The public sphere is the domain of peoples’ social lives where public opinion can be created. Virtually all people are at liberty to join the public sphere. Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher who came up with the discussion of the basis of the public sphere. He explains it as the space in which individuals join one another forming the public and use their rationale to examine the strength of the state, which he termed as the bourgeois public sphere. This was a group which stood up against the tyrannical states (Sagepub, n.d). In this way, justice and peace were sought by the public for themselves when they were able to overcome atrocities with the help of a unified public opinion. As a result, Habermas placed the public sphere as a mediatory space between the monitory of revolutionaries and allowing free communication for the middle-class citizens (Boeder, 2007).
Habermas’s public sphere went into decline after the rapid commercialization and social developments taking places such as industrialization and urbanization. Technology has shaped the way people communicate with one another, and the public opinion has also developed differently from the notion developed by Habermas. Technology has captivated different domains such as that of media, advertising, social media and others (Fuchs, 2014). With the recent trends of commercialization of media, the power of the public sphere has fallen to private interests. Media is the source which has begun to shape public opinion and people no longer have the same strength they had which they gathered by coming together, forming the public sphere and coming up with a unified opinion (Fuchs, 2014). Hence, technology is the source which now shapes public sphere unlike the power of the middle class. While technology allows media to be present everywhere, it has the power to convince people to think in a certain manner and then contain the masses in that spell, whereby they follow that formed opinion. Technology has changed the notion of Habermas’s public sphere.
Bibliography
Boeder, P. (2007) ‘Habermas’ heritage: The future of the public sphere in the network
society’, First Monday, 10(9).
Fuchs, C. (2014) ‘Social media and the public sphere,' tripleC: Communication, Capitalism &
Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 12(1), pp. 101–57.
Sagepub (no date) Available at: http://uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-
binaries/2773_Mc04post.pdf (Accessed: 30 January 2017).
