Habermas Online
The great man has spoken of the internet at last
In 2006, Jürgen Habermas, the preeminent theorist of the public sphere, spoke of the internet for the first time, only in a footnote, all but dismissing the net as “millions of fragmented chat rooms.” Many have waited for more. Now, in a paper recently published and translated, Habermas finally reflects on the internet and its impact on public discourse.
Habermas now calls the internet “a caesura in the development of media in human history comparable to the introduction of printing,” an “equally momentous innovation” to the invention of movable type, and a “third revolution in communications technologies” whose result is “the global dissolution of boundaries” as “the communication flows of our garrulous species have spread, accelerated and become networked with unprecedented speed across the entire globe and, retrospectively, across all epochs of world history.”
As someone who has a book positing just that coming out in June — The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet (preorder now) — I am gratified, indeed relieved not to be alone. In my book and now here, I will dispute Habermas. Agree or disagree with his provocations, though, they have a way of helping to clarify one’s own thinking. (Sadly, Habermas’ paper is behind high academic…
