It's mid-February already, which means that here at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre we've just concluded another very engaging DMRC Summer School, with participants from around the world – many thanks to everyone who joined us for this.
One of the new segments in the programme this year was a session on 'Re-Thinking Media for the Platform Age', with several contributions from DMRC research leaders on current topics of interest. In my own talk for this, I revisited the idea of the public sphere once again, continuing a thought process that spans from my Information Policy article in 2008 (preprint here) through my chapter with Tim Highfield in the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics in 2016 (preprint) to my article in a special issue of Communication Theory in 2023 (preprint).
In my talk I considered how 'the' public sphere might be better understood by focussing instead on its individual parts and their interplay, and offered some practical and actionable definitions for how we might understand those parts, and by which criteria we might identify them when we encounter them in our research. Here are the slides for the presentation:
This won't be the last I have to say on the subject, of course – the very concept of the public sphere seems to me increasingly anachronistic, and long overdue for replacement. In fact, in another forthcoming book chapter I'm noting that precisely none of its constituent terms still hold up to scrutiny:
Several decades into the Internet age, to still speak of ‘the public sphere’ may be a misnomer: our communicative environment has been reconfigured by contemporary digital and social media technologies to a point where it is no longer unitary, entirely public, or concentrically arranged around a set of agenda-setting mass media, as the words ‘the’, ‘public’, and ‘sphere’ suggest. Rather, a more convincing schematic model of this environment might acknowledge that the communicative spaces available to us are now multiple and overlapping in complex ways; that any hard boundaries between public and private communication spaces have eroded to enable any number of hybrid, “publicly private and privately public” configurations (Papacharissi, 2023: xii); and that such spaces, from the smallest to the largest, are connected with and layered on top of each other in such a way that metaphors drawing on networks are considerably more appropriate than those envisaging spheres (Bruns, 2023).
But, more on that at another time...
