The Global Public Sphere

Public Communication in the Age of Reflective Interdependence

Ingrid Volkmer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745639581, 9780745639574
• eBook ISBN: 9780745665030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last several years, the debate about publics seems to have newly emerged. This debate critically reflects the Habermasian ideal of a (national) public sphere in a transnational context. However, it seems that the issue of a reconstruction of a global public sphere is more complex. In this brilliant and provocative book, Ingrid Volkmer argues that a reflective approach of globalization is required in order to identify and deconstruct key strata of deliberate public discourse in supra- and subnational societal formations. This construction helps to understand the new processes of legitimacy at the beginning of the 21st century in which the traditional conception of a 'public' and its role as a legitimizing force are being challenged and transformed. The book unfolds this key phenomenon of global deliberate interconnectedness as a discursive and negotiated dimension within 'reflective' globalization, i.e. continuously constituting, maintaining and refining the 'life' of the global public and conceptualizes a global public sphere.

Offering insightful case studies to illustrate this new theory of the global public sphere, the book will be essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication studies , and social and political theory.

1

Public Territories and the Imagining of Political Community

Despite the increasing transnationalization of communication, we are only at the beginning of understanding the implications of this new sphere on public communication and civic deliberation. It is a public architecture that evolves as a networked space within and beyond the nation-state. However, when attempting to assess this sphere of public space, we are facing an ambiguity: on one hand conceptions of the ‘public sphere’ are framed through an overarching still dominant modern paradigm which centres public communication in nation-states; on the other, political, civic, and, on the other public communicative practices are embedded in public spheres which are meandering across globalized networks – linking citizens of different societies and, through such an emerging sphere of deliberation, influencing the agenda of politics and, sometimes, governments. It seems that the overarching paradigm of modern public spheres tends to blind us to identifying and conceptually mapping how these new structures of public communication take shape. In this chapter, we will begin to situate public space between specific forms of networks: ‘networks of centrality’, the observing sphere and the ‘centrality of networks’, the engagement sphere. In order to map this ‘terrain’ over the next chapters, we must first carefully assess the ways in which existing debates have defined the ‘openings’ of the nation-state, or in other words, the processes of ‘decoupling’ civil society from the national boundedness. This discussion will allow us to address more specifically the ways in which the public space evolves through such a ‘de-bracketing’ of the state–society nexus, across different spheres of public ‘action’ within a globalized scope.

In his book The Public and its Problems, John Dewey remarked that ‘in no two ages or places is there the same public’ (Dewey, 1927: 33). Dewey's observation, made in the early decades of the twentieth century relates to the transformation of the public sphere at a time when the traditional centrality of vibrant community public life in the USA was still functional but – and this is Dewey's point – already slowly dissolving. The traditional public life of local communities was merging with larger, more centralized forms which now began to ‘mediate’ public debate and shape public opinion, which was no longer an outcome of traditional ‘local’ community reasoning. Such a shift away from the centrality of public discourse of a vibrant local community ‘place’ of the local townhall to the ‘mediating’ centrality of national media spheres of newspapers and radio, left local publics – so Dewey concludes – ‘eclipsed’ and ‘diffused’ (Dewey, 1927: 137). The deliberative role of a vibrant community public, and this is Dewey's pessimistic assessment, is ‘passing away’ as ‘mediated’ spheres of publics emerge where the ‘power’ and ‘lust of possession’ is ‘in the hands of the officers and agencies’ which – and what an irony! – ‘the dying public instituted’ (Dewey, 1927: 81).

About forty years after Dewey, Jürgen Habermas has identified a second major shift of public spheres. This shift relates to another Western world region: modern European nation-states. In this lens, the shift of public discourse in European nation-states towards ‘manufactured publicity’ (Habermas, 1964; 1991: 211) and away from reasoned publicness made room for strategically produced ‘publicness’, a distinct form of public reasoning, which is, however, often translated as ‘public opinion’ or ‘publicity’ of private interests. Such a second further shift of mediated public spheres has significantly weakened the public as a ‘critically debating entity’ (Habermas, 1964, 1991: 162). Furthermore, these ‘private’ representations of publicity, as Habermas argues, not only ‘centralize’ – this was Dewey's point – but ‘streamline’ public debate. A process, Noam Chomsky has called the ‘manufacturing’ (Chomsky, 1992) of public consent. In consequence, the remaining fractures of public debate disappear ‘behind the veil of internal decisions concerning the selection and presentation of the material’ (Habermas, 1964, 1991: 169) and further disempower public life.¹ From a quite different perspective, Nancy Fraser (1992) argues for another shift of public spheres not only of ‘private’ and ‘public discourse’ but towards ‘segmented’ or fragmented public debate. Fraser proposes a dichotomy of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ public discourse. Strong publics are those ‘whose discourse encompasses both opinion formation and decision making’, which means achieving ‘legally’ binding decisions and in weak publics deliberative practice ‘consists exclusively in opinion formation’ (Fraser, 1992: 134).

