Shifting Spheres
Call for Papers to a special issue of Kybernetes [Clarivate Impact Factor: 1.381]
Deadline: 1 June 2020
Guest Editors:
Markus Heidingsfelder, Xiamen University, Malaysia
Holger Briel, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University, PR of China
Steffen Roth, La Rochelle Business School, France, and Yerevan State University, Armenia
The concept of publicity as a sphere of its own was first introduced to social scientific discourse by Jürgen Habermas in 1962. His novel contribution consisted in the development of an ideal type of social discourse: the “bourgeois public sphere”, a relatively dense network of public communication that managed to emerge from the middle of the 18th-century private sphere within which individuals could come together in rational discussion to identify the problems they faced as a society and seek to resolve them by consensus. This utopia of rational and universalistic politics was imagined to be free from both the economy and the state. However, according to Habermas, the same forces that initially established it eventually destroyed it. Identifying the consumeristic drive that successfully infiltrated all levels of society as its main cause. A detailed description of this downfall would fill the pages of his 1972 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
Today, in a world increasingly characterized by rapid media transformations and corresponding structural shifts in public communication, …