The hidden structures of the digital public sphere

Abstract

In recent years, scholarly discourse has been dominated by concerns about the political public sphere: fake news and conspiracy theories are seen to have gained credence in "the age of social media", strong polarization characterizes public debates even in established democracies, and, information abundance notwithstanding, more and more people appear to be disengaged from political news. Regarding Habermas' latest writings about a "new" structural change of the public sphere (Habermas, [[10]]), the important question is whether this critique still stands. On top of that, Habermas again took up his seminal analysis in his latest contribution to political theory, a small book on the I New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere i (Habermas, [11]). (Habermas, [9], p. 420) In the tradition of the Frankfurt School's first generation, Habermas' I The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere i argues that the risk of colonization is especially high under the conditions of a commercialized media system. [Extracted from the article]