Frankfurt School and the Internet

• The Shrinking of the Public Sphere
  • Bread, Circuses, and the New Yellow Journalism
  • Censorship through regulation
  • Commodifying Participation
• The Public Pushes Back
  • A Return to the Liberal Broadcasting Model
  • Production as Guerilla Warfare
• The Future

The very beginning of my paper. I'm continuing to sort it out by the hour.

Frankfurt School and the Internet

In Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas conceived of a sphere in between the private space of the home and the public space occupied by the state where individuals could convene to critically reflect upon politics, culture, and identity. Though Habermas is speaking primarily about the public sphere of 18th and 19th centuries, his analysis and those of other Frankfurt School theorists, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, are instrumental in understanding both the boundless promise and the tremendous waste of the Internet. YouTube? provides a simplistic, yet didactic microcosm.

The Shrinking of the Public Sphere

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Habermas lamented the decline of this so-called bourgeois “public sphere,” blaming, among many things, the concentration of economic power. The engorgement of economic power, he observes, in turn produces a call from both the public and the conglomerations themselves to regulate, thereby shrinking the public sphere. In the case of intellectual property, the call for stricter regulation of property rights in cultural products came as smaller production companies became consumed and transformed into larger ones.

-- StacyAdelman - 20 Oct 2011