to both post and read news about the otherwise heavily censored protests.2 Similarly the protests of the Arab Spring in many Arab countries were coined as the Facebook and Twitter Revolutions by many observers.3 During these instances Twitter turned out to be the best place to get on the ground reports that were not being censored. As such it was a source and tool for journalists and a unique way for citizens to successfully organize and mobilize against repressive regimes.
A medium originally intended for chitchat among friends appears to have become a powerful tool in the hands of repressed citizens. This could potentially have become the twenty-first century version of the Habermasian coffee house. Jürgen Habermas theorized the eighteenth century coffee houses as the ideal site for deliberation between citizens who were well-informed through the information provision of the news media. Such deliberation and news formation, Habermas poses, were necessary for what he termed a democratic public sphere.4 Ever since the eighteenth century this model has been in crisis as citizens’ relation toward both the state but also the media apparatus has compromised equal and universal participation in the public sphere. Due to this downturn Habermas, but also other theorists like Douglas Kellner, Nancy Fraser and Peter Dahlgren have been trying to define a new ideal type model for democracy.
1 Twitter’s tagline as could be found on its homepage from 2006 until 2009.
2 Lev Grossman, “Iran’s Protests: Why Twitter is the Medium of the Movement,” Time Magazin U.S. June 17, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html (accessed June 6, 2011).
3 Brad Stone and Noam Cohen, “Social Networks Spread Defiance Online,” The New York Times. June 15, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/world/middleeast/16media.html?_r=0 (accessed July 14, 2013).
4 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois
Exploring Twitter’s potential as a democratic tool thus advances our theoretical knowledge of potential new public spheres, befitting contemporary society instead of eighteenth century bourgeois society. More practically this leads to an increasing understanding of how Twitter can be most advantageously used by journalists, those who are supposed to be information providers in a public sphere. Moreover, such research provides an overview of how citizens are already using Twitter and thus answers what Twitter’s current potential as a democratic tool is.
Twitter, despite having only been on the scene since 2006, has nonetheless already been the subject of extensive research. To put my research within the context of previous research it is necessary to focus both on the way Twitter has been looked at within the political sciences and within journalism studies, as this thesis focuses on journalists’ use of Twitter and democratic theoretical ideas of the Habermasian public sphere. Within the political sciences, research on Twitter has been focused on Twitter’s democratizing role. Twitter in this case has often been linked to Habermas in the sense that the interactions on it reminds of the Habermasian eighteenth century coffee houses populated by citizens engaging in critical rational deliberation. The coffeehouse served both as a place where citizens became informed on their public sphere and a space to engage in deliberation with other citizens. Twitter is also a space where information can be gathered and discussed. Moreover, on Twitter citizens can also spread information themselves. They are no longer only dependent on the news media, as was the case in the coffee houses of the eighteenth century. As such political science research has focused Twitter’s potential to function as a forum for political deliberation;5 it has discussed a too optimistic vision of the democratizing and empowering functions of social media;6 and has developed theories on how Twitter might most effectively help democratic innovation.7
Within journalism studies scholarly work into the democratic implications of Twitter is also manifold. When considering the renewed interaction possible between journalists and citizens, the main focus in early research on Twitter has been on its influence on journalistic practices. This happened in the form of researching the way Twitter is challenging old
5 Andranik Tumasjan, “Predicting Elections with Twitter; What 140 Characters Reveal about Political Sentiment,” (paper presented at the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, George Washington University, Washington, DC, 23 – 26 of May, 2010), 1.
6 Petros Iosofidis, “The Public Sphere, Social Networks and Public Service Media,” Information,
Communication and Society 14, no. 5 (2011), 619.
7 Andrew Chadwick, “Recent Shifts in the Relationship Between the Internet and Democratic Engagement in Britain and the United States: Granularity, Infromational Exuberance, and Political Learning,” Website New
Political Communication Unit, 2010, http://newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk/storage/ chadwick/Chadwick_Granularity_
journalistic values, such as verification;8 but also how journalists who microblog have to negotiate their professional norms.9 Another type of analysis is how journalism can be enhanced through the use of Twitter and other social media. For example, different studies have considered the way Twitter helps with information dissemination;10 how social media and Twitter can and should be adopted in newsrooms;11 how Twitter changes media ethics;12 in what manner Twitter discusses different topics compared to traditional media outlets;13 and the effects Twitter might have on the diversity of the audience of news outlets.14
Taking this a step further is the research looking at the influence of Twitter on citizens as well as journalists, which similar to this thesis automatically also considers the democratic implications of this interaction. For example, it was researched how Twitter’s set-up encourages citizens to act as journalists, especially during disasters or terrorist attacks, therefore enriching and improving the news surrounding such events.15 More specifically, such studies have considered what kind of news citizens on Twitter are producing and whether this is so-called hard news or soft news.16
The implications of the use of Twitter by citizens is researched and also often linked to Habermasian ideas on the public sphere. For example, Peter Dahlgren explores how Twitter used by both citizens and journalists might enhance civic participation.17 Sue Robinson goes even further by theorizing the implications of Twitter and social media for journalism. She argues a new kind of journalism practiced both by journalists and citizens has come into being largely due to social media and Twitter in the form of journalism as process where both parties continuously work on and change the news that is available.18 Similar to this idea is
8 Alfred Hermida, “Tweets and Truth,” Journalism Practice iFirst Article (2012), 1.
9 Dominic L. Lasorsa et al., “Journalism Practice in an Emerging Communicaton Space,” Journalism Studies iFirst Article (2011), 1.
