Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND DEMOCRACY
as they have done so, their key contribution as reliable disseminator of information
about the public sphere is diminished. The media’s function changes as they
increasingly become arms of capitalist interest, shifting towards a role of publicopinion
former and away from that of information provider.
There are many dimensions of this transition, several of which were reviewed
in Chapter 6, but the net result is that the public sphere appreciably declines as
the press assumes advertising functions and increasingly expresses propagandistic
positions even in its reportage. For a similar reason, that of increased
commercialisation and corporate expansion, the realm of ‘letters’ degenerates
into something concerned chiefly with ‘blockbusters’ and ‘best-selling’ entertainments,
the purpose of which is to encourage ‘cultural consumption’ rather than
stimulation of critical debate. In the publishing industry or, even more important,
the television and newspaper business, a primary purpose today is the ‘feudal’
one of the celebration of capitalist styles of life, whether through adulatory
displays of the ‘stars’, partisan and partial news coverage, or subordination of
content to the dictates of advertisers calling for maximum size of audiences.
While these two features are expressive of the spread and strengthening of
capitalism’s hold over social relationships, there is something else which, from
its early days in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has fought to use the
state to bolster the public sphere. It has frequently swum against the current that
has swept us towards a mature capitalist economy. One thinks here of groups
which have made an important contribution to the creation and spread of a public
service ethos in modern society. Habermas observes that from its early days
the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ has provided space for people who occupy a position
between the market and government, between, that is, the economy and the
polity. I refer here particularly to professions such as academics, lawyers, doctors
and some civil servants. It is arguable that, as capitalism consolidated its hold in
the wider society and over the state itself, so did significant elements of these
(and other) professions agitate, with some success, for state support to ensure
that the public sphere was not overly damaged by capital’s domination.
Habermas (1962) makes this point with broadcasting especially in mind,
arguing that public broadcasting corporations were founded ‘because otherwise
their publicist function could not have been sufficiently protected from the
encroachment of their capitalistic one’ (p. 188). But the argument that such were
the tendencies towards takeover by capitalist interests that state involvement was
required to guarantee the informational infrastructure for a viable public sphere
can be extended to explain the character of several key institutions, notably
public libraries, government statistical services, museums and art galleries, and
even higher education. Indeed, the public service ethos, conceived as an outlook
which, in the informational realm at least, was committed to dispassionate and
neutral presentation of information and knowledge to the widest possible public,
irrespective of people’s abilities to pay, can be regarded as closely consonant
with an orientation essential to the effective functioning of the public sphere. As
such, it bears close scrutiny of its often tense relationships with the corporate
capitalism which now predominates.
Reading Jürgen Habermas on the history of the public sphere, it becomes
impossible to avoid the conclusion that its future is precarious. Even in its heyday
166