Thank you, Thomas! Royal job! For the citation experts out there: What is the right way to include the translator's name in your citation? I hope other people will jump in and translate Part 1 of the speech (Der Standard, March 10), where he talks about the changing role of intellectuals, to the end. A reader's comment following Part 2 made me laugh: "Der Mann hat ja interessante Gedanken .kann sie aber leider immer noch nicht verständlich formulieren." In that sense, Thomas' efforts are really appreciated. Maria ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas Koenig" <T.Koenig@lboro.ac.uk> To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 7:09 PM Subject: Re: [Air-l] habermas on the internet
Maria Bakardjieva wrote:
Thank you Jeremy and Christian for bringing this very interesting piece of information to the attention of AoIRs. I wonder if any of our German-speaking colleagues could translate the few sections of the speech dealing with the Internet and post them to the list. My German is too rusty and it would take me hours to make sense of the text on my own.
FWIW, I translated the following two paragraphs, but remember, I am not a professional translator and Habermas is not Thomas Mann:
"The usage of the Internet proliferated and expanded communicative networks at the same time. Therefore the Internet does have a subversive effect onto the rigidities (structures) of the public sphere. At the same time, the horizontal and deformalized (increasingly more informal) network of communications weakens the traditional public spheres. The latter used to focus within political communities the attention of an anonymous and fragmented public in a way that enabled citizens to critically evaluate the same filtered topics at the same time [I am not kidding you here, I even left out an obscure causal relationship "naemlich"]. The desirable increase in egalitarism that the Internet delivered is paid for with a decentralization of the admission of unedited contributions to the discourse. In this medium, intellectuals lose the power to focus the discourse."
In plain English: "The rise of the Internet has led to more and easier access to the public sphere. Increased access has led to difficulities to focus public debates, a prerequisite for rational deliberation."
Auf Deutsch: "Oeffentlichkeitsdiskurse sind egalitaerer, aber dafuer weniger fokussiert-sachlich geworden."
"The idea that the electronic [sic] revolution destroys the stage for intellectuals is premature, though. Take TV, which basically operates within the public spheres f nation states: It only expanded the stage of the print media and literature. At the same time, TV changed the nature of the stage: It needs to visualize, what it wants to say, and it accelerated the iconic turn, the shift from words to images. This relative deprecation the wights between the two functions have also shifted in the public sphere."
In plain English: "Intellectuals still occupy a crucial role in public discourse, they just have to adapt to the new playing field. Take, for example, TV: It made visual communication and its discourse logic more important and devalued speech."
HTH, maybe somebody else want to take over.
-- thomas koenig http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/staff/thomas/index.html
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