10 Kristina Lerman and Rumi Ghosh, “Information Contagion: an Empirical Study of the Spread of News on Digg and Twitter Social Networks”, in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Weblogs and Social
Media (2010): 1.
11 Nicola Bruno, “Tweet First, Verify Later? How real-time information is changing the coverage of worldwide crisis events,” Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper (2010 – 2011).
12 Stephen J.A. Ward and Herman Wasserman, “Towards an Open Ethics: Implications of New Media Platforms for Global Ethics Discourse,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 25, no. 4 (2010), 292.
13 Wayne Xin Zhao and Jing Jiang, “An Empirical Comparison of Topics in Twitter and Traditional Media,”
Singapore Management University School of Information Systems Technical Paper Series (2011), 1.
14 Jisun An et al., “Media Landscape in Twitter: A World of New Conventions and Political Diversity,”
(presented at the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Barcelona July, 2011) 18. 15 Dhiraj Murthy, “Twitter: Microphone for the Masses?” Media Culture & Society 33, no. 5 (2011), 779. 16 Tyler J. Horan, “Soft Versus Hard News on Microblogging Networks: Semantic Analysis of Twitter Produsage,” Information, Communication and Society iFirst Article (2012), 1.
17 Peter Dahlgren, “Online Journalism and Civic Cosmpolitanism: Professional vs. Participatory Ideals,”
Journalism Studies iFirst Article (2012), 1.
18 Sue Robinson, “’Journalism as Process’: The Organizational Implications of Participatory Online News,”
the concept of network or networked journalism, recently expounded both by Adrienne Russell and Ansgard Heinrich.19 Russell and Heinrich both posit that journalism within a networked sphere has become a horizontal instead of a vertical process. Moreover, network journalism consists of many different players apart from journalists also citizens, NGOs, government officials and corporations for example. All these actors function as a node within a network, constantly contributing and changing the news within that network.20
This thesis fits into this earlier work on Twitter, firstly on a theoretical level because it combines political science ideas about the Habermasian public sphere with the concept of network journalism from journalism studies. By appropriating Habermas’ theory of the public sphere and applying it in a new way to Twitter, this thesis contributes to the theory building efforts surrounding public sphere theory. Moreover, my research adds to the emerging published research on Twitter as I empirically research how it is being used by an interconnected group of citizens and journalists. As opposed to most research that either focuses on how journalists appropriate Twitter into their already existing journalistic practices or on how citizens use it for mobilizing and information purposes among themselves, my thesis focuses upon the interrelations between these two groups.
I thus answer the overarching question of how citizens and journalists may use Twitter in the most democratic manner. To accomplish this, in chapter one I first define and problematize what a democracy entails according to Habermasian public sphere theory. Moreover this chapter also presents the normatively appointed role of both citizens and journalists in such a sphere. Chapter two subsequently presents how this public sphere theory can be appropriated to fit an idea of the internet functioning as a virtual public sphere. Within this sphere I again problematize the specific roles of citizens and journalists by defining an adapted normative vision for this virtual public sphere. This vision borrows from the Habermasian conception of the public sphere, but incorporates contemporary ideas about the internet such as the idea that a discussion does not need to take place in a small amount of time but can be spread over several days or sometimes even weeks. Moreover, I incorporate the idea that dissensus is also an acceptable outcome for discussions taking place in a virtual public sphere. Chapter three builds on this by honing in on the specific role of Twitter and defining how this could normatively be a tool for democracy.
19 Ansgard Heinrich, Network Journalism: Journalistic Practice in Interactive Spheres (New York City: Routledge, 2011); Adrienne Russell, Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011).
Having built up this theoretical framework of Twitter’s potential role within a virtual public sphere, I then test whether this is actually the case and to what extent. For this I use the case study of the November-December 2012 protests in Cairo, Egypt. These protests serve as an example of citizens protesting their democratically elected government. During these protests Twitter was again used by many citizens, as well as journalists, to connect. Of these Twitter users I selected fourteen elite tweeters, seven of them citizens, the other seven journalists. The elite tweeters had a large following, posted often and were retweeted often. They were also highly interconnected therefore serving as an ideal sample of a close-knit network. In chapter four I present how a grounded theory approach best suits my purpose of assessing how Twitter served as a tool for democracy during these protests. By coding the 5299 English-language tweets sent by my elite tweeters I then developed categories as well as three overarching themes to classify the democratic practices taking place via Twitter.