These and many other carefully drawn distinctions between the dialectical space of public spheres (Curran, 1991; Bohman, 2001; Dahlgren, 2009; Coleman and Ross, 2010) rotate around the dialectic of ‘private’ and ‘public’, ‘weak’ and ‘strong’, ‘fractured’ and ‘mainstream’, ‘online’ and ‘offline’ publics and have made important contributions to the conceptual refinement of the shifting parameter of the public sphere. However, these conceptions of public spheres and deliberative communication seem to be no longer sufficient for assessing today's emerging non-national, non-territorial ‘fluid’ publics as an increasingly powerful multi-directional sphere between place and space in the logic of intersections. Public communication in these spheres of connected, intersecting layers of, for example, thematic ‘threads’ is dis-embedded from the traditional dialectic of public formations and, instead, rotates around what Luhmann might have described as ‘autopoetic’, a self-directed discourse ‘absorbing’ public engagement across national borders ventilated across a ‘viral’ public ‘system’ (Luhmann, 1984). The sphere of climate change debates is an example for such a ‘self-directed’ transnational debate which offers, due to its transnational angle, multiple ‘intersections’ as communicative forms across to national climate change spheres from India to Kenya, the USA, China and Australia.

This public space requires a re-thinking of public deliberation beyond the modern model and also beyond the boundedness of national territories, which no longer exists as a secluded sphere. Today, most nation-states are multi-cultural societies where the Realpolitik of public discourse is already situated within worldwide networks of satellite and Internet communication. It seems that even in modern multi-cultural nation-states, the traditional model of public spheres has become an empty category and does not reflect the complex realities of public discourse practices. What is surprising is the dominance of the paradigm of territorial boundedness of publics in the debate of public communication. It is a debate that not only seems to ignore the deep transformation of nation-states to ‘network states’ (Castells, 2010) but also the varying scopes of transnational public engagement. Such a methodological nationalism of public-sphere conceptions constitutes a – what might be argued – ‘normative’ methodological exclusion of world regions, where citizens have over the last decade become actors and participants in such a transnational public; however, they are rarely conceptually integrated into the lens of media research methodologies.

Large terrains of world regions, for example in Asia, in Africa and South America are undergoing unprecedented regional specific transformations in contexts of ‘compressed’ or what Beck might understand as ‘reflexive’ modernities (Beck, 1992). Dimensions of ‘reflexivity’, however, are rarely incorporated into the transnationalization of networked communication and, in particular, conceptual debates about transnational public deliberation. I should add that despite a few exceptions, specifically so-called ‘non Western’ regions are rarely sites of empirical research. Little is known about the shaping of particular urban networked public cultures in the various and adverse societies of African countries through increasing complexities of satellite television, smart-phone mobile communication and the Internet, which have multiplied over the last years. A new communicative landscape emerges that seems to deeply transform the civic identity and ‘public orientation’ of the emerging middle class in so-called ‘developing’ regions. In (Western) debates, which mainly highlight implications of neoliberal globalization processes on ‘developing’ regions, it is overlooked that the enlarged communicative landscape transforms civic discourse, which is increasingly geared towards new forms of deliberation within networked structures of public engagement. These new vibrant publics, for example of African regions and South East Asia are also not addressed in public-sphere debates. For example, Indonesia is one of the most connected countries worldwide, with about half of its population being youth; yet, not much is known about the way in which social media and other forms of network communication create discourse spheres of civic communication within a transnational network space.

Mainly in times of crises, however, these world regions are becoming visible. A visibility that draws attention not only to the use of social media but also to the spheres of connectedness of regions that in the past have been on the periphery of media research. The Arab Spring has shown how little has been known about the role of networked media in a world region long excluded from the communication research mainly conducted in a centralized Western national paradigm. Since the time of the Arab Spring, various studies, increasingly also from the region, attempt to address the role of social media in non-modern societies; what is needed, however, is an inclusive framework for an understanding of the role of networked communication for public spheres and ‘connected’ civic identities across the complexities of this transnational landscape. These important phenomena require a somewhat inclusive approach to public-sphere conceptions and a conception of the ‘reflective’ situated-ness of public space.

