"Use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication. This is why the Internet can have a subversive effect on intellectual life in authoritarian regimes. But at the same time, the less formal, horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens the achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public on select topics and information, allowing citizens to concentrate on the same critically filtered issues and journalistic pieces at any given time. The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus." From Habermas's Kreisky prize lecture printed in Der Standard March 10-11 translated in part in signandsight.com. thoughts? jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ LI-the journal
Habermas isn't so outdated after all. This is what Geert Lovink has been writing about. See his interview to mentelocale.it, an italian online magazine: http://www.networkcultures.org/geert/interview-for-mentelocaleit-daniele-mig.... The question is how to answer to this profudance of information, with a torrent of rss feeds, social networks and emails coming in permanently without reintroducing a gatekeeper. Digg.com, Kuro5hin, in this sense, are exemplary because they let everybody be gatekeepers and create open gatekeeping communities. But there should be new and better tools to provide a truly open edition model. The concept of Web 2.0 can be of some help in here. But I'm suspicious that this is just a new fad in order to boost Internet economy. Miguel Caetano 2006/3/28, Jeremy Hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu>:
"Use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication. This is why the Internet can have a subversive effect on intellectual life in authoritarian regimes. But at the same time, the less formal, horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens the achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public on select topics and information, allowing citizens to concentrate on the same critically filtered issues and journalistic pieces at any given time. The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus."
From Habermas's Kreisky prize lecture printed in Der Standard March 10-11 translated in part in signandsight.com. thoughts?
jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ LI-the journal
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
I don't think that Habermas is right in pointing out that intellectuals lose their power to create focus because there is a decentered, multi-focus public sphere emerging by computer-mediated communication. The question is not how much online communication there is, but how much relevance it has, i.e. how much it is recognized and how influential it is. I think that also cyberspace is to a certain extent still shaped by old centres like corporate media (compare e.g. the overall public interest in cnn.com to the one in Indymedia). It is a nice political goal that all people can become intellectuals that talk in the public and to whom many others listen and answer and that CMC enables and empowers such processes. But today this is not yet the case, therefore I think Habermas is not right, there is no death of intellectuals as well as no death of powerful interests caused by the Internet. There is a general underrepresentation of intellectual thinking in mass media and cyberspace, this is not due to the effects the Internet on the public, but due to (in Habermas' own theoretical categories) the colonizing effects of monetarization/capitalization and bureaucratization on lifeworld communication processes in the private and the public sphere (including Internet communication and mass media communication) If one applies Habermas' own theory to cyberspace consequently, I think one will arrive at other results: Cyberspace as a realm of communication belongs to the lifeworld, but like other lifeworld aspects it is today shaped and colonized by the steering media money and power which results in a lack of communicative action and rational discourse. But on the other hand also great potentials for a new critical public sphere emerge that can transcends the colonization of the lifeworld because cyberspace creates new forms of networked commons and communicative action that can bypass colonization processes of the life world. I think that there are both colonization and decolonization processes of lifeworlds going on in cyberspace which are antagonistic and constitute new types of conflicts. I think what Habermas also wants to point out is what he calls "deformalization of the public sphere" (in another paragraph in the same article that has not been translated into English). And here I think he is right: The claims of validity of communication that Habermas identifies in his Theory of Communicative Action (truth, truthfulness, rightness, comprehensibility) are much harder to obtain in online communication than in face to face communication. I think that this can result in a loss of critical reflection in online communication, but not in a reduced importance of intellectuals in communication. Overall I am happy that Habermas has finally commented on the Internet because this was really overdue. Christian _________________________________ Christian Fuchs Assistant Professor for Internet & Society ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research in Information and Communication Technologies & Society (http://www.icts.sbg.ac.at) University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner-Gasse 18 A-5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at Phone +43 0662 8044 4823 Fax +43 0662 6389 4800 Information-Society-Technology: http://cartoon.iguw.tuwien.ac.at/christian/ Managing Editor of tripleC - Cognition Communication Co-operation Open Access Online Journal for the Foundations of Information Science http://triplec.uti.at/ Am 28.03.2006 14:58 Uhr schrieb "Jeremy Hunsinger" unter <jhuns@vt.edu>:
"Use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication. This is why the Internet can have a subversive effect on intellectual life in authoritarian regimes. But at the same time, the less formal, horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens the achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public on select topics and information, allowing citizens to concentrate on the same critically filtered issues and journalistic pieces at any given time. The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus."
