Jurgen Habermas IV (p.22-40)

#ethics

Class: PHIL-282
Author: Jürgen Habermas
Book: A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, edited by Ciaran Cronin.

Notes:

Text

(3) Before addressing specific changes in the structure of the media and hypotheses concerning their implications for the political function of the public sphere, I would like to interpolate some remarks on the economic, social and cultural boundary conditions that must be sufficiently satisfied if deliberative politics is to be possible.

For it is only against the backdrop of the complex causes of the crisis tendencies of capitalist democracies in general that we can correctly assess the limited contribution, among the possible causes of an impairment of deliberative opinion and will formation, attributable to the digitalization of public communication.

Active citizenship requires, first, a by and large liberal political culture consisting of a delicate fabric of attitudes and taken-for-granted cultural assumptions. This is because the population's basic understanding of the democratic constitutional principles, which remains for the most part implicit, is embedded in an extensive network of historical memories and traditional beliefs, practices and value orientations; these are preserved from generation to generation only thanks to customary patterns of political socialization and institutionalized patterns of political education. The time span of half a century that was required, for example, for the political resocialization of the population of the (old) Federal Republic of Germany after the end of the Nazi dictatorship - despite the preceding 150 years of constitutional development - is an indicator of the obstacles that generally have to be overcome by any acclimatization to a liberal political culture. For the moral core of such a culture consists in the willingness of citizens to reciprocally recognize others as fellow citizens and democratic co-legislators endowed with equal rights. This begins with regarding political adversaries in a spirit open to compromise as opponents and no longer as enemies - and it continues, beyond the limits of different ethnic, linguistic and religious forms of life, with the reciprocal inclusion of strangers, who wish to remain strangers to one another, in a shared political culture.

This political culture must have differentiated itself from the respective majority culture to such an extent that every citizen in a pluralistic society can recognize himself or herself as a member. The social bond of a society, however heterogeneous it may be, will remain intact only if political integration as a general rule ensures a form of civic solidarity that, far from demanding unconditional altruism, calls for a limited reciprocal willingness to assist. This kind of solidarity [Füreinander-Einstehen] goes beyond the willingness to make compromises based on one's interests. Nevertheless, among fellow members of the same political community, it is invariably bound up with the indeterminate expectation of a reciprocal reconciliation of interests that may be required in the long run - specifically, with the expectation that others will feel obliged to provide similar assistance in a similar situation. A 'liberal' political culture is not a breeding ground for libertarian' attitudes; it calls for an orientation to the common good, albeit one that makes modest demands on its addressees. An outvoted minority will not be able to accept majority decisions if all citizens base their electoral decisions exclusively on their short-term self-interest. A sufficient - and, moreover, representative - proportion of citizens must also be willing to perform the role of democratic co-legislators with an orientation to the common good.

A second precondition of an active civil society is a level of social equality that allows the spontaneous and sufficient participation of the electorate in the democratic process of opinion and will formation, although such participation must not be made compulsory. The architecture of the constitutional state's system of basic rights - which guarantees the freedoms of private citizens through subjective private rights (and welfare state entitlements), on the one hand, and the political autonomy of public citizens through subjective rights of public communication and participation, on the other - only becomes fully accessible in the light of the functional meaning of the complementary roles that the private and public autonomy of citizens also play for each other, aside from their respective intrinsic value. On the one hand, the political rights empower citizens in their civic role to participate in democratic legislation, which decides, among other things, on the distribution of private rights and entitlements, and thus on their opportunities to acquire an appropriate social status as private citizens; on the other hand, this societal status in turn creates the social presuppositions and motivations for the use that public citizens actually make of their civic rights in each case. There is ample evidence of the close correlation between social status and voter turnout. But this expectation that democratic participation and securing social status should enable each other will function only as long as democratic elections actually rectify substantial and structurally entrenched social inequalities. Empirical studies confirm that a vicious circle becomes established when abstentionism becomes entrenched among the lower status segments of the population due to resignation over the lack of perceptible improvements in living conditions. Then the political parties that used to be