Public space between ‘networks of centrality’ and ‘centrality of networks’

In order to begin to ‘map’ this space, it might be helpful to situate such a ‘reflective’ space in the dialectic of ‘network centrality’ on the one hand and the ‘centrality of networks’ on the other.

The term ‘network centrality’ refers here in a broad way to the networked structure of ‘centralized’ discourse – in other words to the ‘monitoring’ of public discourse. The second sphere, ‘centrality of networks’ relates to the sphere of discursive engagement, the sphere of actors, for example, uploading links, engaging in viral publics, posting comments and blogs but also interacting with ‘equals’ with shared interest in such a spatial landscape. The sphere of ‘centrality of networks’ of public discourse relates, in other words, to the broader terms to public engagement through chosen platforms as continuous discursive and interactive ‘reference points’ but also through engagement in social media and blog sites. These two spheres, network centrality as the monitoring sphere and centrality of networks, the engagement sphere, allow us to unfold the dialectical architecture of advanced globalized public communication, which is no longer exclusively related to modern Western nation-states but to other states (authoritarian, ‘failed’ states') and has ‘reflexive’ implications across societies. This inclusive dialectical architecture in the advanced phase of globalized networked communication positions civic identity as ‘reflexive’ imagination in the subjectively chosen horizons of ‘world consciousness’ (Robertson, 2011).

This dialectic of such a public space between ‘networks of centrality’ and ‘centrality of networks’ emerges today across all world regions, however, in varying fabrics and patterns. Contours of this emerging public space between, for example, national media as a ‘networks of centrality’ and social media as ‘centrality of networks’ can be observed in contexts of political conflicts in various world regions. For example, national media in Syria deliver limited – and often argued – censored information; yet, citizens have access to social media forms that not only provide information but discursive sites for engagement in alternative conflict scenarios within regional but also larger transnational spheres. This parallelism of public spaces can also be observed in contexts of European policy debates where, national media might serve as ‘networks of centrality’ and constitute spaces for active engagement in transnational, cross-European debates. The geopolitics of such a networked public space has increasing impacts on the ‘public’ agenda not only of Western nation-states but also of diverse state formations. However, such a public space also shapes new formations of public deliberation: forms of deliberation that, for example, emerged in the context of the Wikileaks disclosure practices, such as of diplomatic cables and war logs. Wikileaks could be considered as a ‘network of centrality’, a monitoring sphere in some world regions where Wikileaks is fully accessible and publicly discussed. The platform might be considered to be a ‘centralized network’ for discursive engagement in other world regions for political actors who upload information and have access to otherwise banned web content. For example, the so-called ‘war logs’ disclosure, as well as the disclosure of diplomatic cables, have influenced through the role of ‘network centrality’ the national public agenda from Spain, Lebanon to Costa Rica, Russia to Cuba. Despite the controversial debates of the Wikileaks model of transparency as a deliberative strategy of radical disclosure in transnational publics (see Sifry, 2011; Fenster, 2012), this transparency model has been even adopted by mainstream news organizations; yet, there are different degrees of disclosure across world regions. In some Western regions the focus on public ‘impact’ in contexts of transnational public engagement was enabled through collaborative links, intersections, with national networks of centrality: mainstream media organizations, such as the Guardian in the UK and Der Spiegel in Germany. These sites have even enhanced the role of, in this case, Wikileaks, as a globalized site for radical transparency. Networks of centrality as the ‘monitoring’ sphere might also be constituted by the minute-by-minute accounts of subjective perceptions of political crises on micro-blogging sites – from local violence during the crisis in Somalia, to the coordination of demonstrations in Istanbul.

The dialectic of ‘networks of centrality’ as the ‘monitoring’ sphere, and the ‘centrality of networks’ as the ‘engagement’ sphere, helps to set very broad parameter of the discursive unfolding of public space beyond national boundaries. Furthermore, public discourse across such a diversity of communicative ‘networks’ can no longer be merely related to ‘web-based’ spheres or technological ‘connectivity’, since communicative networks constitute multidirectional, multilayered communicative forms. In this sense the term ‘network’ as used here reflects a diversity of discursive sites, the Internet as well as satellite channels, traditional media forms and ‘apps’ on tablets and mobile phones, in addition to new forms of ‘networked’ television, streamed as IPTV (Internet Protocol Television), social media sites, Skype and Facetime accessible in local public spheres in an increasingly transnational scope. This is the new dimension of networked complexities of cross-platform communicative practices, which through this multi-layered spatial dimension begins to de-territorialize public communication from the territoriality of national information and communication spheres. The centrality of the local townhall from Dewey's time and the national centrality of the Habermasian age, as well as the assumed ‘linearity’ of international, cross-border communicative forms are shifting towards a ‘reflective’ public space emerging in the dialectic of networked discourse.

