Jurgen Habermas V - (p.41-59)
Class: PHIL-282
Author: Jürgen Habermas
Book: A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, edited by Ciaran Cronin.
Notes:
Text
(5) Empirically speaking, the impact of the introduction of the internet, and of social media in particular, on opinion and will formation in the political public sphere is not easy to circumscribe. However, the findings of the long-term study on media use in Germany conducted by the national broadcasters for the period from 1964 to 2020 permit some rough conclusions about changes in the media offerings and their use.
There was a considerable expansion of offerings, first as a result of the introduction of commercial television, and then above all due to the wide range of online options. This holds not only for the national level, since the internet also makes a large number of 'foreign' press offerings and radio and television programmes available. Interested people from around the world were able to watch the storming of the Capitol live on CNN. Correspondingly, the time budget invested in daily media consumption has absolutely exploded. The amount of time spent using all media has risen sharply since 2000, but peaked in 2005; since then, it has levelled off at a saturation point of an astounding eight hours a day. The proportions of the time devoted to the different media have shifted over the decades. Since 1970, the utilization of the then-new medium of television overtook that of the traditional media of daily newspapers and radio. But even after the impact of the online competition became clearly felt from 2000 onwards, television and radio have continued to maintain the greatest reach. Book consumption also remained quite stable, with fluctuations, between 1980 and 2015. What must be emphasized in our context is that, in contrast, the corresponding reach of daily newspapers underwent a steady decline since the introduction of television, from 69 per cent of the daily time budget in 1964 to 33 per cent in 2015. The slump since the introduction of new media is reflected in the dramatic decline in the reach of printed newspapers and magazines from 60 per cent in 2005 to 22 per cent in 2020. This trend is destined to continue at an accelerated rate, given that 40 per cent of people in the age group of 14- to 29-year-olds were still reading printed newspapers or magazines in 2005, compared with 6 per cent in the same age group in 2020. At the same time, the reading intensity has decreased: while the average reader spent 38 minutes per day reading newspapers in 1980 (and 11 minutes reading magazines), the average daily reading time decreased to 23 minutes in 2015 (or 11 minutes for magazines), and to 15 minutes in 2020 (for newspapers and magazines combined). Of course, newspaper consumption has also shifted to the internet; but aside from the fact that reading digitalized texts presumably does not demand the same level of intensive attention and analytical processing as reading printed texts, alternative online information offerings (podcasts, for example, or news portals) cannot fully compensate for the offerings of daily newspapers. An indicator of this is the average time spent reading digital texts each day factored across the population as a whole - 18 minutes in total, 6 minutes of which are spent on newspapers and magazines.
The most recent representative Eurobarometer of the populations of the then 28 EU countries, which was conducted at the end of 2019, confirms the current scale of the offerings and the utilization of the various media: on a daily basis, 81 per cent of respondents use television, 67 per cent the internet in general, 47 per cent social media, 46 per cent radio and 26 per cent the press, whereas the proportion of daily newspaper readers in 2010 was still 38 per cent. The Eurobarometer records daily utilization of social media separately from that of the internet in general, and this share has risen astonishingly rapidly, from 18 per cent of all respondents in 2010 to 48 per cent currently. Interestingly, television and, at a lower level, radio are also maintaining their leading role in the demand for 'political information on national affairs'.
For political information, 77 per cent of those surveyed name television, 40 per cent radio and 36 per cent the print media as their 'main sources, while 49 per cent cite the internet in general and 20 per cent social media. The fact that this last figure, which is of interest in the present context, has already risen by a further four points compared to the previous year's survey confirms the increasing trend also documented elsewhere. In any case, the drastic decline in the consumption of daily newspapers and magazines is also an indicator that, since the introduction of the internet, the average amount of attention paid to political news and the analytical processing of politically relevant issues have declined. Nonetheless, the relative stability of the share of television and radio also in general media consumption suggests that, for the time being, these two media are providing reliable and sufficiently diverse political information to at least three-quarters of the electorate in the EU member states.