Chapter 1 The Public Sphere and the News Media
Communication via the mass media plays an important role in the normative vision I advocate.21
Habermas’s initial theory about the public sphere, which he presented in his 1962 work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere reserved a special place for the news media, as can be seen in abovementioned quote. However, the Habermasian public sphere could not have been meant as a normative model of the connection between social media, journalism and democracy. Nevertheless, Jürgen Habermas as well as many other critical theorists since the 1960s have developed and expanded on the original theory of the public sphere. Those advances provide a useful theoretical framework to identify that a possible interplay of social media users and journalists might improve the quality of democracy. In order to arrive at this conclusion, however, it is first necessary to establish the claim that a certain kind of public sphere is necessary for a healthy and thriving democracy.22
In this chapter I discuss Habermas’ theory of the public sphere and how within that sphere democracy can be achieved. The main purpose of this chapter is to posit Habermas’s theory as a normative ideal type for democracy that can similarly serve as a normative model for contemporary journalism. This is the basis from which I will argue in the second chapter that Habermas has indirectly also provided a normative model for new forms of journalism which, among others, includes contributions to Twitter by both citizens and journalists during the November-December revolts in Egypt. For now, however, I focus on Habermas’ original theory of the public sphere and the additions and changes necessary for it to be normatively applicable to contemporary societies and journalism.
1.1 An Ideal Public Sphere?
Habermas’ conception of the ideal public sphere is based on the social, political, economical and historical situation in England, France and Germany in the eighteenth century. He poses that in this time, for a short while, an effective bourgeois public sphere existed within these three countries. This meant that a relatively large group of middle class men was able to come together and engage in reasoned debate over key issues, resulting in new ideas, practices and reasoned criticism of the state. The public sphere, consequently, was an effective place of mediation between the state and the private individual. Habermas defined this ideal bourgeois
21 Jürgen Habermas, Time of Transitions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 9.
public sphere “above all as the sphere of private people com[ing] together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.”23 While Habermas’ definition of the public sphere offers the basis of the discussion in this chapter, for the purpose of this thesis a good working definition is provided by Peter Dahlgren, who states that the public sphere is a “realm of social life where the exchange of information and views on questions of common concern can take place so that public opinion can be formed.”24 This means that a public sphere exists when citizens are able to interact and discuss issues of political concern to reach informed decisions and conclusions. Participation needs to be universal and equal.
John Michael Roberts and Nick Crossley succinctly summarize the four most important factors that allowed for the rise and existence of the bourgeois public sphere. First, a differentiation of society, especially in the form of a separation of political authority from that of everyday life provides the free space for citizens to deliberate. Secondly, the self and subjectivity were newly privatized, effectively creating a conscious public seeking self-cultivation and thus forced to rationally and reasonably think about and argue for their specific private interests. Third, the emerging art and literature scene as developed in the salons of the eighteenth century led to literary debate which generated the abilities and skills for critical and rational political debate. Lastly, the new printing technologies and coming into existence of popular newsletters and journals provided relative spaces of debate. What makes these four factors important for Habermas is that they facilitated, generated and fostered what he calls critical rationality, meaning a space that exists through critical rational deliberation. Furthermore this space is relatively powerful and able to put pressure on the state and cause political, social and economical change.25
The goal of identifying this functioning public sphere was for Habermas to criticize contemporary democracies. He identifies an almost immediate downturn of the effective bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century, which continues to modern day. Roberts and Crossley summarize the four contributing factors to this downturn. First, the differentiation between state and society almost immediately started to blur, resulting in an
23 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 27.
24 Peter Dahlgren, Television and the Public Sphere: citizenship, democracy and the media (London: SAGE Publications, 2000), 195.
25 John Michael Roberts and Nick Crossley, “Introduction”, in After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public
infiltration of the state in private interests. A dependency of individuals on the state has created a client, or consumer, relationship between state and individual, instead of critical citizens. Within this relationship interests in money and power have largely replaced critical rationality, both are not conducive for a rational democracy. Secondly, politicians who are part of the state have appropriated argumentation and debate; consequently debate has also become subordinated to interests in power and money. Third, professional scientists have degraded public opinion by reducing it to mere opinion polls. Fourth, media markets that are supposed to provide a relatively free and open space for deliberation have been corrupted and hijacked for the purpose of selling goods. In other words they have also been corrupted by the power of money.26 In short this means that equal and universal participation in the critical rational public sphere that Habermas imagines has become impossible.
One could easily dismiss Habermas’s view of the public sphere as mere nostalgia and a doomsday image of contemporary democracy, but this would be too simple. Luke Goode suggests that the theory of the public sphere offers a frame of reference for our current model of democracy.27 Or as Nicholas Garnham puts it, it might be wise “not to see the public sphere as a concrete space or set of discursive practices, but as a perspective from which to think about the problem of democracy in the modern world.”28 The Habermasian public sphere is therefore a normative ideal type of how a rational democratic should best be served.
The purpose of discussing this theory so far is to propose that the discussion of the public sphere as a critical theoretical concept provides a fitting context to discuss the democratic potential of social media. This is based on the premise that social media, through the kind of new space it provides, has the potential to revive aspects of the long lost bourgeois public sphere. On the internet citizens have the potential of letting their voice be heard and deliberate critically because of the kind of forum, potentially free from the influence of the state, that social media provide. It furthermore has the potential of allowing a semblance of universal and equal participation in the public sphere. Also, deliberations on this forum could possibly lead to social change. Because of the role that Habermas theorizes for the news media, this discussion simultaneously also includes the role of journalists. Pulling social media into the discussion of the public sphere therefore serves a dual purpose, not only to ascertain a normatively proper role for citizens, but similarly for journalists.
