Mediating the Public Sphere: Habermas and Net Neutrality
“If it is to be truly relevant to our world today, the theory of the public sphere must not content itself with being a theory of communication: it must also become a theory of mediation.”
In a 1963 dictionary article, Habermas described the public sphere as “a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed .” The idea was that citizens could gather as equals in a public body to confer with the guarantee of “freedom of assembly and association and the freedom to express and publish their opinions about matters of general interest”.
In its popular usage the term ‘public sphere’ refers to shared space, but for Habermas, the public sphere represented something specific: an ideal situation in which public opinion was shaped by rational deliberation of the public good. Only the elements of society in which citizens held a shared dependence were considered as ‘public’, all other elements were private interests, and not to be discussed in the public sphere. Public issues were therefore mostly concerned with law and markets generally. His closest approximation of that ideal was found in the English cafes and French salons of the mid 18th century, in what Habermas refers to as the “Bourgeois public sphere”. This is the first instance of private individuals gathering as a public, to publicly employ reason in deliberation over issues for use against the public authority.
Habermas provides several reasons for the emergence of this phenomenon: the rise of capitalism, the growth of a centralized state, the state dependence on capitalists for taxation, the capitalist dependence on laws to protect individuals and their assets, and the public recognition of shared dependence, and therefore concern towards the State.
The public sphere therefore could be considered as a sphere which mediates between society and state. “Society, now a private realm occupying a position in opposition to the state, stood on the one hand as if in clear contrast to the state.” The public became the bearer of public opinion, in accordance with hard-fought democratic principles. Liberal values, such as equality and autonomy, led individuals to active participation in politics, for their capitalist interests were closely aligned with the workings of state policy. In newspapers and critical journals, they debated with public authority on issues of labor and commodity exchange.
The public sphere therefore seems to have emerged by way of a conflation of two traditions: what Habermas identifies as the republican tradition, with its community values and shared concerns, and the liberal tradition - stemming from the enlightenment, but emboldened by a capitalist force. More importantly, overriding both traditions was the shared belief in a democracy driven by public opinion – that individuals and the state share the same fate, and therefore it is crucial that public opinion is formed by way of rational deliberation over the issues of general interest.
But the ideal bourgeois public sphere could not last. By the mid-ninetieth century, the diffusion of press and propaganda led the public body to expand beyond the bounds of the bourgeois public sphere. Whereas the idealized public sphere was concerned with shared, and general interests, conflicts previously restricted to the private sphere began to intrude on the public sphere. The public sphere, which must mediate those demands, became a field for the competition of interests. This therefore enables certain individual actors to capitalize off the conflict in a quest for political power. This Habermas describes as the “refeudalization of the public sphere”, in which “large organizations strive for political compromises with the state and with each other, excluding the public sphere whenever possible”. The support of the public therefore became something that was sought from the top down.
The problem therefore seems to stem from mediation. When public bodies become too large to fit into a town hall, representation is needed for the transmission of message. Communicating a message originated with the printing press, but over the 18th and 19th century, the transmission of message changed from newspapers, to radio, and to television, mediated by mass media outlets. The public sphere was transformed by the influx of private interests, which received special prominence in the mass media.
Habermas referred to the bourgeois public sphere as it existed prior to mass media. The object of the inquiry was “the rise and decline of a historically specific and limited form of the public sphere” with the aim to identity the conditions that made it possible. The result, according to Nancy Fraser, was the conviction that under the conditions of the late-twentieth century “welfare state mass democracy,” the bourgeois or liberal model of the public sphere is no longer feasible, or adequate for “the critique of the limits of actually existing democracy in late-capitalist societies.” With media firmly associated either with government control or market-demands, the public sphere in which it served as a method of communication, became less a sphere for deliberative discourse for the purpose of will-formation. Some new form of public sphere is therefore required to salvage the critical function of the public sphere, and to legitimize a democracy that functions on public opinion.
Habermas, over his career consistently placed importance on conditions of communication. In his 2000 work The Inclusion of the Other, he wrote :
“The concept of deliberative politics acquires empirical relevance only when we take into account the multiplicity of forms of communication in which a common will is produced… Everything depends on the conditions of communication and the procedures that lend the institutionalized opinion- and will-formation their legitimating force”
Under these circumstances, Fraser finds it odd that “Habermas stops short of developing a new, post-bourgeois model of the public sphere,” one in which takes modern mass communication seriously. But there seems no lack of individuals who are willing to take up the project. Fraser herself, in identifying four “constitutive assumptions of the bourgeois conception of the public sphere,” reforms corresponding elements necessary for a new, post-bourgeois conception of the public sphere: 1) the elimination of social inequality (rather than the ideal ‘bracketing’ of social status found in the idealized cafe); 2) a multiplicity of publics is preferable to a single public sphere – for it allow for complex specialization of issues; 3) the public sphere must permit the inclusion of interests and issues that bourgeois ideology labels “private” and treats as inadmissible, such as sex and gender issues; therefore understanding of norms themselves can arise from deliberation; 4) a defensible conception must allow both for strong publics and for weak publics and that it should help theorize the relations among them
It is the last element that seems problematic: how does a fragmented public sphere engage in deliberation? How do the weak fragments of social groups transfer communicative power to the strong public of state power?
I think a relevant example of this could be found in what is being described as “the Obama effect”, and “the Tech effect”. “Obama’s campaign used the Internet, social networks, and new technology to galvanize support, generate millions in donations, and ultimately attract millions of new, younger voters”. Engagement with the internet was engagement with the public, found as and in the distributed social networks of the internet.
