Skip to main content
Home
Snurblog — Axel Bruns

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Information
  • Blog
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Presentations
  • Press
  • Creative
  • Search Site

New Public Spheres, and the Law

Snurb — Thursday 27 October 2011 23:53
Internet Technologies | Social Media | Berlin Symposium 2011 |

Berlin.
Finally, Karl-Heinz Ladeur responds to Wolfgang’s talk at the Berlin Symposium by also highlighting the fragmentation of the public sphere: first, on the one hand, there was a vision of a homogeneous political public organised in concentric circles, whose deliberative processes are facilitated by a supposedly neutral media; on the other hand, there was a view of a cultural public which integrates the imagined nation state with the society of individuals.

But through the gradual transformation of the media, a more active media role came to greater prominence; media were no longer seen as neutral, but as actors in their own right, and the notion of an entertainment public arose. Audiovisual media played an immediate role in the reproduction of everyday life in its fragmentation, and in the presentation of possible social norms – reality TV is the culmination of this process.

The next step from here is the network society: characterised by a multifaceted tendency to undermine borders between public and private, individual and collective. The Facebook style of public demonstrates the diminishing importance of education, and the growing importance of peer groups, in establishing and promoting cultural norms; another form of public is constituted by hybrid public/private fora, where different degrees of publicness intersect with one another; the eBay style of public communication enables the emergence of a new type of common knowledge through technologically supported, aggregated, and institutionalised means, represented by new rule systems; the blog type of public communication combines a superficial version of commentary with a deep impact on professionals at large; further, the Internet is also used to organise public demonstrations (both in western democracies and in autocratic systems).

There is a strong shift towards the discussion of these public/private issues, but other areas must also be considered: the role of search engines in structuring public communication, for example; the impact of semantic processes being used to process data and information; the changing shape of traditional media, partly in response to these other changes (and not least also to the financing problems they raise). Lawyers and social scientists both need to observe these changes closely, and approaches to addressing these issues through legal frameworks need to be considered carefully.

  • 3817 views
INFORMATION
BLOG
RESEARCH
PUBLICATIONS
PRESENTATIONS
PRESS
CREATIVE

Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

» more

Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

» more

Opinion and Press

Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

» more

Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

» more

Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

Bluesky profile

Mastodon profile

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) profile

Google Scholar profile

Mixcloud profile

[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence]

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.