Digital media blur the private-public boundary even though its structural basis persists

Evidence

In Europe, the bourgeois public sphere in its literary and its political form was only gradually able to free itself from the shadow of older formations – above all the religious public sphere of ecclesiastical government and the representative public sphere of the personal rule embodied in emperors, kings and princes – once the social-structural prerequisites for a functional separation of state and society, of the public from the private economic sphere, had been satisfied. … As we shall see, the digitalization of public communication is blurring the perception of this boundary between the private and public spheres of life, although the social-structural prerequisites for this distinction, which also has far-reaching implications for the legal system, have not changed. From the perspective of the semi-private, semi-public spaces of communication in which users of social media are active today, the inclusive character of the public sphere, which was hitherto clearly separate from the private sphere, is disappearing. … This constitutes, as I would now like to show, a disturbing development on the subjective side of media users that at the same time draws attention to the inadequacy of the political regulation of those new media. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 22

Categorization

• XREF: This is Habermas revising his own 1962 thesis on the bourgeois public sphere’s emergence from the representative public sphere — the reader’s stated purpose explicitly tracks how this 2022 essay revisits the classic. — connects to: Social media may be changing citizens’ perception of the public sphere itself — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 43; Public and private space boundaries shift with power struggles; Loss of private opacity makes people forget mediating material infrastructures — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 92 (+5 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies the historical sequence of public-sphere forms: religious, representative, then bourgeois — useful definitional grounding for the deliberative-democracy frame.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly does Habermas mean by the inclusive character of the public sphere disappearing as the private-public boundary blurs?

Related

• Digital media seemed to finally fulfill the bourgeois public sphere’s equality claim (similarity 0.87)
• Social media may be changing citizens’ perception of the public sphere itself (similarity 0.86)
• Digital proliferation collapsed the primary-secondary definer boundary (similarity 0.84)
• Social media spaces create an anonymous intimacy that is neither public nor private (similarity 0.80)
• Jürgen Habermas — A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics (similarity 0.79)
• Extending the public sphere made bourgeois theorists brand the people a fickle mass (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Social media may be changing citizens’ perception of the public sphere itself #corroborates (0.82) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 43
• Loss of private opacity makes people forget mediating material infrastructures #expands (0.80) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 92
• Digital media seemed to finally fulfill the bourgeois public sphere’s equality claim #qualifies (0.78) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 34
• Public and private space boundaries shift with power struggles #complicates (0.75)