Shaping the Public Sphere: Habermas and Beyond

In recent years, there has been an explosion of ambitious sociological research that attempts to map and explain the dynamics of media understood not as technologies or individual organizations but rather as systems interacting with other systems. This approach has multiple roots, but in this essay, I argue that its reach and influence have been amplified by the work of Jürgen Habermas, especially through his concept of the “public sphere. ” Habermas has been especially helpful in clarifying normative debates about democracy, and he is right to suggest that normative criteria can usefully guide empirical research. Yet his own empirical model, despite some recent improvements, remains underdeveloped and moreover, embodies debatable assump-tions about the social origins of democratic and intellectual renewal. Habermas, and many sociologists of social movements influenced by or implicitly allied to his project, make the mistake of taking the “media system ” as a given and then orienting their analysis toward effective strategies to exert influence in the face of this supposedly invariant media “logic. ” A new generation of researchers, influenced by Bourdieu and state-oriented new institutionalism, is fortunately moving to fill in this gap just at the moment when journalists and activists are searching for guidance in rebuilding a media system devastated by commercial pressures and the inadequately remunerated shift to online platforms. This opportunity for sociology to describe and explain variations in media logics and to actively engage in shaping these logics for democratic ends must not be missed. In the remainder of this essay, I thus attempt to address the following questions: First: What has Habermas contributed to the sociology of media and communica-tion? And to what extent and in what ways has his conceptual apparatus—chiefly th