26 Ibid, 4-6.
27 Ibid, 4.
1.2 Transformations of the Habermasian Public Sphere
This section discusses two big scholarly critiques on Habermas that both add some more flesh to the theory of the public sphere so that it is more applicable to the role of both journalists and citizens in our contemporary world. The first critique entails the idea that Habermas’s use of specifically the bourgeois public sphere as an ideal type is false and participation has never been universal and equal. In the small discussion that follows, the two main proponents of these critiques, Douglas Kellner and Nancy Fraser, offer a solution to these critiques in the form of a conception of multiple public spheres. The second critique is on the validity and practicality of Habermas’s conception of critical rationality as a normative ideal type of communication as expounded mainly by Nicholas Garnham and Seyla Benhabib.29 Habermas has, in the course of the development of his theory acknowledged these critiques and has subsequently made his theory more applicable to contemporary society. As Habermas puts it himself: “My own theory, finally, has […] changed, albeit less in its fundamentals than in its degree of complexity.”30 This increasing complexity of his theory means that it is also applicable to multifaceted societies such as the Egyptian one during the protests of November and December, 2012.
1.2.2 The Two Critiques
Most prominent and possibly the easiest criticism has been the clamor about his historical misrepresentation of the bourgeois public sphere. First of all, Douglas Kellner argues that it is unlikely that the ideal rationality Habermas subscribes to the bourgeois public sphere has ever existed, “politics throughout the modern era have been subject to the play of interests and power as well as discussion and debate.”31 This means that neither in the bourgeois public sphere, nor in subsequent forms of the public sphere, has everybody participated in critical rationality, but rather a privileged few. Nancy Fraser strengthens this argument by pointing out that several historiographies prove that only a certain class of men participated in the bourgeois public sphere.32 Furthermore, Fraser voices the concern that in the Habermasian ideal public sphere women were excluded and uses Mary Ryan’s historiographies which document “the variety of ways in which nineteenth century North American women of
29 Nicholas Garnham, “Habermas and the public sphere,” Global Media and Communication 3, no. 2 (2007): 207.
30 Jürgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. by Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 422.
31 Douglas Kellner, “Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention,” in Perspectives on
Habermas, ed. by Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2000), 267.
various classes and ethnicities constructed access routes to public political life, even despite their exclusion from the official public sphere.”33 Rational public participation has proven to be possible then even if one is not part of the official public sphere.
In order to answer to this critique both Douglas Kellner and Nancy Fraser propose that the existence of a single public sphere is insufficient. Kellner posits that “rather than conceiving of one liberal or democratic public sphere, it is more productive to theorize a multiplicity of public spheres, sometimes overlapping but also conflicting.”34 Within those different public spheres different (excluded) groups, perhaps through the use of new technologies, as for example new media, can express themselves and interact with each other. Habermas eventually also addressed the issue himself and argues that his model works if “from the very beginning one admits the coexistence of competing public spheres and takes account of the dynamics of those processes of communication that are excluded from the dominant public sphere.”35 With this exclusion he hints at those groups who might not be part of the hegemonic public sphere but “additional subcultural or class-specific public spheres [that] are constituted on the basis of their own and initially not easily reconcilable premises.”36 In his latest book Time of Transitions Habermas recognizes that because of globalization, taking as his main example the European Union, different public spheres need to cooperate.37
Before presenting the second critique of the public sphere, that on the practical application of rationality in it, it is helpful to understand the necessity of rationality in the public sphere for Habermas, for this explains why the concept is still important to include but perhaps in a different form. For Habermas rationality plays an important role in the public sphere for, according to Nicholas Garnham, it provides “a normatively defensible form of ‘solidarity among strangers’ in modern conditions”38. Only through the existence of rationality is it possible for Habermas to find a common ground and therefore a situation in which informed public opinion comes into existence. For him the only possibility to come to rational public opinion within the complex relations people maintain in current society is through discourse and critical rationality. Garnham goes even further to suggest that only
33 Ibid, 61.
34 Douglas Kellner, “Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention,” in Perspectives on
Habermas, ed. by Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2000), 267.
35 Jürgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. by Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 425.
36 Ibid, 425.
37 Jürgen Habermas, Time of Transitions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 76.
through discourse citizens are able to identify themselves as opposed to others within that society. Habermas himself poses that “the human mind encounters itself only indirectly through symbolically mediated relations to the world; it does not exist ‘in the head’ but in the totality of publicly accessible and intersubjectively comprehensible symbolic expressions and practices.”39
Discourse allows anybody to participate in any public sphere, be it the political, but also, for example, the cultural public sphere. It is necessary for the universal participation that Habermas is seeking within his model. And as Seyla Benhabib points out, this model is intended to function “democratically as the creation of procedures whereby those affected by general social norms and by collective political decisions can have a say in their formulation, stipulation and adoption”40. Also, “there may be as many publics as there are controversial general debates about the validity of norms”41 which means that even though those discourses are aimed at agreement, disagreement is fitted very well into the model as well. Habermas himself posits that “This entropic state of a definitive consensus, which would make all further communication superfluous, cannot be represented as a meaningful goal because it would engender paradoxes” since disagreement is necessary for discourse to exist, the existence of universal agreement would abolish the need for discourse.42 With this then Habermas concedes that in addition to agreement, disagreement is a necessity within his model of the public sphere.
