Dissertation Projects

Communicative Action and the Public Sphere in the Digital Age. What is about to change, what remains and how this is to be evaluated

Lisa Schurrers' dissertation project
Over the past few years, politics and research with respect to the public sphere has been strongly marked by debates surrounding digitalization and its consequences. The present project contributes to this discussion by emphasizing the theoretical communicative foundations of democratic societies. The main argument of the project is that a normative model of the democratic public sphere can be designed on the basis of an extended and critically considered concept of communicative action. This approach has three advantages. First, digitalization and automation processes can be examined in-depth. Second, extant and new power mechanism can be described more thoroughly. Third, both systemic distortions in communication as well as dysfunctions specifically related to democratic public spheres can be comprehensively identified. Such an understanding of the public sphere therefore creates the opportunity to organize discussions around new digital technologies. Phenomena or developments such as Twitter bots, media consumption via Facebook, conversations with one’s smartphone, or automated facial recognition algorithms that are used in public as part of predictive policing, can thereby be made comprehensible and can be linked to one another in the context of an analytical model, without however glossing over their differentiated societal impacts. Reference to background knowledge, as well as literature and studies on the latest technological developments ensures a sound empirical basis for the normative framework.

To achieve this, the project first establishes an understanding of the political public sphere. In this respect, most importantly, dynamics pertaining to questions about how one speaks, about what, and in which space, are examined. Furthermore, basic mechanisms of communication are considered. Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action is taken as the starting point. This approach seems particularly fruitful for the project, since it is based on a combination of agent and structural theories and thus allows one to both take the communicative practices of interpersonal relations seriously, as well as examine and criticize mechanisms of power. The Habermasian approach nevertheless also has some shortcomings in terms of technology and media philosophy, to which the present project responds. Particularly problematic is whether communication can still be adequately understood by means of a concept such as that of communicative action in times when communicative processes are often channelled through the media or when we often communicate with artificial interlocutors. Normative foundations are devised according to this critical revision, which in turn then justify the explicit functions of the political public sphere. Ultimately, these functions serve as a benchmark to classify and evaluate new digital public phenomena.