Expanding the Public Sphere through Computer ... - ResearchGate

CHAPTER 2. THE PUBLIC SPHERE 25
new model the convivial discussion among individuals gave way to more or
less noncommittal group activities. These too assumed fixed forms of informal
sociability, yet they lacked that specific institutional power that had
once ensured the interconnectedness of sociable contacts as the substratum
of public communication – no public was formed around group activities.
The characteristic relationship of a privacy oriented toward an audience was
no longer present when people went to the movies together, listened to the
radio, or watched TV. The communication of the public that debated critically
about culture remained dependent on reading pursued in the closed-off
privacy of the home. The leisure activities of the culture-consuming public,
on the contrary, themselves take place within a social climate, and they do
not require any further discussions. The private form of appropriation removed
the ground for a communication about what has been appropriated
(163).
This is in marked contrast to the private realm of commodity exchange – which
Habermas (1989) suggests replaces the idealized public sphere – in which individuals
act on their own best interests as individuals, and not as a public. The
idealized public sphere which had grown as a part of the private realm was replaced
by what Habermas (1989, 160) calls the “pseudo-public or sham-private”
sphere of culture consumption, or what others call the “liberal public sphere” (see,
for example, Stanley (1988), Pateman (1970), and Calhoun (1992)). As the private
realm increasingly became dominated by struggles over resources, increasingly
regulated by the forces of economic competition, increasingly oriented to
the “dictates of life’s necessities,” it ceased to support a public sphere with a political
character, “in the Greek sense of being emancipated from the constraints”
(Habermas 1989, 160) of everyday life. The idealized political public sphere had
presupposed a separation inside the private realm between, on the one hand, affairs
that private people pursued individually and, on the other hand, the sort of interaction
that united private people into a public. But as soon as and to the degree that
the public sphere in the world of letters spread into the realm of consumption, this
threshold became leveled. So-called leisure behavior, once it had become part of
the cycle of production and consumption, was already apolitical, if for no other
reason than its incapacity to constitute a world emancipated from the immediate
constraints of survival needs:
When leisure becomes nothing more than a complement to time spent on
the job, it could be no more than a different arena for the pursuit of private
business affairs that were not transformed into a public communication