Description
Although the Internet age has unprecedentedly offered anyone with access the ability to become their own author, For Jürgen Habermas, this does not necessarily translate into progress of the public sphere because the Internet doesn’t know how to concentrate salient political issues in the same way the classical public sphere once did. In this way, Habermas essentially underscores the central thesis made over 50 years ago in the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). It is possible to theorize this phenomenon by combining the overarching thesis of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere with arguments contained in the Theory of Communicative Action to explore how global information and communication flows of the digital age represent a different order of transformation. Despite early promises of a democratized cyberspace, the Internet instead represents perhaps the most crucial renegotiation of the public sphere, writ large. Central to this argument is that even as it has provided myriad new publics with a powerful new platform, the Internet has simultaneously provided new power structures with an unprecedented ability to instrumentalize such publics. Even as it gives the appearance of creating novel online spaces for critical rational debate, it simultaneously makes users more vulnerable to instrumentalization by those with access to aggregated data sets. This paper seeks to explore this tension between how the Internet is perceived by individual users and how it is instrumentalized by those with access to the bigger picture.| Period | 18 May 2018 → 19 May 2018 |
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| Event title | (dis)Covering Discourses Transdisciplinary Conference |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Cork, IrelandShow on map |