Media studies’ fascination with the concept of the public sphere: critical reflections and emerging debates

• communicative action
• discourse ethics
• Habermas
• public institutions
• mediation
• normative turn
• public sphere

Discussions of the public sphere have enjoyed an enduring place in the pages of Media, Culture & Society with 346 articles referring to the concept to date. Initially (1979–89), articles were sparse (23) and mainly focused on bringing German scholarship to English-speaking scholars (cf. the 1982 special issue, vol. 4:2); yet these articles already offered a range of applications of the concept as well as critiques. From 1990 to 2000, Media, Culture & Society published 58 articles referring to the public sphere which, again, concentrated on the problems of the mass-mediated public sphere. But in the last decade, interest in the public sphere has expanded hugely, with 247 articles in Media, Culture & Society (and many more in other journals), covering a diversity of themes and greatly stimulated by the advances of globalisation and mass internet use.

For those who find the public sphere newly fascinating in a globalising network society, such interest is encouraging. For those who consider the concept to have been roundly critiqued or already superseded, this fascination merits pause for thought. It is in this context that the editors of this special issue invited us to initiate a conversation over what we might term ‘the rise and rise’ of the concept of the public sphere within media studies. Scholars are already familiar with the trajectory of the concept in academia, and most can outline Habermas’s original theory, detail the many critiques it has attracted and discuss whether these undermine the concept, its continuing relevance and how it can it be researched. But in what follows, we have selected contributors keen to mine the undeveloped potential of the public sphere concept so as to address the pressing concerns of 21st-century media studies.

This provides a fresh look at some lively debates, among which constraints of space forced …