Even though it is clear that Habermas’s perspective on discourse and critical rationalization are not as naive as pictured, they do pose a problem for practical application within a democratizing public sphere. Habermas concedes in 1992 that he has “considered the state apparatus and economy to be systematically integrated action field that can no longer be transformed democratically from within, ... without damage to their proper system logic and therewith their ability to function.”43 In short this means that he does not see a possibility for his public sphere that critical rationality employed by citizens will be able to cause real change. The result of this is that “discourses do not govern. They generate a communicative power that cannot take the place of administration but can only influence it. This influence is
39 Jürgen Habermas, Time of Transitions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 56.
40 Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 105.
41 Ibid, 105.
42 Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 101.
limited to the procurement and withdrawal of legitimation.”44 In his changed model citizens have lost a large part of their democratizing power.
These additions and caveats resulting from the two big critiques on his public sphere theory have resulted in some interesting facts to be reconsidered when applying Habermas’ public sphere theory to the role of citizens and journalists and their use of social media. The multiple public spheres give the opportunity to conceive of different counterpublics that can manifest themselves online. And the focus on rationality and the concession of Habermas that the power of citizens to cause actual change has diminished is interesting to compare and contrast with the repercussions of the revolts in Egypt around January 25, 2011. I will therefore now first incorporate these adaptations to the Habermasian public sphere in greater detail with especially the normative role of journalists in mind.
1.3 The News Media and the Public Sphere
In the eighteenth century the news media in combination with critical rational citizens in “the coffeehouses in Britain, salons in France and table societies in Germany” were the basis of Habermas’ ideal public sphere.45 Within those coffee houses, newsletters and journals encouraged critical rationalization among citizens by informing them and by providing a forum for discussions. Those journals, or the early news media, provided a rational free space for deliberation and information dissemination. This would allow citizens to be both informed and to critically discuss key issues and subsequently be able to bring about societal change. As Habermas put it: “The press was for the first time established as a genuinely critical organ of a public engaged in critical political debate: as the fourth estate.”46 Stuart Allan poses that “by conceiving of the news audience as citizens engaged in public dialogue, bringing to bear the force of public opinions upon authority relations,”47 citizens supported and maintained a perfect democratic system.
Unfortunately this ideal situation that presumably existed in the eighteenth century, was maintained only temporarily, and it is questionable if it existed in the way Habermas suggested as discussed in previous sections. What is certain, however, is that he paints a rather grim picture of the role of the news media after the downfall of the bourgeois public sphere:
44 Ibid, 452.
45 Lasse Thomassen, Habermas: A Guide for the Perplexed. (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 38.
46 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an inquiry into a category of
bourgeois society (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989), 60.
The communicative network of a public made up of rationally debating private citizens has collapsed; the public opinion once emergent from it has partly decomposed into the informal opinions of publicistically effective institutions. Caught in the vortex of publicity that is tagged for show or manipulation the public of non organized private people is laid claim to not by public communication but by the communication of publicly manifested opinions.48
Habermas contends that citizens who should behave in a rational-critical manner have become mere consumers of news that has been offered to them by the commercial news media, which in turn are not functioning the way they should be. Jürgen Gehrards and Mike Schäfer pose that “the mass media drastically reduce social complexity - only a fraction of all available topics, actors and arguments can get published.”49 In this public sphere Habermas recognizes a shift away from critical publicity to manipulative publicity, meaning that those individual preferences that people will expound in public are being influenced not by critical reflection but by the whims of publicity industries, including the mass media.50 This growing uncritical stance of citizens and badly functioning news media is what Habermas calls the refeudalization of the public sphere.
This refeudalization of the public sphere results in public sphere that is no longer universally accessible and does not promote equality among those who participate. Incidentally, those are two important premises of a healthy democratic public sphere. The non-universality means that the public sphere is no longer a place in which all citizens are able to discuss and deliberate issues that are important to everyone, but now due to “the growing concentration of conglomerations of ownership in the media sectors of most industrialized societies” it is the news media, motivated by interests in money and power, instead of critical rational citizens, who decide what the content of the public sphere will be.51
These practices threaten the universality of the public sphere, but the equality within it is also below par. First of all Stuart Allan rightly poses that “it is evident that the social division between those with ‘information capital’ and those without are widening.”52 Especially because of rapid technological developments not everybody has equal access to or the right knowledge of participation on, for example, the internet. This leads to inequality in participation and therefore results in little or no participation in the sphere that has come into
48 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an inquiry into a category of
bourgeois society (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989), 247-8.
49 Jürgen Gerhards and Mike S. Schäfer, “Is the internet a better public sphere? Comparing old and new media in the USA and Germany,” New Media and Society 12, no. 1 (2010): 144.
