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CHAPTER 2. THE PUBLIC SPHERE 33
the preceding Elizabethan epoch. Here, at the start of the eighteenth century,
more than half the population lived on the margins of subsistence. The
masses were not only largely illiterate but also so pauperized that they could
not even pay for literature. They did not have at their disposal the buying
power needed for even the most modest participation in the market of cultural
goods. Nevertheless, with the emergence of the diffuse public formed
in the course of the commercialization of cultural production, a new social
category arose.
This notion of equality is supported by the model of access to the media advanced
by Barron (1967), who argues that the First Amendment to the American constitution
ought to be interpreted to protect the rights of all persons to gain access
to the means of distributing and receiving information. This view was explicitly
rejected by the United States Supreme Court in the 1972 Tornillo case, in which
it held that the rights of those owning the media were paramount to the rights of
those using the media (Schmidt 1976). Though Habermas is suspect of protections
afforded the public sphere by the state, the lack of opportunities to contribute to
the public sphere is evidence of its degeneration in this century. To measure this
aspect of equality, an analysis of the distribution of computers and Internet access
at the time of the study, and the distribution of competencies to use the technology,
could have been performed. This aspect of equality is beyond the scope of
the present work.
Equality can also be assessed by examining the relative treatment of individuals
within the public sphere and their ascribed status. One aspect of equality of individuals
within the public sphere is related to status. Habermas emphasized the
equality of status among participants, suggesting that the institutions of the emerging
public sphere were based on a disregard of status among the participants – if
not in practice, at least in theory. Public sphere institutions “preserved a kind of
social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded
status altogether. The tendency replaced the celebration of rank with firm rules
of equality” (Habermas 1989, 131). In Habermas’s conception of the bourgeois
public sphere, however:
interlocutors would set aside such characteristics as differences in birth and
fortune and speak to one another as if they were social and economic peers.
The operative phrase here is ’as if.’ In fact, social inequalities among the
interlocutors were not eliminated but only bracketed. (Fraser 1992, 119).