'responsible' for the interests of these disadvantaged strata tend to neglect a clientele from which they cannot currently expect to receive votes; and this tendency in turn strengthens the motivation for abstentionism. Today, the success of populist movements in mobilizing the potential of these non-voters is leading, not to a reversal, but to an ironic inversion of this vicious circle. Then, of course, these radicalized groups of non-voters no longer participate in elections under the accepted presuppositions of a democratic election, but instead in the spirit of obstructionist 'opposition to the system'. Even if this populism of the 'disconnected' cannot be explained solely by increasing social inequality, because other strata that are struggling to adapt to accelerated technological and social change also feel 'disconnected', it is at any rate a manifestation of a critical disintegration of society and a lack of successful policies to counteract it. This draws attention, finally, to the precarious relationship between the democratic state and a capitalist economy, which tends to reinforce social inequalities. The balancing of the conflicting functional imperatives by the welfare state is (at this level of abstraction) the third precondition for the success of a democratic regime worthy of the name. Political economy first revealed the systematic connection between the political system and society; this was the perspective from which I traced the structural transformation of the public sphere in the earlier work.

However, a liberal political culture is more a boundary condition for the state, one which happens to be satisfied to a greater or lesser extent, rather than something whose development could be influenced by the state itself with administrative means. The situation is different with the social stratification of society and the existing degree of social inequality. In any case, self-perpetuating capitalist modernization generates a need for state regulation to curb the centrifugal forces of social disintegration. The governments of those national welfare states that emerged in the West during the second half of the twentieth century find themselves compelled to undertake such political countermeasures under increasingly demanding conditions of political legitimation. To avoid crises of social integration, governments, as Claus Offe has shown, are trying to satisfy two conflicting demands: on the one hand, they must ensure sufficiently favourable conditions for the valorization of capital in order to generate tax revenues; on the other hand, from the point of view of political and social justice, governments must satisfy the interest of the population as a whole in securing the legal and material preconditions of the private and public autonomy of every citizen - otherwise they will be stripped of their democratic legitimacy. However, capitalist democracies will only be able to steer a course of crisis avoidance between these two imperatives if they possess sufficient governance capacity. In other words, the scope of the interventionist policies must match the extent of the economic cycles relevant for securing national prosperity. Evidently, the Western democracies satisfied this condition sufficiently only for a limited period - namely, only until the worldwide deregulation of markets and the globalization of financial markets, which since then have controlled the financial policies of the states.

A historical account of national public spheres based on these roughly outlined systematic viewpoints would reveal how difficult it is to arrive at any tenable generalizations at all about the framework conditions for the functioning of these public spheres in different historical periods. National peculiarities overlay the general trends towards the kind of nationally organized capitalism that shaped the post-war development of democracy in the West until the neoliberal turn. While during this period the development of the welfare state strengthened popular support for democracy, privatist trends towards depoliticization already emerged in the course of the development of a consumer society (whose beginnings I probably overemphasized in Structural Transformation in the climate of the Adenauer period, which was experienced as authoritarian). Since the shift towards neoliberal policies, however, the Western democracies have entered a phase of increasing internal destabilization, which is being aggravated by the challenges of the climate crisis and the growing pressure of immigration. A further aggravating factor is the perceived rise of China and of other 'emerging countries' and the resulting transformation of the global economic and political landscape. Domestically, social inequality has increased as nation-states' scope for action has been constrained by imperatives of globally deregulated markets. In the affected subcultures, the fear of social decline has grown in tandem with anxiety over the inability of the nation-state to cope with the complexity of the accelerated social changes.

Even apart from the new global political situation created by the pandemic, these circumstances suggest the prospect of closer integration for the nation-states united in the European Union - in other words, that they should strive to recover the competences they have lost at the national level in the course of this development by creating new political capacities for action at the transnational level.

However, a sober description of institutional approaches to global governance, which have consolidated rather than dismantled international asymmetries of power, does not inspire hope.

In particular, the indecisiveness of the EU in the face of its current problems raises the question of how nation-states can unite at the transnational level to form a democratic regime which, without itself assuming the character of an actual state, would nevertheless have the power to act globally. This would also presuppose a more pronounced opening of the national public spheres to each other.