This makes another trend all the more striking. Evidently, the increasing infiltration of the political public sphere by fake news, and in particular the spectacular development towards a 'post-truth democracy that became the alarming normality in the US under the Trump administration, have also reinforced distrust in the media in Europe. Forty-one per cent of the respondents to the Eurobarometer survey doubt that the reporting of the national media is free from political and economic influence; 39 per cent explicitly affirm this distrust with regard to the public media that today form the backbone of a liberal public sphere; and as many as 79 per cent claim that they have encountered distorted or false news.
These data provide information about the quantitative changes in the spectrum of available media and their utilization; however, they only provide indirect evidence of the quality of the public opinions formed on this basis and of the extent of citizens' involvement in the process of opinion and will formation. Therefore, I must confine myself to informed conjectures. On the one hand, the dramatic loss of relevance of the print media compared to the dominant audio-visual media seems to point to a decline in the level of aspiration of the offerings. Hence, it also seems to indicate that the citizens' receptiveness and intellectual processing of politically relevant news and problems are on the decline. Incidentally, this diagnosis is confirmed by how the politically leading daily and weekly newspapers have adjusted their offerings to the 'colourful' format of entertaining Sunday newspapers. On the other hand, as a participant observer one finds daily evidence that the remaining more sophisticated national newspapers and magazines continue to serve as the leading political media that specify the reflected contributions and positions on the agenda-setting topics for the other media, especially television. However, mistrust in the truth, seriousness and completeness of the programmes is increasing among the general population in Germany, even though it can be assumed that the public broadcasters continue to ensure a reliable supply of news and political programmes. The growing doubts about the quality of the state-financed media presumably go hand in hand with the increasingly widespread conviction that the political class is either unreliable or corrupt, or at any rate suspect. This general picture suggests that, on the one hand, the diversity of the media on the supply side and a corresponding pluralism of opinions, arguments and perspectives on life fulfil important preconditions for the long-term formation of critical opinions that are immune to prejudice; but that, on the other hand, the increasing dissonance of diverse voices and the complexity of the challenging topics and positions are leading a growing minority of media consumers to use digital platforms to retreat into shielded echo chambers of the like-minded.
For the digital platforms not only invite their users to spontaneously generate intersubjectively confirmed worlds of their own, they also at the same time seem to lend the stubborn internal logic of these islands of communication the epistemic status of competing public spheres. But before we can assess this subjective side of the changes in recipients' attitudes due to the media offerings, we must first examine the economic dynamics that are increasingly distorting subjective perceptions of the editorial public sphere. For the idiosyncratic character of these modes of reception promoted by social media should not blind us to the economic anchoring of the - for the time being largely politically unregulated - transformation of the structure of the media that we have roughly outlined.
(6) To describe the platforms as 'media offerings for networking communicative contents across arbitrary distances' is, if not naïve, at least incomplete, in view of the far from neutral performance of algorithm-steered platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. For these actually existing new media are companies that obey the imperatives of capital valorization and, measured by their market capitalization, are among the 'most valuable' corporations worldwide. They generate their profits by exploiting data, which they sell for advertising purposes or otherwise as commodities. These data consist of information that accrues as a byproduct of their user-oriented offerings in the form of the personal data their customers leave behind on the internet (now subject to their formal consent).
Newspapers are also generally privately owned companies that are financed to a large extent by advertising revenue. But while the old media are themselves the advertising vehicles, the kind of value creation that has provoked criticism of surveillance capitalism ?9 feeds on commercially exploitable information that is randomly'snagged' by other services and in turn enables individualized advertising strategies.
Through these processes steered by algorithms, social media are also promoting a further advance in the commodification of lifeworld contexts.