50 Luke Goode, Jürgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere (Pluto Press: London, 2005), 24. 51 Stuart Allan, News Culture. (Maidenhaid: McGraw-Hill Open UP, 2010), 16.
existence online: the virtual public sphere. This both means that not everyone has equal access to online forms of journalism that should inform them, but also that not everyone can participate as a critical rational citizen online by contributing material themselves or reacting to others. Moreover, Nancy Fraser points out that the news media are generally in the hands of the dominant groups, which means that the mass media in this way stifles the voices of subordinated groups.53
Habermas concludes thus that the public sphere is in crisis. In the last pages of Structural Transformation, however, he takes up a hopeful tone when he poses that institutions that are part of the public sphere could and should try to enact critical publicity, this includes the news media.54 This would mean, for example, that journalists should adhere to certain moral and ethical norms to promote open dialogue amongst members of the public sphere. Following, therefore, is a discussion of the different ways that the notion of the public sphere has been reworked to accommodate contemporary changes in the public sphere. I moreover discuss why the Habermasian theory remains a useful analytical tool not only to envision a well working democracy but also as a normative model for the functioning of journalism in such a democracy. More precisely the following discussion conceptualizes the role of journalism in a public sphere permeated by new technologies such as the internet.
1.3.2 Dismissing Lifeworld and System
While Habermas contends that the public sphere is in crisis and that the media play a crucial role both in being the cause of that crisis but also partly in solving it, he fails to give a sufficient theoretical framework on how the media, or other forms of journalism could do this. In Between Facts and Norms he again discusses the media and the public sphere, but according to Douglas Kellner “he does not discuss the normative character of communication media in democracy or suggest how a progressive media politics could evolve.”55 Kellner therefore argues that for the public sphere theory to work in the current age of new media a shift in Habermas’s theoretical framework is necessary.
In order to succinctly explain and lay out Kellner’s critique let me define the definitions of the lifeworld and the system in the public sphere. The lifeworld encompasses all the societal processes that are being produced by social actors’ intentions. The result of those
53 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 64.
54 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 198.
55 Douglas Kellner, “Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention,” in Perspectives on
intentions might surpass the intentions of active agents, that is, the system in which social actors live and that transcends their purposeful actions. It is in the system that Habermas locates such inevitable steering institutions like money and power. This concept is applicable to the interplay of social media, journalists and democracy in the sense that specific actions either by citizens or journalists online have the potential of systemically influencing society even though the online environment in which they have been made would be counted as the lifeworld.
Habermas, in his critique of the current public sphere is sceptic of the critical and potentially democratic role that citizens can play through their actions in the lifeworld. As for the news media, he places these as functioning only on a systemic level, meaning that they are driven by abstract systemic forces, such as money and power, instead of being checked and influenced by citizens in the lifeworld. Habermas therefore overlooks the influence the news media have in both the lifeworld and the system. Kellner argues that “new technologies are permeating and dramatically transforming every aspect of what Habermas discusses as system and lifeworld, or earlier production and interaction, and that such a dualistic and quasi-transcendental categorical distinction can no longer be maintained.”56 According to Kellner, it is possible for the news media, while being part of the system to still influence democracy within the lifeworld. He suggests a model for a so-called radical democracy in which “the media are part of a constitutional balance of power, providing checks and balances against the other political spheres and should perform a crucial function of informing and cultivating a citizenry capable of actively participating in democratic politics.”57
At the same time Kellner also imagines individuals organizing “democratically to transform the media, technology and the various institutions of social life.”58 Theoretically this is an opportunity for subordinated groups, as mentioned by Nancy Fraser, to mobilize, educate and organize opposition from within the lifeworld to the public sphere and therefore contribute to the democratization of that sphere. Kellner envisions this to be possible through the use of new media, including the internet, he argues that new media has “multiplied information and discussion, of an admittedly varied sort, and thus provide potential for a more informed citizenry and more extensive democratic participation.”59
56 Douglas Kellner, “Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention,” in Perspectives on
Habermas, ed. by Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2000), 271.
Kellner goes even further by suggesting that not only new media will empower citizens, but that in order for it to do so and to be explained theoretically Habermas’s model needs to be adapted. Habermas’s strict division of lifeworld and system does not work in the time of new technology. As Kellner has posed, citizens are able to influence the system through their actions in their lifeworld, in other words critical rationality is permeating the system through information technology. These same information technologies hold a promise in them for individual journalists to escape the systemic forces of which news media are a part and instead contribute to a critical rational debate in the lifeworld as envisioned by Habermas. This different conception of Habermas’ theory turns it from a theory that conceives citizens as disempowered into one in which they are empowered. Within this different understanding of the theory subordinate groups are able to discuss and actively challenge the goings on in the public sphere with the help of new technologies. An example of how this might play out is embodied by the use of Twitter and Facebook during and leading up to the revolts against the authoritarian government in Cairo that started on January 25th, 2011 in Cairo and are still continuing as of writing this thesis. However, not only the dismissal of a strict boundary between system and lifeworld is necessary, the acknowledgment of multiple spheres is also vital to incorporate both the role of journalists and citizens in contemporary society.