But both the divisions within the EU and the halting, but ultimately accomplished, Brexit suggest that existing democratic regimes are instead becoming depleted - and that the foreign policy of the major powers might even revert to a new kind of imperialism. For the time being, we do not know how the national and global economic problems facing a world society stricken by a pandemic will be perceived and processed by the political elites in our countries who still have some power to act. At the moment, there are few pointers for the desirable policy shift to a social and ecological agenda leading to greater integration at least of core Europe.

(4) The media system is of crucial importance for the role of the political public sphere in generating competing public opinions that satisfy the standards of deliberative politics. For the deliberative quality of public opinions depends on whether the process from which they emerge satisfies certain functional requirements on the input side and on the throughput and output sides. Public opinions are only relevant if opinion makers from the ranks of politics, as well as the lobbyists and PR agencies of the functional subsystems of society and, finally, the various actors from civil society, are sufficiently responsive to discover the problems in need of regulation and then to ensure the correct input. And public opinions are

only effective if the corresponding topics and contributions of opinion makers find their way into the public eye and, on the output side, attract the attention of the wider - voting - population. Our primary interest here is in the media system responsible for the throughput. Although for civil society actors, face-to-face encounters in everyday life and in public events represent the two local regions of the public sphere in which their own initiatives originate, the public communication steered by mass media is the only domain in which the communicative din can condense into relevant and effective public opinions. Our topic is how digitalization has changed the media system that steers this mass communication. The technically and organizationally highly complex media system requires a professionalized staff that plays the gatekeeper role (as it has come to be called) for the communication flows out of which the citizens distil public opinions. This staff comprises journalists who work for the news services, the media and the publishing houses - in other words, specialists who perform authorial, editorial, proofreading and managerial functions in the media and publishing business. This staff directs the throughput and, together with the companies that manage production and organize distribution, forms the infrastructure of the public sphere that ultimately determines the two decisive parameters of public communication - the scope and the deliberative quality of the offerings. How inclusive the reception of the published opinions actually is - how intensively and with what investment of time they are received on the output side by readers and listeners and are processed further into effective public opinions in the two aforementioned local areas of the political public sphere and, finally, are cashed out in the political system in the currency of election results ultimately depends on media users, specifically on their attention and interest, their time budgets, their educational background and so on.

The influence of digital media on a further structural transformation of the political public sphere can be read off, since the turn of the millennium or thereabouts, from the extent and nature of media usage. Whether this change also affects the deliberative quality of public debate is an open question. As the relevant research in the fields of communication studies, political science and the sociology of elections - especially research on voter turnout and public ignorance - demonstrates, the values for these two dimensions of public communication by democratic standards were already anything but satisfactory prior to digitalization; however, they pointed to democratic conditions that still fell some way short of stability-endangering crises.

Today, the signs of political regression are there for everyone to see. Whether and to what extent the state of the political public sphere is also contributing to this development would have to be shown by examining the inclusiveness of public opinion formation and the rationality of the prominent public opinions. Evidently, empirical surveys of this second variable face major obstacles. While data exist for media usage, even in the case of procedurally regulated opinion formation in individual bodies, such as committees, parliaments and courts, it is difficult to operationalize a theoretical factor such as 'deliberative quality;' but the difficulty is even more acute in the case of the unregulated communication processes in large-scale national public spheres. However, the data from a long-term comparative study of media use enable us make inferences from an independent assessment of the quality of the media offerings that are being consumed to the level of reflectiveness of public opinions. Before pursuing this question further, however, we need to get clear about the revolutionary character of the new media. For they not only involve an expansion of the range of the previously available media, but also a caesura in the historical development of the media comparable to the introduction of printing.

