Colloquium Presentation Part 1: The Public Sphere: Public Sphere

“By ‘public sphere’ we mean first of all a domain of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be formed. Access to the public sphere is open in principle to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere is constituted in every conversation in which private persons come together to form a public” (Habermas).

Colloquium Presentation Part 2: The Public Sphere: Public

“Citizens act as a public when they deal with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion; thus with the guarantee that they may assemble and unite freely, and express and publicize their opinions freely” (Habermas).



“When the public is large, this kind of communication requires certain means of dissemination and influence; today, newspapers and periodicals, radio and television are the media of the public sphere” (Habermas).

Colloquium Presentation Part 3: The Public Sphere: Public Opinion

“The term ‘public opinion’ refers to the functions of criticism and control of organized state authority that the public exercises informally, as well as formally during periodic elections” (Habermas).

Blogs can be seen as the newest exercise of public opinion, both formal and informal. Many blogs critique the political process and attempt to assert some measure of control by making sure information is presented in a public forum instead of being swept aside and forgotten.

“Whereas mere opinions (things taken for granted as part of a culture, normative convictions, collective prejudices and judgments) seem to persist unchanged in their quasi-natural structure as a kind of sediment of history, public opinion, in terms of its very idea, can be formed only if a public that engages in rational discussion exists” (Habermas).

Colloquium Presentation Part 4: The Public Sphere: Political Representation in the Era of the Public Sphere

“Representation in the sense of the bourgeois public sphere, as in ‘representing’ the nation or specific clients, has nothing to do with representative publicness, which inheres in the concrete existence of a lord. As long as the prince and the estates of his realm ‘are’ the land, rather then merely ‘representing’ it, they are capable of this kind of representation; they represent their authority ‘before’ the people rather than for the people” (Habermas).

What example can we use to demonstrate the idea of Representative Publicness vs Representation in a Bourgeois Public Sphere?
Example

Colloquium Presentation Part 5: The Public Sphere: Public Sphere Media

“They [the Bourgeois] soon began to make use of the public sphere of informational newspapers, which was officially regulated, against the public power itself, using those papers, along with the morally and critically oriented weeklies, to engage in debate about the general rules governing relations in their own essentially privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and labor” (Habermas)

Colloquium Presentation Part 6: The Public Sphere: Transformation of News Media

“The political daily press came to have an important role during this same period. In the second half of the eighteenth century, serious competition to the older form of news writing as the compiling of items of information arose in the form of literary journalism. Karl Bucher describes the main outlines of this development: ‘From mere institutions for the publication of news, newspapers became the vehicles and guides of public opinion as well, weapons of party politics. The consequence of this for the internal organization of the newspaper enterprise was the insertion of a new function between the gathering of news and its publication: the editorial function” (Habermas)

Art Speigelman's depiction in In the Shadow of No Towers of his "interview" with Tom Brokaw illustrates this idea that the media guides public opinion instead of merely reporting it.

Colloquium Presentation Part 7: The Public Sphere: The Sway of Public Relations

“Whereas at one time publicness was intended to subject persons or things to the public use of reason and to make political decisions susceptible to revision before the tribunal of public opinion, today it has often enough already been enlisted in the aid of the secret policies of interest groups; in the form of ‘publicity’ it now acquires public prestige for persons or things and renders them capable of acclamation in a climate of nonpublic opinion. The term ‘public relations’ itself indicated how a public sphere that formerly emerged from the structure of society must now be produced circumstantially on a case-by-case basis” (Habermas).

Colloquium Presentation Part 8: Blogs as a Medium for the Public Sphere

Blogs are a way for private individuals and organizations to hold conversation in a medium virtually free from the coercion of the public power. PBS has a feature in their Media Matters section entitled Welcome to the Blogosphere which has a link to a video Blogfather Glenn Reynolds that gives a short explanation of what a blog is.

Colloquium Presentation Part 9: Welcome to the Blogosphere: Links

WELCOME TO THE BLOGOSPHERE
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/mediamatters/303/blogs.html
(Realplayer Video)


BBC - American media vs. the blogs
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4279229.stm


MORE BLOG INFO
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/chee/S_chee/typesofblogs.htm


NEWS/POLITICS BLOGS

Vodkapundit
http://www.bloglines.com/blog/1stCorinthians?subid=2039495

Third Estate Blog
http://home.mindspring.com/~thirdestate/


PERSONAL BLOGS

Boogerhead
http://www.secraterri.com/jan3001.html

Nate’s Other Page
http://sirante87.tripod.com/id2.html (turn down sound)

VSO (Misuse of the term Blog?)
http://www.vso.org/code/Ludwig042904.html


GROUP BLOGS

Slashdot
http://slashdot.org

IMAO
http://www.imao.us/archives/002703.html


PHOTO BLOGS

Quarlo
http://www.quarlo.com/

Pink Elephants
http://pink.trianide.com

http://dirtdirt.com/669


AUDIO BLOGS

Will Wheaton
Will Wheaton's Audio Blog

Noah Glass
Noah Glass' Audio Blog


HOW TO BLOG

Blogger
http://www.blogger.com

Movable Type
http://www.movabletype.org