However, I am interested in a different aspect, namely the pressure to adjust being exerted on the old media by the valorization logic of the new media. The old media are suitable vehicles for advertising only as long as their contents are commercially successful. However, these contents themselves obey a completely different inherent logic - namely, the demand for texts and programmes whose form and content must satisfy cognitive, normative or aesthetic standards. That readers and audiences evaluate journalistic performances according to such epistemic standards (broadly understood) becomes immediately apparent once we grasp - from the philosophical perspective of analysis of the lifeworld - the important function that the media fulfil in providing orientation in the increasingly confusing 'media society'. In the face of societal complexity, the media are the intermediary which, given the diverse perspectives presented by social situations and cultural forms of life, sifts out an intersubjectively shared core from among the competing interpretations of the world and validates it as generally rationally accepted. Of course, daily or weekly newspapers, with their classic threefold division of contents into politics, business and feature pages, are never the final authority regarding the truth or correctness of individual statements or recognized interpretations of facts, the plausibility of general assessments, or even the soundness of standards or procedures of judgement. But with their daily stream of new information and interpretations, the media constantly confirm, correct and supplement the blurred everyday image of a presumptively objective world, which more or less all contemporaries assume is also accepted by everyone else as 'normal' or valid.
Why the advance towards the 'platformization of the public sphere' is creating difficulties for the traditional media, both economically and in view of dwindling journalistic influence and the adjustment of professional standards, is explained by Otfried Jarren and Renate Fischer.
Since there is a correlation between circulation and advertising revenues, the decline in demand for printed newspapers and magazines is jeopardizing the economic basis of the press; and thus far it has not found a really successful business model for commercial sales of digital formats, since on the internet it faces competition from providers who offer their users corresponding information free of charge. The result is cutbacks and precarious employment conditions with negative effects on the quality and scope of editorial work. But the losses in the advertising and audience stakes are not the only factors that are weakening the relevance and interpretive power of the press. Adjusting to the online competition calls for changes in how journalists work. Even if the 'audience turn' - i.e. the greater involvement of the audience and an increased sensitivity to the reactions of readers - is not necessarily detrimental, the trends towards deprofessionalization and an understanding of journalistic work as a neutral, depoliticized service are intensifying. When data and attention management replace targeted research and precise interpretation, 'newsrooms, previously places of political debate, are transformed into coordination centres for sourcing and managing the production and distribution of content 32'
The change in professional standards is a reflection of how the press, which has the greatest inherent affinity for the discursive character of opinion and will formation by citizens, is adjusting to the commercial services of the platforms that are soliciting the attention of consumers.
With the triumph of the imperatives of the attention economy, however, the new media are also intensifying the trends, long familiar from the tabloid and popular press, towards entertainment, emotionalization and the personalization of the issues of concern for the political public sphere.
With the alignment of political programmes with offers of entertainment and consumption addressed to the citizens as consumers, we touch on trends towards depoliticization that have been observed in media research since the 1930s, but which are evidently intensifying as a result of the offerings of social media. It is only when we turn our attention away from the objective side of the expanded media structure and its altered economic basis towards the side of the recipients and their altered modes of reception that we broach the central question of whether social media are changing how their users perceive the political public sphere. Of course, the technical advantages of commercial platforms, and even of a medium like Twitter that compels its users to produce concise messages, offer the users undoubted benefits for political, professional and private purposes. But these advances are not our topic. Our question is rather whether these platforms are also prompting a kind of exchange about implicit or explicit political views that, through the changed mode of use, could influence how the political public sphere is perceived as such. With a view to the subjective side of the use of the new media, Philipp Staab and Thorsten Thiel refer to Andreas Reckwitz's theory of the 'society of singularities' and, in particular, to the incentives that the activating platforms provide their users for narcissistic self-promotion and the 'staging of singularity'.
If we make a clear distinction between 'individualization' - i.e. the distinctiveness a person acquires through her life history - and 'singularization' - i.e. the visibility and gain in distinction she can achieve through spontaneous contributions on the internet - then the 'promise of singularization' may be the correct term for influencers who court the approval of followers for their own programme and reputation. Be that as it may, when it comes to the contribution of social media to opinion and will formation in the political public sphere, a different aspect of reception seems more important to me. It has often been observed that the spontaneously self-directed and fragmented public spheres that split off both from the editorial or official public sphere and from one another generate a pull towards self-referential reciprocal confirmation of interpretations and opinions. If participants experiences and perceptions of what were hitherto called publicness and the political public sphere were to change, affecting the customary conceptual distinction between private and public spheres, this would necessarily have far-reaching consequences for the self-understanding of internet consumers as citizens. For the moment we lack the data to test this hypothesis; but the indications prompting such a hypothesis are troubling enough.