1.3.3 Multiple Spheres and the Role of Journalism
To conceive of a normative role for journalism within Habermas’ public sphere, we need to look further than just the interplay between system and lifeworld. The existence of multiple spheres, as argued for both by Kellner and Fraser, and conceded to be necessary within his theory by Habermas himself, is the second necessary re-interpretation to the public sphere theory. When acknowledging that the public sphere exists of different spheres this leaves space for a normative model of how the news media should act in contemporary society. At first glance such a conception opens the opportunity for different kinds of media operating in different spheres. These counter public spheres could include opportunities for discourse between the members of a specific counter public. These members could consist not only of specific citizens but also of certain parts of the news media, such as online journalists and citizen journalists who are active online.60
Taking this a step further, Curran conceptualizes a model to foster democracy that theorizes the role of the news media more explicitly. Taking Great Britain as an example, he
theorizes that the public service broadcasting should provide the core of the media system, which is the public dialogue. Then he envisions four big sectors, or alternative spheres if you will, that “serve ‘decentred’ publics.”61 Within these alternative spheres he reserves key roles not only for professional journalism and commercial journalism, but also within the civic media sector for citizens who want to make contributions to journalism. The intention is that those spheres around the core “would need to provide and circulate inwardly affirming discourses within the emergent social grouping, but, equally, their members would also need to find a means of addressing the broader public of which they are also members.”62
The big difference here with Habermas is not the fact that there are multiple spheres, but that those spheres interact. Habermas focused not on this interaction but on the role of professional journalism as gatekeeper, through the use of professional norms, between the counter public spheres and the political public sphere. In Curran’s and Fraser’s conceptions, however, it is an interaction between those spheres, meaning that, as Kellner suggests, citizens can influence the political sphere through their actions such as education and mobilization. This opens up the possibilities for the democratizing role of new media like Twitter and Facebook in the hands of both citizens and journalists.
In short, this chapter has added three important ideas to the public sphere theory of Habermas. First, that multiple spheres exist and can interact. Secondly that critical rationality in the practice of the lifeworld has its limits and needs to be re-interpreted in contemporary society. And lastly that journalism can be active both in the system and the lifeworld through practices of both journalists and citizens. With this basis it is possible to proceed to the next chapter where the Habermasian theory will be set up as a theory suitable for the conception of a virtual public sphere.
Chapter 2 A Virtual Public Sphere
The age of the public sphere as face-to-face talk is clearly over: the question of democracy must henceforth take into account new forms of electronically mediated discourse.63
Mark Poster stated this back in 1995. And while this might be too crude there is no denying that people all around the world are connected and communicating through an intricate network stretching from so-called democratic countries to those ruled by dictators. This interconnectedness suggests a renewed possibility of critical rational debate among citizens who are no longer bound by space and to a lesser degree time. This leaves a lot of room to discuss the possible democratic implications of the internet and demands an answer to the question if the internet in any way can be regarded as a virtual public sphere. While Habermas’ public sphere theory is based on the bourgeois discussions that took place in coffee houses, he also poses how the public sphere could blossom through contemporary new techniques. He envisions that “a dispersed public interconnected almost exclusively through the electronic media can keep up to date on all kinds of issues and contributions in the mass media with a minimum of attention,”64 which can lead to democratic public opinion formation. The fact that he proposes this himself shows that his theory needs some more additions than only those discussed in the past chapter where it was established that there are multiple spheres and that there is no strict dualism between system and lifeworld.
In this chapter I therefore continue with the adaptation of the Habermasian public sphere theory to fit contemporary society. Building on the idea that the public sphere consists of multiple public spheres, I present and elaborate on a specific shape one of those spheres can take, namely the virtual public sphere. As I cannot discuss all scholarly positions to the fullest I focus on those that are specifically related to the place of journalism in that virtual public sphere. This means that this chapter is an exploration of the kinds of journalism that have come into existence or have flourished due to the existence of the internet, such as online professional journalism and citizen journalism. The idea is that these different forms of journalism are the key ingredients for a new healthy virtual public sphere.
2.1 A Virtual Public Sphere
As mentioned in the previous chapter, Habermas sees the possibility of the existence of a virtual public sphere, he however doubts its democratic potential:
63 Mark Poster, “CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere.” Website of University of California, Irvine, 1995, www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/writings/democ.html (accessed July 19th, 2011), 8.
Of course, the spontaneous and egalitarian nature of unlimited communication can have subversive effects under authoritarian regimes. But the web itself does not produce any public spheres. Its structure is not suited to focusing the attention of a dispersed public of citizens who form opinions simultaneously on the same topics and contributions which have been scrutinized and filtered by experts.65
Believing this, Habermas has not explored the possibility and width of a virtual public sphere as a normative model for contemporary democracies. However, considering the three big conclusions of the last chapter and seeing the possibilities offered by the internet it is not far-fetched to argue the existence of a virtual public sphere. First of all, one of the multiple spheres of the public sphere could be the virtual public sphere in which online critical rationalization could reverberate in the offline spheres of the public sphere.66 Furthermore, new forms of interaction that have come into existence on the internet allow for new ways to interpret critical rationalization as it is taking form in contemporary society. Lastly, the interaction of, among others, citizens and journalists online fit well with the idea that journalism can be active both in the system and the lifeworld.
Because of these connections between the Habermasian theory of the public sphere and the aspects of the internet, and then mainly social media, there have already been debates on the existence of a virtual public sphere. Mark Poster, Zizi Papachirissi, Jane B. Singer, Peter Dahlgren, James Slevin and Andrew Chadwick lead the discussion among others. I therefore address those different scholarly standpoints through a literature review. This allows for a conception of how such a virtual public sphere should at least normatively look.