After the first evolutionary advance to recording the spoken word in writing, the introduction of the mechanical printing press in early modernity meant that the alphabetic characters became detached from handwritten parchment; in recent decades, as a result of electronic digitalization, binary-coded characters have become detached in a similar way from printed paper. As this further, equally momentous innovation has unfolded, the communication flows of our garrulous species have spread, accelerated and become networked with unprecedented speed across the entire globe and, retrospectively, across all epochs of world history. With this global dissolution of spatial and temporal boundaries, these flows have simultaneously become condensed, their functions and contents have been differentiated and have multiplied, and they have been generalized across cultural and class-specific divisions. The innovative idea that ushered in this third revolution in communications technologies was the worldwide networking of computers, enabling any person to communicate with any other person regardless of where they were in the world. At first, it was scientists who used the new technology. In 1991, the American National Science Foundation decided to make this invention available for private use, which meant that it was also available for commercial purposes. This was the decisive step towards the establishment of the world wide web two years later, which created the technical basis for the logical completion of a development in communications technology that, over the course of human history, gradually overcame the original limitation of linguistic communication to face-to-face oral conversations and exchanges within hearing range. For many areas of life and activity, this innovation opens up undoubted advances. But for the democratic public sphere, the centrifugal expansion of simultaneously accelerated communication to include an arbitrary number of participants across arbitrary distances generates an ambivalent explosive force, because the public sphere, with its orientation to the centralized state organizations with the political power to act, is for the time being limited to national territories. There can be no doubt that the expansion and acceleration of opportunities for communication and the increased scope of the publicly thematized events have advantages for political citizens as well. The world has also shrunk on the television screens in our living rooms. The contents of press products and of radio and television programmes do not change when they are received on smartphones. And when films are produced for streaming services like Netflix, this may lead to interesting aesthetic changes; but the changes in reception and the regrettable depletion of the cinema have long been heralded by the competition of television. Aside from its evident benefits, the new technology, on the other hand, also has highly ambivalent and potentially disruptive repercussions for the political public sphere in the national context. This is a result of how consumers of the new media make use of the availability of limitless possibilities for networking, i.e. of 'platforms' for possible communications with arbitrary addressees.

For the media structure of the public sphere, it is this platform character of the new media that represents the real novelty. It means that they dispense with the productive role of journalistic mediation and programme design performed by the old media; in this respect, the new media are not 'media' in the received sense. They radically alter the pattern of communication that has been dominant in the public sphere until now by empowering all potential users in principle to become independent and equally entitled authors. The 'new' media differ from their traditional counterparts in that digital companies make use of this technology to offer potential users the unlimited opportunities for digital networking like blank slates for their own communicative content. Unlike the traditional news services and publishers, such as print media, radio and television, these companies are not responsible for their own 'programmes, that is, for professionally produced and editorially filtered communicative contents. They neither produce, nor edit nor select; but by acting in the global network as intermediaries 'without responsibility' who establish new connections and, with the contingent multiplication and acceleration of unexpected contacts, initiate and intensify discourses with unpredictable contents, they are profoundly altering the character of public communication itself.

Broadcasting and publishing establish a linear and one-way connection between a broadcaster or publisher and many potential recipients. The two sides encounter each other in different roles: on the one side, publicly identifiable or known producers, editors and authors responsible for what they broadcast or publish; on the other side, an anonymous audience of readers, listeners or viewers. In contrast, platforms provide a multifaceted communicative connection open to networking that facilitates the spontaneous exchange of possible contents between potentially many users. The latter are not differentiated as regards their roles by the medium alone; rather, in communicative exchanges on spontaneously chosen topics, they encounter each other as participants who are in principle equal and self-responsible. Unlike the asymmetrical relationship between broadcasters or publishers and recipients, the decentralized connection between these media users is fundamentally reciprocal, but its content is unregulated because professional filters are lacking. The egalitarian and unregulated character of the relationships between participants and the equal authorization of users to make their own spontaneous contributions constitute the communicative pattern that was originally supposed to be the hallmark of the new media. Today, this great emancipatory promise is being drowned out, at least in part, by the desolate cacophony in fragmented, self-enclosed echo chambers.

The new pattern of communication has generated two remarkable effects for the structural transformation of the public sphere. At first, the egalitarian-universalistic claim of the bourgeois public sphere to include all citizens equally seemed to be finally fulfilled in the guise of the new media. These media promised to grant all citizens their own publicly perceptible voice and even to lend it mobilizing power.