The internet as a network that encompasses the whole public (so long as they have a computer and internet access) allows for a new type of mediated communication. Yochai Benkler, in his recent book The Wealth of Networks articulates the failings of the traditional media as a platform for public discourse. It is too limited to capture the complexities of modern society, it is corruptible by large power, it tends to be inane and soothing rather than political engaging, and it oversimplifies complex public discussion.
The internet, on the other hand, as a result of a ‘networked information economy’, enables a shift from the mass-mediated public sphere to a networked public sphere. The networked information economy improves the public sphere by enabling more individuals to communicate ideas, empowering individuals to actively participate in public deliberation, further, intellectual content is no longer exclusively controlled by media owners. Most importantly, the structure of the public sphere improved with “technological developments that the unique neutral internet enables: the development of a wide range of mechanisms, originating with mailing lists, newsgroups, text-based static websites, and now the more sophisticated capacities for user-generated content as well as mechanisms for mobility
The notion of a sphere in which individuals work together in a participatory fashion in the creation of communicative tools seems to be in line with John Dewey’s designation of the modern public as “a political process in which common cause is built through the search for solutions to problems initially encountered as private concerns.” Whereas a private concern might have been that the mediation of traditional media sources corrupted pure deliberative communication, the internet has developed as a solution.
Gone are the days of a one-to-many distribution of information, perhaps even tainted by values of political power or big business. The internet makes all users also providers of content, enabling a many-to-many distribution of information. In regards to the problem of mediation, the user now has a choice in the information that one will subscribe to. The internet provides all possible viewpoints/ formulations/ideologies/argumentations. Individuals are free to use their reason in deciding how their opinions are shaped: for example, one might live off Fox News for political insight, while another might consult with several newspapers, a few prominent blogs of respected scholars, and forum scrum. Individual valuing based on reason and public deliberation also contributes to public valuing: we see this most prominently in social aggregate mechanisms such as Delicious bookmarking, Digg, Stumbleupon, and Google heuristics engine. Knowledge becomes aggregated according to the public. Further, pages like wikipedia fit into a habermasian public sphere almost ideally. Articles and arguments are written by all members, claims are cited to their peer reviewed academic sources, viewpoints and value judgements are flagged, and the user is not convinced, he/she can contribute to the article with their concern.
In 2006, Habermas wrote the article “Political Communication in Media Society” in which he further articulated a communication model of deliberative politics. There were two critical conditions for the applicability of a communication model of deliberative politics:
“mediated political communication in the public sphere can facilitate deliberative legitimization processes in complex societies only if a self-regulating media system gains independence from its social environments and if anonymous audiences grant a feedback between an informed elite discourse and a responsive civil society”.
This seems especially relevant for the justification of the internet as neutral mediator of the public sphere. As described, the internet functions according to independent mechanisms. Further, feeback exists in the sense that public opinion is informed by way of the internet, which translates to representational democratic voting.
The internet is neutral essentially, according to Weitzner: “This is a statement of fact about how the Internet is designed and operated, not a matter for debate in public policy circles. The neutrality of the Internet has made it an open platform for the free flow of information, ideas and commerce.
It is not enough to wonder if the Internet exists as a public sphere. We must go further in examining how the internet can enable a greater public sphere by way of participatory culture engaged with technology on their own terms, as found in diverse levels from open-source projects, social networking (either for funds or for significance), and social aggregation mechanics for a democratic valuing and transmission of content. With this in mind, it seems that an overarching concern, for all those who value the ideal of public sphere, should be “how will society protect the physical infrastructure and enabling practices of neutral data transmission on which all else depends?”
According to Larry Lessig, the internet developed into a robust, end-to-end network because telephone carriers were regulated as common carriers. They were required to carry all traffic without discrimination. What this means is that the network itself did not know what the data packets were for, and did not privilege certain packets over others, or drop packets that were deemed undesirable. In 1999–2000, as cable internet was becoming more popular and more prominent, worries started to arise that the cable broadband architecture could be manipulated to deviate from the neutral, end-to-end architecture of the Internet. Once it became known that indeed certain companies were ”shaping” their data flows, concerned citizens formed groups under the rubric of “Network Neutrality”.
Weitzner claims “the heart of the debate is the question of whether Internet Service Providers ought to be subject to a non-discrimination (aka neutrality) requirement.” The challenge is to “identify and preserve (or at least not erode) the essential conditions of neutrality that have characterized the Internet.” And this seems like something Habermas would endorse.
Bibliography
Benkler, Yochai. “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom” Yale University Press, 2006. <http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300110561>
Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy” in Habermas and the Public Sphere (Craig Calhoun, ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 109-142. 1992.
Goode, Luke. “Jurgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere”. Pluto Press: London, Michigan. 2005.
Habermas, Jurgen. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)” New German Critique, No.3 49-55. 1974.
Habermas, Jurgen. Between Facts and Norms, Contributions to Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Habermas, Jurgen. ”Civil Society and the Political Public Sphere (1996)” In Contemporary Sociological Theory, (Calhoun ed). 388-407
Habermas, Jurgen. “The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory” Cambridge, MA. MIT Press. 2000
Habermas, Jurgen. “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research (2006)” Communication Theory 16. 411–426
Johnson, Pauline. “Habermas: Rescuing the Public Sphere”. Routledge: New York, New York. 2006
Weitzner, Daniel J. “The Neutral Internet: An Information Architecture for Open Societies”. Cambridge, MA. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. <http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2006/06/neutralnet.html>
Neutrality.ca. “The Obama Effect on Canadian Tech Policy.” 5/11/2008.<http://www.neutrality.ca/index.php?option=com_extcon&task=view&eid=1&cid=3490>
