Article

‘New’ Media, ‘Old’ TheoriesDoes the (National) Public Melt into the Air of Global Governance?

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Abstract

■ Since its earliest conceptualizations, publicity was believed to contribute significantly to the democratic social order; it normatively legitimized the press and other media as constitutive of the public and public opinion. Yet all the ‘old’ mass media rooted in the property rights of their owners failed to enhance and complement the corporate freedom of the press with technologically-feasible actions towards equalizing citizens’ opportunities to participate in public debates. The most recent technological advances in communication do not seem to resolve this age-old controversy. Rather, an attempt is needed to change the media in the way that would allow of publicity in its original three-dimensional design: personal right to communicate in public, surveillance of the public over government (governance), and mediation between the state and civil society. ■

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... The political is reduced to merely administration wherein decision-making is deemed most appropriate when it is apolitical, efficient and streamlined (Swyngedouw, 2013;Hajer and Versteeg, 2005;Oels, 2005) and is therefore tasked a question of expert (be it scientific or financial) knowledge and not of political ideology or democratic engagement (Swyngedouw, 2013;Manuel-Navarrete, 2010). Whilst citizens can partake in deliberation, their roles are limited to those of stakeholders within the economy (be it passive taxpayers or more influential representatives of economic sectors) and are able to share in amelioration only through choices made as consumers (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014;Manuel-Navarrete, 2010;Splichal, 2009). ...
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... As such, efficiency is understood as a given operating principle, an overriding state responsibility and as vital to the successful functioning of democratic society ; see also Swyngedouw, 2010). As the 'doctrine of efficiency' is coupled with democracy itself, the democratic processes of both public discussion and adequate parliamentary debate are truncated (Graham, 2012: 4746), and dissent, a form of democratic engagement, is recast as anti-democratic (Jessop, 2002: 456; see also Splichal, 2009). Frequent use of the urgency parliamentary mechanism thus indicates state control is becoming increasingly exceptional and, in the case of the NZETS, the state thoroughly and overtly intervenes in market processes and climate matters (Bertram and Terry, 2010; see also Swyngedouw, 2009Swyngedouw, , 2013. ...
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... As recent theorizations have underlined, global problems and consequences of local action mean that a proper framing of such publics becomes transnational (e.g. Splichal 2009 ;Fraser 2014 ;Honneth 2014 ; see also Chap. 6 ). ...
Chapter
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... 30 Vgl. Brunkhorst 2002;Volkmer 2003;skeptischer: Hafez 2005: 223-225;Splichal 2009. Brunkhorst beschreibt dabei, auch unter Bezugnahme auf die Globalisierung von Kommunikationsmedien, die Existenz einer schwachen transnationalen Öffentlichkeit, die aus seiner Sicht als eine »strong public in the making« interpretiert werden sollte. ...
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... For Occupy Oakland, the space of Twitter and the place of the central square in Oakland, Oscar Grant [1] Plaza, and other areas important to the movement are characterized by different affordances. While activists privilege place-based politics, they rely on being able to 'step outside' the limitations of place in order to organize and, perhaps more importantly, retain cohesion for the movement when the physical places of Occupy Oakland are shut Research into Twitter and political protests has covered many different contexts, including the 2009 Iranian and Moldovan demonstrations (Burns and Eltham, 2009;Splichal, 2009), the 2010 anti-G20 protests in Toronto, Canada (Poell and Borra, 2012), as well as various aspects of the Arab Spring uprisings (Barrons, 2012;Harlow and Johnson, 2011;Poell and Darmoni, 2012). The Occupy movements have also attracted extensive attention, particularly quantitative research drawing initially on the archives of tweets containing Occupy-related hashtags, such as #ows (for Occupy Wall Street) (Conover, Davis, et al., 2013;Costanza-Chock, 2012;DeLuca, et al., 2012;Thorson, et al., 2013). ...
Article
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Chapter
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Beeinflussen Massenmedien den Gang der internationalen Politik? Alexander Brand gibt hierauf eine differenzierte Antwort, die Medien weder zu Sündenböcken für fehlgeschlagene politische Projekte macht noch deren eigenständige Wirkmächtigkeit abstreitet. Auch widerspricht er einer technologiefixierten Lesart, wie sie bei der Rede vom »CNN-Effekt« oder der »Twitter-Revolution« dominiert. Auf der Basis eines modifizierten konstruktivistischen Ansatzes für die Internationalen Beziehungen erläutert die Studie, wo genau sich Medieneffekte in internationalen politischen Dynamiken niederschlagen - und zeigt, dass dies weder einseitig gerichtet noch mit durchweg erwartbaren Konsequenzen geschieht.
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Der Beitrag widmet sich der grundlegenden Frage, wie der Begriff der politischen Öffentlichkeit im Kontext der Mikro-Makro-Problematik sinnvoll konzeptionalisiert werden kann. Obwohl Öffentlichkeit als ein basales Konzept für die einzelnen Forschungsbereiche der Kommunikationswissenschaft gilt,1 ist nur vereinzelt zur eindeutigen Klärung des Begriffs beigetragen worden.2 Die Verwendung des Begriffs Öffentlichkeit und damit verwandter Bezeichnungen wie v.a. den der öffentlichen Meinung oszilliert daher – wie so oft – zwischen wissenschaftlichen und alltagssprachlichen Bedeutungen (Imhof 2003a, 194). Idealtypisch stellt Jeff Weintraub (1997, 1 f.) diesbezüglich fest: „…(D)ifferent sets of people who employ these concepts [Öffentlichkeit und öffentliche Meinung, J.W.] mean very different things by them – and sometimes, without quite realizing it, mean several things at once.“