The societal basis for the legal and political differentiation of the public sphere from the private sphere of economic, civil society and familial activity has not undergone any structural change during the period under consideration; for the capitalist economic system is itself based on this separation. In constitutional democracies, this structure has also found a reflection in the consciousness of citizens. And their perception is the crucial issue. Citizens are expected to make their political decisions in the field of tension between self-interest and the orientation towards the common
good. As we have seen, this tension is played out in the communicative space of a political public sphere that as a matter of principle includes all citizens as a potential audience. The very fact that public flows of communication pass through editorial sluices sets them apart from all private and business contacts. Different standards apply to the composition of print products addressed to an anonymous reading public than to private correspondence, which for a long time was still written by hand. "4 What is constitutive for the public sphere is not the disparity between active and passive participation in discourse, but rather the topics that deserve shared interest, as well as the professional processing and rationality of the contributions that promote mutual understanding about shared and diverse interests. We should not overstrain the spatial metaphorics of the distinction between private and public 'spaces'; what is decisive is the perception of the (politically contested) threshold between private matters and the public issues discussed in the political public sphere. This perception is also shared by the social movements that create counterpublics to combat the narrowing of vision of the media public. Apart from the substantive reference to the central political authority with the power to act, it is the form and relevance of the selected editorial contributions that attract the attention of the audience. And this expectation concerning the reliability, quality and general relevance of public contributions is also constitutive for perceptions of the inclusive character of a public sphere that is supposed to direct the attention of all citizens to the same topics, in order to stimulate each of them to make their own judgements in accordance with the recognized standards about the issues of relevance for political decision-making.
It is true that, since the emergence of 'media societies', the societal basis for such a separation of the public sphere from the private spheres of life has not undergone any essential changes. Nonetheless, the more or less exclusive use of social media may have led in parts of the population to a change in the perception of the public sphere that has blurred the distinction between 'public' and 'private', and thus the inclusive meaning of the public sphere. In the literature in communication studies, one increasingly encounters observations of a trend away from traditional perceptions of the political public sphere and of politics itself.
In certain subcultures, the public sphere is no longer perceived as being inclusive, and the political public sphere is no longer seen as a space of communication for a generalization of interests that includes all citizens. Therefore, I will try to explain a hypothesis and render it plausible as such. As mentioned, the internet opens up virtual spaces in which users can empower themselves as authors in a new way.
Social media create freely accessible public spaces that invite all users to make interventions which are not checked by anyone - and which, as it happens, have also long since enticed politicians to exert direct personalized influence on the voting public. This plebiscitary 'public sphere', which has been stripped down to 'like' and 'dislike' clicks, rests on a technical and economic infrastructure. But in these freely accessible media spaces, all users who are, as it were, released from the need to satisfy the entry requirements of the editorial public sphere and, from their point of view, have been freed from 'censorship', can in principle address an anonymous public and solicit its approval. These spaces seem to acquire a peculiar anonymous intimacy: according to hitherto valid standards, they can be understood neither as public nor as private, but most readily as a sphere of communication that had previously been reserved for private correspondence but has now been inflated into a new and intimate kind of public sphere.
Users empowered as authors provoke attention with their messages, because the unstructured public sphere is first created by the comments of readers and the 'likes' of followers. To the extent that this leads to the formation of self-sustaining echo chambers, these bubbles share with the classical form of publicness their porousness to further networking; at the same time, however, they differ from the fundamentally inclusive character of the public sphere - and from the corresponding contrast to the private - in their resistance to dissonant and their assimilating inclusion of consonant voices into their own limited, identity-preserving horizon of supposed, yet professionally unfiltered, 'knowledge'. From a point of view fortified by the mutual confirmation of users' judgements, claims to universality extending beyond their own horizons become suspect in principle of hypocrisy. From the limited perspective of such a semi-public sphere, the political public sphere of constitutional democracies loses the appearance of an inclusive space for a possible discursive clarification of competing claims to truth and a general equal consideration of interests; precisely this public sphere, which hitherto presented itself as inclusive, is then downgraded to one of the semi-public spheres that compete on an equal footing.
