Die politische Öffentlichkeit als Ort des Denkenn | The Political Public Sphere as a Site for Thinking
Where are we, when we are thinking? Thinking requires space in order to flourish. Thinking is always directed towards the public sphere: It is in testing a thought in the social space and entering into a discourse with others that one is in encounter with oneself. The public sphere plays a crucial role in politics and political philosophy. It is the space in which ideas are developed, arguments exchanged, and public opinions are formed. The public sphere is not an unstructured blank-position. It is situated in and structured by a power-arena of economic interests, state regulations and media dynamics. These parameters constitute the framework, within which the political thinking occurs.
The political thinking in the public sphere has to confront the different challenges that go along with the media transformation in the 21st century. First, these challenges consist of an ironic perception of the political discourse. The separation of the political information and other areas of news, which are strictly separated in traditional media (such as newspaper, radio, and TV) is increasingly blurred in the internet and in the social media. Not only that information is not marked as political, but political contributions also take the form of communication dominating the social media as well, i.e. apercus, short observations and ironic comments. Political communication, that take on these forms, changes the way politics is conducted. Second, the exchange of political information increasingly takes place in semi-private, semi-public networks, in which actors do not have a clear private or public role. Thereby, the hitherto separated spheres of the private and the public are mixed. Third, the virtual public sphere takes the form of a bubble as the internet platforms are getting more and more personalized. Internet platforms are gathering data based on the past browsing history in order to generate algorithms to profile users in order to target users with specific products and services, such that the odds of being confronted with diverging opinions or unexpected contents are less and less likely.
These three transformations of the media-generated public sphere do not only change the conditions under which the political thinking takes place, but they also change the form of political thinking itself, and the possibility that political thoughts are heard and translated into real social changes. Thinking is in fact always directed towards the public sphere, as pointed out at the beginning; however the form in which thinking takes place is changing. The process of this change, drafted above, is the topic of this paper.
Lukas Kaelin hat Philosophie in München und London studiert und mit einer Arbeit über Adorno und Biotechnik promoviert. Nach einigen Jahren als Visiting Professor an der Ateneo de Manila University ist er zur Zeit Universitätsassistent am "Institut für Ethik und Recht in der Medizin" an der Universität Wien und schreibt an seiner Habilitation zur Transformation der Öffentlichkeit.