What does the public sphere mean? What does it mean for us?
According to Kotus’ dictionary, the word “public” has at least the following interpretations in Finnish:
1. openly, so that everyone sees or hears, knowingly happening or done, being common knowledge
2. a) applicable to all, intended for general use
b) belonging to the sector of the bodies of society, state, municipality, parish.
Of course, you can think of these interpretations as being closely related – their differences are rather differences in emphasis related to contexts or perspectives.
The ideal of the public sphere
The public sphere has been described in different ways in social sciences. For example, sociologist Richard Sennett has analysed public spaces as concrete places that allow people who were previously strangers to each other to meet and interact. Philosopher Hannah Arendt has emphasised the idea of the public sphere as a place of freedom and debate separate from the bare necessities of life and the obligations of work, with origins in the political culture of ancient Greece.
Undoubtedly the most central public sphere theorist of the modern era, Jürgen Habermas, formulated the meaning of the public sphere in 1962 as follows: “By ‘the public sphere’ we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body.”
In Habermas’ mindset, the press, the mass media, played a key role in forming the bourgeois liberalist public sphere in seventeenth–eighteenth century Europe. At that time, the new, rising bourgeoisie had begun to “challenge the authorities in public debate on general rules related to the exchange of goods”*. The press conveyed information about the decisions of the state or the court for the bourgeoisie to discuss.
*) Huttunen 2019, subchapter “Julkisuusparadigma”.
Habermasin mukaan tästä käynnistyi yksityisen piirin – tavarankierron eli kaupankäynnin ja porvarillisen ydinperheen intiimin sisätilan According to Habermas, this started the separation of the private sphere – the circulation of goods, or trade, and the intimate interior of the bourgeois core family – from the public sphere; in the latter, the private bourgeoisie specifically exercised public reasoning and was thus influencing political decision-making from the perspective of their own interests. On the other hand, public power separated itself into a sphere of its own and also separated itself from the person of the traditional monarch.
In principle, the public sphere, open to all citizens, remained between public power and the private sphere, where the formation of public opinion was influenced by all kinds of interactions between citizens in cafes and salons, and by journalism in particular. In addition to passive communication, journalists also began to express their views and thus actively participate in political processes. This transition gave birth to the role of the press as the “fourth estate” and “watchdog of power”, but also as one of the gatekeepers that, in the journalistic process, chooses which information ends up in the public sphere.
This entire structure of the public sphere is deeply rooted in the ideal of a liberal society, which is now referred to in Finnish as “deliberative democracy” and which a large proportion of Western people consider to be either the present reality or at least a goal worth pursuing.
Communications theorist Brian McNair has specified the five functions of media in the conceptualised public sphere as follows:
– producing information to support citizens’ decision-making
– interpreting complex contexts
– interrogating the authorities
– representing their audiences in front of the authorities
– advocating or expressing views.
In the context of deliberative democracy, it is easy to see that these tasks serve the same ideal and stem from the same historical roots outlined above.
But the question remains: is the public sphere what Habermas conceptualised in his influential theory? Is it still that, or not any more?
The reality of the public sphere
Habermas published his original theory of the public sphere in 1962. McNair considers Habermas’ theory and the relationship of journalism and publicity from a contemporary perspective. Since then, attention has been paid to the fact that, particularly with regard to its historical review of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, it was not relevant to the situation of the majority of the population. That majority consisted of women, ordinary workers and ethnic groups. The public sphere as a forum for political participation only served the elite, who can rightfully be called a patriarchy. Coffee shops, newspaper pages and pamphlets were all spaces made available to white men by white men.
Another point that Habermas himself has later drawn attention to is that a significant proportion of the media in liberal democratic states are private operators, not public, “neutral” services. How is the work of a journalist, with all its public impacts, guided if their salary is paid by a news media organisation aiming for financial profit, whose news reports are also perceived as commodities? According to good journalistic practice in Finland, editorial decisions are never made outside the editorial teams or on the basis of non-journalistic criteria. However, it is not so much a question of the integrity of an individual journalist’s work as it is about what is required so that the public’s trust in journalism at large does not waver.In addition, the public sphere as a mediator between citizens and public authorities is obfuscated by the impact of non-public PR activities and influencer communications. This has undoubtedly always been the case to some extent, but in recent decades, the importance of this issue has increased. In the background, there is a broader development in which the state, which in the Habermas model focused strictly on the use of public power, has moved closer to economic activity, which in the same model belonged strictly to the private sphere, and vice versa. Thus, decision-making has been shifting into the hands of monopolies, parties and labour market organisations outside the public sphere. Public use of power becomes only a representation of powerand marketing of decisions already made to the public.*
*) Huttunen 2019, subchapter “Julkisuusparadigma”.
Digitalisation developments based on technological developments in recent decades, on the other hand, have put the ideal model of the public sphere to the test in at least two revolutionary ways. The first is related to the amount of publicity and accessibility. While the analogue public sphere was characterised by the scarcity of information available to the recipient, the information space has become virtually infinite, especially with the internet. Journalistic – but also other – content is more accessible to anyone than ever before in written history.
Another revolution concerns the transformation of information flows into bidirectional, or rather multidirectional flows. Traditional journalistic communication was easy to conceptualise as a vertical hierarchy in which the gatekeeper organisations at the top distributed information downwards to the masses. Once the original public spheres of the bourgeoisie – coffee shops, marketplaces, salons – had been superseded by a public sphere maintained namely by the media, a private person could participate in the public discourse mainly by means of opinion column letters. Today, the masses, which means anyone, have become content creators and gatekeepers. The real question is whether this structure sustains the public sphere at least broadly in Habermas’ original sense, or whether we have moved into a new age where private entities have begun eating away at the public sphere. What will then happen to the idea of a shared political sphere that brings people’s interests together?
McNair also raises the issue of the restriction of journalistic content. Nowadays, it is no longer obvious that the liberal democratic public sphere, which for many reasons has been driven into a defensive stance, would only be supported by the perception of serious journalistic content by white men who dress sharply and still dominate the media landscape in many places. This question of restriction is at least related to the aforementioned embedding of private entities into the public sphere. Such characteristics can be identified, for example, in various publications of the human interest type, where a socially significant theme manifests itself through an individual human destiny. Such a publication may have been created even primarily for “only” entertainment, to control the immense impetus of private individuals cut down to simple consumers, but it can also be difficult to anticipate possible political consequences among a broad audience.
Drawing boundaries is not always easy. In any case, it is important to be aware that whatever forms and expressions the core activity of democracy known as journalism takes, it is always characterised by a certain method, which, at least in Finland, is articulated in the principles of good journalistic practice, or namely the Journalist’s Guidelines.
Sources
Habermas, Jürgen: “Julkisuus”. Originally published under the title “Öffentlichkeit” in Fischer Lexikon Staat und Politik, Neuausgabe, Frankfurt 1964, p. 220–226. Finnish translation by Esa Väliverronen. Media & viestintä8(3), 1985, p. 17–22.
McNair, Brian: “Journalism as Public Sphere”. In Vos, T. P. (ed.): Journalism. De Gruyter – Mouton, Boston/Berliini 2018, pp. 149–168.
Huttunen, Rauno: “Jürgen Habermasin yhteiskuntateoriat”. In Kauppinen, Ilkka; Pyykkönen, Miikka & Moisio, Olli-Pekka (eds.): 1900-luvun saksalainen yhteiskuntateoria. Gaudeamus, Helsinki 2019.
Seuri, Olli & Ikäheimo, Hannu-Pekka: Portinvartijat. Kamppailu tiedon vapaudesta. Teos, Helsinki 2023.