How the blogosphere transformed public debate

The philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, who “towered over the intellectual life of modern Germany” (as the Financial Times put it in its obituary), has died at the age of 96. He will be widely mourned by generations of German philosophers and academics. But he will also be remembered by many of us who were early users of the internet, and especially by those who were bloggers.

The connection was Habermas’s most famous book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published in 1962. In it, he had traced the evolution in western Europe of a new space for public debate in the coffee houses and literary salons of 18th-century bourgeois society. He called it the “public sphere”.

Participants in the sphere were private individuals, coming together to rationally and critically discuss public affairs – above all, the actions of governments. It is, Habermas wrote, “a realm of private individuals assembled into a public body who as citizens transmit the needs of bourgeois society to the state, in order, ideally, to transform political into ‘rational’ authority within the medium of this public sphere”.

This sphere was not a physical place but a set of conventions and practices where political participation could be enacted through conversation. One of the most important conventions was disregard of social or economic status: anyone could speak, which was rare enough in 18th-century society.

It didn’t matter if you were an aristocrat or a merchant, what Habermas called “the authority of the better argument” was supposed to prevail over the social status of the speaker. In other words, it was an arena where people could interact as peers, where participants used logic and evidence to challenge the state’s “divine right” or arbitrary secrets.

As states evolved and democracies began to emerge, this idea of Habermas’s took on the status of a viral meme – until it ran into the 20th century. The rise of mass media and broadcasting made his vision look increasingly implausible. And his public sphere atrophied in a world where it was co-opted and controlled by those rich enough to own a newspaper or a TV network, and everyone else was a couch potato.

Then came the internet and – more importantly – the web, and suddenly, things started to look up. Anyone with the requisite technical knowledge could build a website. And if you could type and had an internet connection, you could become a blogger – and broadcast your ideas to the world without having to convince a legacy-media gatekeeper of your worth. The age of “the wealth of networks” (the title of Yochai Benkler’s optimistic book about user-generated content) had arrived.

As blogging became popular and grew into what the late social networking pioneer Brad L Graham coined as the “blogosphere”, many of those of us who were involved in it began to see it as an instantiation of Habermas’s great idea. After all, there were no barriers to entry: sign on to the Blogger service and you’re online. And there were no status differentials. As the dog in a New Yorker cartoon says to its fellow canine: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Between 2000 and 2007, the blogosphere thrived. During the Iraq war and the 2004 US presidential election, bloggers such as Daily Kos, Instapundit and other “warblogs” began challenging mainstream media narratives, and the “hidden wiring” provided by RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds allowed readers to subscribe to their favourite bloggers. Here, we thought, was a real, functioning public sphere.

In the excitement, though, I sometimes wondered what Habermas would make of it. And then, in 2006, I found out. “The internet,” he wrote, “has certainly reactivated the grassroots of an egalitarian public of writers and readers. However, computer-mediated communication in the web can claim unequivocal democratic merits only for a special context: it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes that try to control and repress public opinion.

“In the context of liberal regimes, the rise of millions of fragmented chatrooms across the world tends instead to lead to the fragmentation of large but politically focused mass audiences into a huge number of isolated issue publics.”

Needless to say, the blogosphere was not amused by this, and Habermas was roundly berated for being old, out of touch and not understanding how the internet worked.

But the truth is that the old boy was right. Once upon a time – from 1935, when Gallup began polling, to about 2007, when social media really got going – there was  such a thing as “public opinion” that you could measure. Now we have millions of publics, each with their own opinions.

The good news, though, is that we still have lots of bloggers, including yours truly.

This be the metaverse 

My Prodigal Brainchild is a lovely essay by Neal Stephenson on how Mark Zuckerberg screwed up an $80bn virtual reality idea that he had conceived.

Junk bond 

Timothy Garton Ash’s sharp analysis of the “special” UK-US ties is Love Actually? Washington’s Current Relationship with Britain Is More Like Contempt Actually.

Pure and simple  

Every Element of Stephen Miller’s Immigration Agenda Is Designed for Ethnic Cleansing is a searing examination by Kyle Varner of what’s going on across the pond.

Photograph by Alamy