2.1.2 Arguments Against a Virtual Public Sphere
The first main argument against the possible existence of a virtual public sphere is the idea that it does not live up to the standards of critical rational debate that Habermas has set for a healthy public sphere. Firstly, there are dominating elites, which are also present in the offline public sphere, who do not allow for a healthy environment for critical rational deliberation. Zizi Papacharissi poses that most discussions on the internet are “amorphous, fragmented, dominated by a few, and too specific to live up to the Habermasian ideal of rational accord.”67
65 Stuart Jeffries, “A rare interview with Jürgen Habermas,” Financial Times Magazine April 30, 2010, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/eda3bcd8-5327-11df-813e-00144feab49a.html#axzz2Z7a9p5gA (accessed 15 July, 2013).
66 To take this thinking even further I could also suggest that there are multiple spheres within the virtual public sphere. However, to keep this discussion a little more simple I will address the issue as if there is merely one virtual public sphere.
Secondly, Mark Poster also poses that Habermas envisions a public sphere as a homogeneous place inhabited by citizens on a quest for consensus.68 However, Poster supposes this situation is not the case on the internet because “it installs a new regime of relations between humans and matter and between matter and nonmatter, reconfiguring the relation of technology to culture and thereby undermining the standpoint from within which, in the past, a discourse developed.”69 By this he means that the internet shapes its users instead of it being a tool for the critical discourse necessary for a well functioning public sphere. Thirdly, Peter Dahlgren argues that deliberation on the internet is taking place in fragmented forums among groups of people who are already working towards a consensus.70 This means that discussions will rarely go in-depth in the critical-rational manner that Habermas advocates because those involved in the forum already greatly share the same opinion.
A second major argument against the existence of a healthy virtual public sphere is the so-called digital divide which seems to influence the democratic potentiality of the internet. The digital divide means that equal access does not exist on the internet or in social media. In 2005 Bart Cammaerts and Leo van Audenhove already stressed that “online engagement in forums is cyclical, tends to be dominated by those already politically active in the offline world and functions within a homogeneous ideological framework.”71 Gehrards and Schäfer also point out the lack of inclusion in the virtual public sphere by comparing inclusion of minor actors both in the print media and on the internet. They conclude that there is “minimal evidence to support the idea that the internet is a better communication as compared to print media. In both media, communication is dominated by (bio- and natural) scientific actors; popular inclusion does not occur.”72 Their conclusion is based on the fact that search engines on the internet exclude much of the diversity of opinion on the internet which consequently leads to a framing of search results supported by the dominant culture. This makes it harder for small actors to be heard on the internet.73
In addition to difficulties with accessibility and real critical rational debate, commodification is also viewed as a major factor in diminishing the internet as a public
68 Mark Poster, “CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere.” Website of University of California, Irvine, 1995, www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/writings/democ.html (accessed July 19th, 2011), 8.
69 Ibid, 4.
70 Peter Dahlgren, Television and the Public Sphere: citizenship, democracy and the media, (SAGE Publications: London, 2000), 158.
71 Bart Cammaerts and Leo Audenhove, “Online Political Debate, Unbounded Citizenship, and the Problematic Nature of a Transnational Public Sphere,” Political Communication 22, no. 2 (2005): 193.
72 Jürgen Gerhards and Mike S. Schäfer, “Is the internet a better public sphere? Comparing old and new media in the USA and Germany,” New Media and Society 12, no. 1 (2010): 155.
sphere. Habermas already theorized commodification of the public sphere, he concedes the public sphere has two functions: self-regulation and inclusiveness and he states that “while those aiming to influence are implemented by organizations that aim to promote purchasing power, loyalty or conformist behavior. These two functions compete with each other. The principle of publicity turns ‘against itself and thereby reduces its critical efficacy’”74 As for a possible digital public sphere W.L. Bennett stated: “The great weakness of the idea of electronic democracy is that it can be more easily commodified than explained.” 75 By this he means that when it is suggested that the internet is inherently democratic instead of recognizing that it is its participants that should make it democratic through hard work, they can become agents of commodification.
2.1.3 The Internet is a Public Sphere
While commodification, the digital divide and a potentially hostile environment for critical rational discussions are all valid arguments against a virtual public sphere, the following section discusses scholar’s counter-arguments to these critiques. By discussing these it is possible to set up a model of a virtual public sphere that is still in accordance with the basic principles of the Habermasian public sphere as established in the first chapter of this thesis.
First, I briefly point out the counter-argument against the danger of commodification of the internet. Alinta Thornton counters Bennett’s doomsday idea of the internet as a commodified virtual sphere. She does concede that within political rhetoric and decision-making citizens are often viewed as consumers, however, she believes that the internet offers the possibility to subvert this effect because there is room for dissenting voices that are not backed by commercial interests.76
Apart from arguments against the commodification of the virtual public sphere, many scholars also theorize how this sphere can actually be a breeding ground of critical rational debate. Firstly, James Slevin discusses the possibility of the internet being a forum of critical rational debate, something which Papacharissi, Poster and Dahlgren hold impossible. Slevin, however, makes a strong case for the existence of what he calls a “deliberative conception of mediated publicness” on the internet.77 He does concede that the internet as a public space is
74 Jürgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. by Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 437.
75 W. Lance Bennett, “New Media Power: The Internet and Global Activism,” in Contesting Media Power, ed. Nick Couldry and James Curran (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 248.
76 Alinta Thornton, “Does Internet Create Democracy?” Equid Novi: South African Journalism Studies 22, no. 2 (2002): 138.
