The Good Fight

Hello,

I’ve been looking into setting up our own wiki and there are a couple of places that will allow us to create a pretty straightforward and basic wiki for free:

www.Wikispaces.com

www.Pbwiki.com

So far i like the look of the second better...maybe i’m just hungry.

Ok, so Jurgen Habermas. You should all be familiar with Public Spheres but as a quick run through. A public sphere is a somewhat imaginary zone in which all people, uninhibited and free from coercion can gather and discuss political issues and through debate achieve consensus and a kind of dialectical progression.

The early form of the public sphere developed in the coffee houses and salons of 16th/17thcentury Europe. Here, nobles and the upper classes gathered primarily to discuss art and literature but over time the conversation turned to the increasingly expanding and complicated (thus regulated) economic markets and so political issues became the staple of these early debates. This is important as it marked the shift from political power being something held before the people - as in the manner of lords and monarchs - to something that if not held by the people per se, then was validated by them in the manner of public opinion, which in a democratic sense adds legitimacy to that which it supports.

As the complexities of the trade markets grew pamphlets began to circulate to provide details on stock prices etc. Soon these same pamphlets included the opinion of their producers in ever greater detail and voila, the first newspapers were born. Soon all shades of opinion, all be it in a very narrow class of property owners, had a mouthpiece and a means to spread their side of the great polemic exchange. Alas, as civil bourgeois society developed there became ever more institutional/official ways to voice opposition and hold those in public office to account. And so those newspapers that survived were free to happily pursue a more commercially viable purpose. Opinions were disguised as facts, ideologies became centralised and generic and all in the name of a larger share in the market audience, which in turn brought in a higher pay cheque from advertising revenue.

Soon, newspapers and all resulting news media became dependant on commercial revenue and so largely abandoned the idea of opinions and debate. Where once public opinion was a messianic figure there was now only the god of publicity and the one way dialogue of consumerism. However, the net with it's ridiculously simple, anyone can publish anything approach promises a return to a more inclusive and fully formed public sphere but with the rise of interactive branding and viral marketing our battle isn’t just about saving an intellectual space from the colonisation of advertising, it’s about preserving the last potential vehicle for true democratic participation!!

Quite compelling, i think you’ll agree.   

Juan PdR