They would liberate users from the receptive role of addressees who choose between a limited range of programmes and give each individual the chance to make his or her voice heard in the anarchic exchange of spontaneous opinions. But the lava of this at once anti-authoritarian and egalitarian potential, which was still discernible in the Californian founding spirit of the early years, soon solidified in Silicon Valley into the libertarian grimace of world-dominating digital corporations. Moreover, the worldwide organizational potential offered by the new media is at the service of radical right-wing networks as well as the courageous Belarusian women in their tenacious protest against Lukashenko. One effect is the self-empowerment of media users; the other is the price the latter pay for being released from the editorial tutelage of the old media as long as they are not yet sufficiently proficient in dealing with the new media. Just as printing made everyone a potential reader, today digitalization is turning everyone into a potential author. But how long did it take until everyone was able to read?

The platforms do not offer their emancipated users any substitute for the professional selection and discursive examination of contents based on generally accepted cognitive standards. This is why there is currently so much talk of the erosion of the gatekeeper model of the mass media. This model in no way implies the disenfranchisement of media users; it merely describes a form of communication that can enable citizens to acquire the necessary knowledge and information so that each of them can form his or her own opinion about problems in need of political regulation. A politically appropriate exercise of the author role, which is not the same as the consumer role, tends to heighten one's awareness of deficiencies in one's own level of knowledge. The author role also has to be learned; and as long as authorial competence is lacking in the political exchange in social media, the quality of the uninhibited discourses that are shielded from dissonant opinions and criticism will continue to suffer. This is what first exposes political opinion and will formation in the political community to the danger of fragmentation in conjunction with a simultaneously unbounded public sphere. The boundless communication networks that spontaneously take shape around certain topics or individuals can spread centrifugally while simultaneously condensing into communication circuits that dogmatically seal themselves off from each other. Then the trends towards fragmentation and the dissolution of boundaries reinforce each other to create a dynamic that counteracts the integrating power of the communication context of the nationally centred public spheres established by the press, radio and television.

Before going into this dynamic in greater detail, I would first like to review how the share of social media in the overall media offerings has evolved.

Summary & Notes

I. Boundary Conditions for Deliberative Politics (Sections 1-9)

Habermas emphasizes that the impairment of deliberative politics must be assessed against the backdrop of broader crisis tendencies in capitalist democracies. Three main preconditions must be satisfied:

1. A Liberal Political Culture

Definition: This requires a delicate fabric of attitudes and cultural assumptions, embedded in historical memory and institutionalized political education.
Moral Core: It rests on the willingness of citizens to reciprocally recognize others as fellow citizens and democratic co-legislators endowed with equal rights.
Civic Solidarity: Citizens must regard political adversaries as opponents open to compromise, not enemies.
Common Good: This culture is not a breeding ground for 'libertarian' attitudes, but calls for an orientation to the common good, which demands modest, limited reciprocal willingness to assist.
Pluralism: The political culture must have differentiated itself sufficiently from the majority culture so that every citizen in a pluralistic society can recognize themselves as a member.

Requirement: A level of social equality is needed to allow spontaneous and sufficient participation of the electorate.
The Vicious Circle: There is a close correlation between social status and voter turnout. Abstentionism becomes entrenched among lower status segments due to resignation over the lack of improvements in living conditions. Political parties then tend to neglect these disadvantaged strata, strengthening the motivation for abstentionism.
Populist Inversion: Today, populist movements mobilize these non-voters, leading to an "ironic inversion" of this vicious circle. These radicalized groups participate "in the spirit of obstructionist 'opposition to the system'".
Manifestation: This obstructionism is a manifestation of critical social disintegration and failing policies to counteract increasing social inequality.

3. Governance Capacity and Crisis Avoidance

Economic Tension: Democratic regimes must balance the political system and the capitalist economy.
Conflicting Demands: Governments must satisfy two conflicting demands to avoid crises of social integration:
1. Ensure favorable conditions for capital valorization (to generate tax revenues).
2. Satisfy the population's interest in securing the private and public autonomy of every citizen (to maintain democratic legitimacy).
Globalization's Effect: Capitalist democracies could only steer a course of crisis avoidance until the worldwide deregulation of markets and globalization of financial markets, which constrained the national states’ scope for action.
Current Destabilization: Western democracies are currently in a phase of increasing internal destabilization, aggravated by global challenges like the climate crisis and immigration pressure. This suggests a need for closer transnational integration, particularly within the EU, to recover lost competences.

