Time.news – Are digital media a danger to society? This is asked in his new book by Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher among the main exponents of the Frankfurt School, who looks with concern at a new “structural change in the public sphere”, as reported by the weekly Die Zeit.
The thesis is this: for Habermas, the new structural change is the result of a “dissolution of narrative boundaries”, because in the meantime “the old structural change took place in theaters, museums, concerts and educational associations, in a lifetime cultural heritage that emancipated itself from the old aristocratic court, the new structural change is currently taking place on digital platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, which they offer an access without obstacles and therefore without filters that facilitate access to the formation of public opinion“. When, all potential users can now also be independent authors, without limits, and anyone can participate in the speech at any time, without any “editorial protection”.
Die Zeit emphasizes in reviewing the book, that on the one hand, “this openness has the potential for emancipation”, on the other, according to Habermas, “it also carries a great danger: it feeds the centrifugal forces of society and, in the worst case, it leads to fragmentation, to the erosion of its democratic public sphere ”.
And if this phenomenon has so far been ascertained within the confines of the quality standards of the main media, in editorial offices, publishers and editors, now “the communicative rules of the game have in fact changed”. Therefore, again according to Habermas, the result is that profiling and network communities are increasingly dominating the “discursive business”in which “the difference between private and public – and with it the common inclusive sense of the public” is canceled.
According to the Die Zeit reviewer, Habermas’ new work must be considered as a change of perspective. After the severe criticism of the Frankfurt School of the mass media as tools of the cultural industry, today they are considered by Habermas “as the last bastion that can save the democratic public sphere from its decline”.
The German weekly concludes: “Despite all the cultural pessimism that repeatedly comes to light in the new structural change in the public sphere”, the illuminist Jürgen Habermas “is now counting again on the learning capacity of his contemporaries”, as 60 years ago. “Because just like in the past – comments Die Zeit – the press has transformed everyone into potential readers, digitization has now turned everyone into potential authors“. And the weekly asks: “” How long did it take before everyone learned to read? A lot of time. One can only hope that learning to write will now only be faster ”.