Conceptions of communicative space in globalization debates

In order to explore this space further, we must realize that such an approach is situated beyond national, transnational and international paradigms and needs to be embedded in the larger paradigmatic scope of globalization theories. This is necessary as the public space in the described networked contexts is not ‘just’ an approach of transnational communication but rather an approach of ‘communicative globalization’. Communicative globalization is used here as a working term for transnational spatial relations, within ‘advanced’ layers in today's network age through a three-way process: not only nations, ‘localities’ but also subjective civic spaces are deeply entangled into globalized formations. Despite the key role of communication for political, social and cultural globalization processes, the relevance of transnational publics is rarely discussed in paradigmatic debates of globalization. For this reason it is crucial for our discussion here to assess conceptual ‘fragments’ offered by globalization theories in order to identify the scope of public space within globalized communication.

Firstly, globalization understood as a process of ‘intensification’ is relevant here. The first author who comes to mind is Anthony Giddens, whose work is important. In this context, Giddens' understanding of ‘relativistic’ globalization as a ‘stretching’ process seems to relate to public communication within the complexity of globalization. Giddens already as early as 1991, at a time when national mass media still prevailed and direct-to-home-satellite delivery and the Internet were just emerging, arguing that globalization constitutes ‘the modes of connection’, connecting ‘different social contexts’ but also ‘regions’ which ‘become networked across the earth's surface as a whole’ (Giddens, 1991: 64). In consequence, Giddens understands globalization as the ‘intensification of worldwide relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’ (Giddens, 1991: 64). His notion of ‘time–space distanciation’ has helped to understand the ‘breaking news’ genre, for example, used by transnational satellite providers such as CNN about twenty years ago which – through Western, in particular US satellite news dominance – linked localities through ‘live’ information from almost any point worldwide. However, it seems that public communication in today's advanced stage of globalization diverts in two ways from Giddens' visionary approach: firstly, globalized public communication is not so much characterized by ‘intensification’ through the somewhat linear axis of trans-local relations but rather by intensification through parallelism of multiple transnationally fluctuating ‘densities’, continuously shifting terrains of highly fractured forms of public engagement. Secondly, public communication is no longer embedded in taxonomies of ‘stretching’ as outlined in Giddens' globalization model. Giddens assumes that modern nation-states dominate such a ‘stretching process’. A process which not only relates to the neoliberal stretching of corporate structures of (mainly Western) multinational media corporations but also to public diplomacy strategies and security surveillance. Today, the linearity of such a stretching process is transformed into a new dialectical taxonomy of ‘contraction’ between networks of ‘monitoring’ and networks of ‘engagement’. It is this dialectical taxonomy which constitutes the resonance sphere of a subjective public ‘situated-ness’ across local, national and transnational discourses. These diverse layers of ‘densities’ and globalized contractions are phenomena which have implications on modern Western nation-states and increasingly – and it is time that we begin to understand this new reality – on other society types, from authoritarian states to ‘failed’ states.

Secondly, the resonance ‘contractions’ emerging between ‘networks of centrality’ and ‘centrality of networks’ as a sphere of globalization could be related to what Beck, Giddens and Lash (1994) understand as ‘reflexivity’ as an epistemic sphere of globalization. They argue that ‘reflexivity’ is a process of reflexive appropriation of a globalized modernity. However, in contexts of network ‘resonance’ such reflexive appropriation of the increasing globalized density of subjective spheres is specifically interwoven with public and political communication not as a consequence of modernity but as a consequence of advanced networked communication. The dimension of ‘reflexivity’ relates in the context of our discussion to an inclusive (e.g. across diverse society types) resonance of transnational public communication, or, in other words: the macro-structural ‘coming-together’ of deterritorialized spaces, the transformation of the ‘local’ site of globalization through the ‘reciprocity’ of such a networked public within the state territory.

Thirdly, the transformation of communicative space has been assessed in the paradigm of the ‘spatial turn’ through the ontological dichotomy of ‘place’ and ‘space’. Lash and Urry already in the early 1990s addressed such a transformation through a critique of neoliberal globalized economies producing dis-embedded ‘place’ which, as they argue, colonize...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1: Public Territories and the Imagining of Political Community
• 2: Post-Territoriality in Spheres of ‘Public Assemblages’
• 3: From ‘Reflexive’ Modernity to ‘Reflective’ Globalization: The Public Space of ‘Inbetween-Ness’
• 4: Public Interdependence, Interlocutors and the ‘Matrix’ of Influence
• 5: From the Public Sphere to Public ‘Horizons’
• References
• Index