II. The Media System and the Gatekeeper Role (Sections 10-13)

The media system is critically important for the "throughput" of public communication, determining whether the resulting public opinions satisfy the standards of deliberative politics.

Gatekeeper Model: The technically and organizationally complex media system requires a professionalized staff (journalists, editors, etc.) who play the "gatekeeper role" for communication flows.
Parameters of Quality: This staff directs the throughput and determines the two decisive parameters of public communication: the scope and the deliberative quality of the offerings.
Pre-Digitalization Status: Prior to digitalization, the deliberative quality and inclusiveness of public opinion formation were "anything but satisfactory," but they did not yet signal stability-endangering crises.
Current Regression: Today, "the signs of political regression are there for everyone to see".

III. The Revolutionary Change: Digitalization and Platforms (Sections 14-16)

Digitalization is a "caesura in the historical development of the media comparable to the introduction of printing".

The Third Communications Revolution

The first revolution moved from speech to writing. The second (printing press) detached alphabetic characters from parchment. The third (electronic digitalization) detached binary-coded characters from printed paper.
This innovation caused communication flows to "spread, accelerated and become networked with unprecedented speed across the entire globe".
Ambivalence: This expansion generates an "ambivalent explosive force" for the public sphere, which remains politically limited to national territories.

The "Real Novelty": Platform Character

Definition: The "platform character of the new media" is the "real novelty" that drives the structural transformation.
Abandoning Mediation: Platforms dispense with the "productive role of journalistic mediation and programme design" performed by the old media.
Intermediaries Without Responsibility: Digital companies offer users "unlimited opportunities for digital networking like blank slates for their own communicative content". Unlike traditional news services, platforms "neither produce, nor edit nor select" content, acting as intermediaries "without responsibility".
Communication Pattern Shift: Traditional media created a linear, one-way, asymmetrical connection between known, responsible producers and an anonymous audience. Platforms facilitate a decentralized, reciprocal, and multifaceted connection where users are "in principle equal and self-responsible" participants. The content on platforms is "unregulated because professional filters are lacking".

IV. Disruptive Repercussions and Concerns (Sections 16-19)

The unregulated, reciprocal nature of platforms undermines the integrating power of the public sphere.

Failure of the Emancipatory Promise

The new media initially presented a "great emancipatory promise" by seemingly fulfilling the "egalitarian-universalistic claim of the bourgeois public sphere," granting every citizen a publicly perceptible voice.
However, this promise is being "drowned out, at least in part, by the desolate cacophony in fragmented, self-enclosed echo chambers".
The initial anti-authoritarian potential "soon solidified in Silicon Valley into the libertarian grimace of world-dominating digital corporations".

Erosion of Deliberative Quality

No Substitute: Platforms "do not offer their emancipated users any substitute for the professional selection and discursive examination of contents based on generally accepted cognitive standards".
Gatekeeper Erosion: This leads to the "erosion of the gatekeeper model of the mass media". The gatekeeper model was essential because it enabled citizens to acquire the necessary knowledge to form their own opinions.
Authorial Competence: While digitalization turns everyone into a potential author, the political author role must be learned. As long as this competence is lacking, the quality of uninhibited discourses suffers.

Fragmentation and Isolation

The uninhibited discourses are "shielded from dissonant opinions and criticism".
Communication circuits spontaneously form, condensing and "dogmatically seal themselves off from each other".
This dynamic of fragmentation and dissolution of boundaries "counteracts the integrating power of the communication context of the nationally centred public spheres" established by traditional media.
Subjective Consequence (from conversation history): This fragmentation "jeopardized among an increasing portion of the citizenry" the necessary intellectual capacity or "subjective prerequisite for a more or less deliberative mode of opinion and will formation".