Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND DEMOCRACY
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the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ was an incomplete means of meeting the German
philosopher’s ideal of ‘undistorted communication’. His account of its more
recent development is more gloomy still, an interpretation of trends which puts
him well inside the mainstream of the most pessimistic Frankfurt School theorists.
The views of Habermas’s former teacher, Theodor Adorno, are especially
evident: capitalism is victorious, the autonomy of individuals is radically reduced,
the capacity for critical thought is minimal, there is no real space for a public
sphere in an era of transnational media conglomerates and a pervasive culture
of advertising. As far as information is concerned, communications corporations’
overriding concern with the market means that their product is dedicated to the
goal of generating maximum advertising revenue and supporting capitalist enterprise.
As a result their content is chiefly lowest-common-denominator diversion:
action adventure, trivia, sensationalism, personalisation of affairs, celebration of
contemporary lifestyles. All this, appropriately hyped, appeals and sells, but its
informational quality is negligible. What it does is no more (and no less) than
subject its audiences ‘to the soft compulsion of constant consumption training’
(Habermas, 1962, p. 192).
Habermas goes still further than these familiar Marxist conclusions. In his
view, while the public sphere is weakened by the invasion of the advertising ethic,
so, too, is it deeply wounded by the penetration of public relations. In this regard
Habermas is especially sensitive to the career of Edward Bernays (1891–1995),
the doyen of American ‘opinion management’, which he takes to be indicative
of the demise of the public sphere. What Bernays and his many descendants
represent is an end to the rational debate characteristic of the public sphere, this
being subverted by the manipulative and disingenuous political operator (Robins
and Webster, 1999). To Jürgen Habermas this intrusion of PR marks the abandonment
of the ‘criteria of rationality’ which once shaped public argument, such
criteria being ‘completely lacking in a consensus created by sophisticated
opinion-molding’ which reduces political life to ‘showy pomp’ before duped
‘customers ready to follow’ (p. 195).
Contemplating the present, Habermas appears unrelentingly glum. Universal
suffrage may have brought each of us into the political realm, but it has also
brought the primacy of opinion over the quality of reasoned argument. Worse
than this weighing of the vote without assessing the validity of the issues, the
extension to everyone of the suffrage coincided with the emergence of ‘modern
propaganda’ (p. 203), hence the capability to manage opinion in a ‘manufactured
public sphere’ (p. 217). This is to identify the dark side of the Enlightenment.
What does it matter if people have the vote, but lack the wherewithal to evaluate
what they are voting for? What does more information matter if it is in the
service of deception? Here indeed is ‘the Janus face of enlightenment and control;
of information and advertising; of pedagogy and manipulation’ (p. 203).
The public sphere and informational change
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The foregoing is a partial review of Habermas’s work, one which has paid
particular attention to information in the rise and fall of the public sphere. Before
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