One symptom of this is the twofold strategy of spreading fake news while simultaneously combating the 'lying press', which in turn unsettles the public and the leading media themselves.
But when the shared space of 'the political' degenerates into the battleground of competing publics, the democratically legitimized political programmes pushed through by the state provoke conspiracy theories - as in the case of the anti-Corona demonstrations, which were staged in a libertarian spirit while in fact being driven by authoritarian motives. These tendencies can already be observed in member states of the European Union; but they can even grip and deform the political system as such, if it has been undermined and riven long enough by social-structural conflicts. In the United States, politics was drawn into the maelstrom of a persistent polarization of the public sphere after the administration and large sections of the ruling party accommodated itself to the self-perception of a president who was successful on social media and obtained the daily plebiscitary approval of his populist following on Twitter.
The - we can only hope, temporary - disintegration of the political public sphere was reflected in the fact that, for almost half the population, communicative contents could no longer be exchanged in the currency of criticizable validity claims. The significant factor for a widespread distortion of the perception of the political public sphere is not the accumulation of fake news, but the fact that fake news can no longer even be identified as such.
In communication studies and social science, it is now commonplace to speak of disrupted public spheres that have become detached from the journalistically institutionalized public sphere. But scholarly observers would be mistaken to conclude that the description of these symptomatic phenomena should be separated from questions of democratic theory altogether.
Atter all, communication in semi-public spheres that have become independent is by no means depoliticized; and even where that is the case, the power of this communication to shape the worldviews of those involved is not apolitical. It is harmful for a democratic system as a whole when the infrastructure of the public sphere is no longer able to direct the citizens' attention to the relevant issues that need to be decided or to ensure the formation of competing public opinions - and that means, qualitatively filtered opinions. If we recall the complex preconditions for the survival of inherently crisis-prone capitalist democracies, it is indeed clear that there may be deeper reasons for a loss of function of the political public sphere. But that does not exempt us from looking for obvious reasons.
I see one such reason in the coincidence of the emergence of Silicon Valley, i.e. the commercial use of the digital network, on the one hand, and the global spread of the neoliberal economic programme, on the other. The globally expanded zone of free flows of communication originally made possible by the invention of the technical structure of the 'net' presented itself as the mirror image of an ideal market. This market did not first have to be deregulated. In the meantime, however, this suggestive image is being disrupted by the algorithmic control of communication flows that is feeding the concentration of market power of the large internet corporations. The skimming and digital processing of customers' personal data, which are more or less inconspicuously exchanged for the information provided free of charge by search engines, news portals and other services, explains why the EU Competition Commissioner would like to regulate this market. But competition law is the wrong lever if one's aim is to correct the fundamental flaw that platforms, unlike traditional media, do not want to accept liability for the dissemination of truth-sensitive, and hence deception-prone, communicative contents. The fact that the press, radio and television, for example, are obliged to correct false reports draws attention to the circumstance of interest in the present context. Because of the special nature of their goods, which are not mere commodities, the platforms cannot evade all duties of journalistic due diligence.
They, too, are responsible and should be liable for news that they neither produce nor edit; for this information also has the power to shape opinions and mentalities.
Most importantly, it is not governed by the quality standards of commodities but by the cognitive standards of judgements without which neither the objectivity of the world of facts nor the identity and commonality of our intersubjectively shared world are possible for us.
In a hard-to-imagine 'world' of fake news that was no longer identifiable as such - i.e. a world in which fake news was indistinguishable from true information - no child would be able to grow up without developing clinical symptoms. Therefore, maintaining a media structure that enables the inclusiveness of the public sphere and the deliberative character of public opinion and will formation is not a matter of political preference but a constitutional imperative.