Government then responds as directed by the people. Yet as a lover of ideas, principles and debate, I do feel uncomfortable with Benkler’s approach.I am more worried by the fragility of the democratic possibilities which Benkler outlines.
She makes a vital distinction between This weak/strong distinction has consequences for the purpose of the public sphere and civil society more generally, particularly when it comes to the issue of the balance between freedom and justice. Reviewed By Granville Ganter.
While Fraser delivered a feminist critique of Habermas’ rigid split between the public and the private – a critique of the private sphere that has been put to good use in analyses of the value of domestic labour and ‘women’s work’ – she also helped to extend the notion of the public sphere by pluralising and classifying it.
She calls these spaces subaltern counter publics as they represent parallel discursive entities ‘where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs’ (Fraser, 1990: 67). In addition to its inability to account for counterpublics, an overly-simple public sphere theory fails to account for the following kinds of public:Just as global communication and mass migration have created complex publics, we cannot apply a simple notion of government to our understanding of power:Might the Internet lead to the replacement of national democracy by some kind of virtual public?
Compared to Benedict Anderson’s thin historical glossing and the theoretical debates of political philosophy, Benkler’s arguments stand out like a paint bomb in a pillow factory.
Perhaps social networking and mass personalisation have already reconfigured information topology to Overall, Benkler argues that the Internet functions as an ecosystem of public spheres, facilitating the development of counterpublics and enabling them to influence power through public reason or more direct tactics. Fraser, N. (1990) Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. So far in our class on Civic Media, we have tried to Here’s the executive summary: Democratic governments are expected to incorporate the people’s will into their decisions.
These activities included the production of journals, the establishment of feminist bookstores and publishing companies, and the proliferation of forms of association and networking via film distribution, lecture series, academic programs, conferences and festivals. Publics and Counterpublics by Michael Warner Zone Books, 2002 $30.00, hardcover. Mark Murphy is a Reader in Education and Public Policy at the University of Glasgow.
Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. Network topology can be changed by the companies that run it. He says that if children will only participate on the same terms as political experts, government will take their views into account. As much as I would like to believe the result is more democracy, I don’t think it is.
Michael Warner’s recent collection of essays, Publics and Counterpublics, is a thoughtful and yet fragmented meditation about the various ways that ideals of publicity and publicness intersect with art and politics. Fraser argues that this specific form of public sphere has allowed feminist women to invent different terms for describing their social reality, including ‘sexism,’ ‘the double shift,’ ‘sexual harassment,’ and ‘marital, date, and acquaintance rape.’ Armed with these forms of counter language, women were able to reduce the level of their subjugation and disadvantage in official public spheres (Fraser, 1990: 67)She does acknowledge that such counter-publics are not always of the progressive kind or indeed pro-democracy – the words she uses is ‘virtuous’ and she suggest that counter-publics can be ‘explicitly anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian’. Consider, for example, British Secretary of State for Education “Passion is a good thing.
She considers the late-twentieth century U.S. feminist subaltern counterpublic as an exemplary form of parallel space which through its activities acted as a bulwark against patriarchal hegemony. Consider this remarkable paragraph:my claims on behalf of the networked information economy as a platform for the public sphere are not based on general claims about human nature, the meaning of liberal discourse, context-independent efficiency, or the benevolent nature of the technology we happen to have stumbled across at the end of the twentieth century. If that’s true, then I hope Fraser is right, that the limits of democracy are larger than our broken public sphere. Can this really happen? Fraser's notion of "subaltern counterpublics" delineates the creation of "parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs. These help us improve our services by providing analytical data on how users use this site. He previously worked as an academic at King’s College, London, University of Chester, University of Stirling, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, University College Dublin and Northern Illinois University.
Online culture might change in ways which diminish the Internet’s democratic potential.