From Habermas's Kreisky prize lecture printed in Der Standard March 10-11 translated in part in signandsight.com. thoughts?
jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ LI-the journal
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
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. Habermas, I think, is making a useful juxtaposition between the traditional media and the Internet on the one hand, and access and focus, on the other. Generally, the relationship between the traditional media and the more open and dialogic Internet-based media has been underconceptualized, in my opinion. So it would valuable to find out how the great theorist thinks about them. Thanks again! Maria ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christian Fuchs" <Christian.Fuchs@sbg.ac.at> To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 8:03 AM Subject: Re: [Air-l] habermas on the internet
I don't think that Habermas is right in pointing out that intellectuals lose their power to create focus because there is a decentered, multi-focus public sphere emerging by computer-mediated communication. The question is not how much online communication there is, but how much relevance it has, i.e. how much it is recognized and how influential it is. I think that also cyberspace is to a certain extent still shaped by old centres like corporate media (compare e.g. the overall public interest in cnn.com to the one in Indymedia). It is a nice political goal that all people can become intellectuals that talk in the public and to whom many others listen and answer and that CMC enables and empowers such processes. But today this is not yet the case, therefore I think Habermas is not right, there is no death of intellectuals as well as no death of powerful interests caused by the Internet. There is a general underrepresentation of intellectual thinking in mass media and cyberspace, this is not due to the effects the Internet on the public, but due to (in Habermas' own theoretical categories) the colonizing effects of monetarization/capitalization and bureaucratization on lifeworld communication processes in the private and the public sphere (including Internet communication and mass media communication)
If one applies Habermas' own theory to cyberspace consequently, I think one will arrive at other results: Cyberspace as a realm of communication belongs to the lifeworld, but like other lifeworld aspects it is today shaped and colonized by the steering media money and power which results in a lack of communicative action and rational discourse. But on the other hand also great potentials for a new critical public sphere emerge that can transcends the colonization of the lifeworld because cyberspace creates new forms of networked commons and communicative action that can bypass colonization processes of the life world. I think that there are both colonization and decolonization processes of lifeworlds going on in cyberspace which are antagonistic and constitute new types of conflicts.
I think what Habermas also wants to point out is what he calls "deformalization of the public sphere" (in another paragraph in the same article that has not been translated into English). And here I think he is right: The claims of validity of communication that Habermas identifies in his Theory of Communicative Action (truth, truthfulness, rightness, comprehensibility) are much harder to obtain in online communication than in face to face communication. I think that this can result in a loss of critical reflection in online communication, but not in a reduced importance of intellectuals in communication.
Overall I am happy that Habermas has finally commented on the Internet because this was really overdue.
Christian
_________________________________ Christian Fuchs Assistant Professor for Internet & Society ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research in Information and Communication Technologies & Society (http://www.icts.sbg.ac.at) University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner-Gasse 18 A-5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at Phone +43 0662 8044 4823 Fax +43 0662 6389 4800 Information-Society-Technology: http://cartoon.iguw.tuwien.ac.at/christian/ Managing Editor of tripleC - Cognition Communication Co-operation Open Access Online Journal for the Foundations of Information Science http://triplec.uti.at/
Am 28.03.2006 14:58 Uhr schrieb "Jeremy Hunsinger" unter <jhuns@vt.edu>:
"Use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication. This is why the Internet can have a subversive effect on intellectual life in authoritarian regimes. But at the same time, the less formal, horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens the achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public on select topics and information, allowing citizens to concentrate on the same critically filtered issues and journalistic pieces at any given time. The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus."
From Habermas's Kreisky prize lecture printed in Der Standard March 10-11 translated in part in signandsight.com. thoughts?
jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ LI-the journal
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
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
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
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Depends who the "intellectuals" concerned are - if he means traditional elite intellectuals "focusing" in traditional form - why yes ...
"Use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication. This is why the Internet can have a subversive effect on intellectual life in authoritarian regimes. But at the same time, the less formal, horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens the achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public on select topics and information, allowing citizens to concentrate on the same critically filtered issues and journalistic pieces at any given time. The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus."
From Habermas's Kreisky prize lecture printed in Der Standard March 10-11 translated in part in signandsight.com. thoughts?
jeremy hunsinger jhuns@vt.edu www.cddc.vt.edu wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ LI-the journal
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
participants (6)
-
Christian Fuchs -
Jeremy Hunsinger -
Maria Bakardjieva -
Miguel Afonso Caetano -
radhika gajjala -
Thomas Koenig