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As a critical concept, the public sphere has always been premised on two idealizing assumptions: in principle, public opinion should be normatively legitimate and politically efficacious. Yet these assumptions are hard to associate with the discursive arenas we today call 'transnational public spheres', which neither stage communication among equal citizens nor address it to sovereign states. In this context, public sphere theory is in danger of losing its critical thrust and political point. Aiming to recover its critical potential, this article revisits the ideals of legitimacy and efficacy in three steps. First, I explicate the implicit Westphalian presuppositions of Habermas's original formulation and show that these have persisted in its major feminist, anti-racist and multicultural critiques, including my own. Second, I identify several distinct facets of transnationality that problematize the understandings of legitimacy and efficacy that informed both the original theory and its critical counter-theorizations. Finally, I suggest a strategy for reconstructing the ideal of legitimate and efficacious public opinion for a post-Westphalian world.
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Almost 60 years ago, Lasswell (1949) asked, ''Why be quantitative?'' and vigorously argued that ''the study of politics can be advanced by the quantitative analysis of political discourse . [b]ecause of the scientific and policy gains that can come of it'' (pp. 40, 52). He suggested that severe ''limitations of qualitative analysis,'' such as imprecision and arbitrariness, could be overcome by quantification. A decade later, Lazarsfeld (1957, p. 41) pleaded for a more balanced view, suggesting that empirical research cannot only provide ''sharper conceptual tools'' that would bring to light ''new implications of all sorts'' (usually championed by representatives of the empirical paradigm; Noelle-Neumann, 1979, p. 144) but also that ''the very act of inspecting this classical material brings to our attention ideas which might otherwise have been over-looked'' in the process of empirical research. He concluded that ''[t]heorizing itself can make progress, and the logic of empirical research can contribute to it.'' Ironically, perhaps, I would offer a similar answer to ''why be critical'': because critical theory and research can provide higher scientific and policy gains than ''conventional research'' to use Halloran's term. The role of critical theory cannot be reduced to that of describing and explaining empirical reality, and it has to question existing conditions in terms of their historical preconditions and future possibilities. It cannot live with what is or was empirically existing, prevalent or ''normal,'' or ''anomalous'' in a given period of time and historical context; it has to permanently broaden the horizons of what is relevant today and possible in the future, identify the seeds of what may stimulate social transformation, and trace its directions. Similar to Gramsci's idea of ''integral journalism,'' critical research (including theory) should be considered ''integral research'' in the sense that it seeks not only to satisfy some given (existing) needs but also to create and develop those needs, to progressively enlarge the population of its users, and to raise civic consciousness. It is inseparably connected to politics (and thus, often both opposed to and by politics) because it is focused on contradictions and conflicts in contemporary societies, which are often rooted in the alienating conditions of individuals and social groups. Such an integral form of critical communication research is emancipatory because it strives to explain how the historical processes of alienation and subordination are repro-duced (in constantly changing patterns); more specifically, how they penetrate communication processes in different spheres of human life (e.g., education, orga-nizational communication, interpersonal communication, journalism, mass com-munication, or computer-mediated communication), and how those processes could be overturned. Because any empirical research unavoidably proceeds from certain normative assumptions (even if not explicit), critical theory also has to guide empirical research—and thus be normative, as Lazarsfeld already suggested. Social criticism in theory and research is not adverse to empirical research, including quantitative research methods. According to Habermas (2006, p. 412), normative theory can build a bridge to political reality and serve as a guide to empirical research projects. The idea of combining normative critical theory and empirical research may seem peculiar. However, Fishkin (2000, pp. 21–22) argues effectively that ''most social science experiments are aimed at creating a counterfactual—the effect of the treat-ment condition. In this effort to fuse normative and empirical research agendas, the trick is to identify a treatment condition that embodies the appropriate normative relevance.'' What we cannot observe, we cannot (help) change; we can only interpret it—to modify the famed Marx's Thesis Eleven. Finally, a central element of a critical theory is its self-reflexivity: It always includes an account of itself and of its own historical preconditions and assumptions. It is not only the processes of communication and their social contexts that should be scrutinized critically but also the practice and politics of communication research itself.
Article
I first compare the deliberative to the liberal and the republican models of democracy, and consider possible references to empirical research and then examine what empirical evidence there is for the assumption that political deliberation develops a truth-tracking potential. The main parts of the paper serve to dispel prima facie doubts about the empirical content and the applicability of the communication model of deliberative politics. It moreover highlights 2 critical conditions: mediated political communication in the public sphere can facilitate deliberative legitimation processes in complex societies only if a self-regulating media system gains independence from its social environments and if anonymous audiences grant a feedback between an informed elite discourse and a responsive civil society.
The Structure and Function of Communication in Society
  • Harold D Laswell
Rechtfertigung des ++-Korrespondenten von der Mosel
  • Karl Marx
in Immanuel Kant, Eternal Peace and other International Essays. Boston: The World Peace Foundation
  • Immanuel Kant
Does History Matter? Grasping the Idea of Public Service Media at its Roots
  • Slavko Splichal