Peter Lunt

Media studies’ fascination with the concept of the public sphere: critical reflections and emerging debates

Discussions of the public sphere have enjoyed an enduring place in the pages of Media, Culture & Society with 346 articles referring to the concept to date. Initially (1979–89), articles were sparse (23) and mainly focused on bringing German scholarship to Englishspeaking scholars (cf. the 1982 special issue, vol. 4:2); yet these articles already offered a range of applications of the concept as well as critiques. From 1990 to 2000, Media, Culture & Society published 58 articles referring to the public sphere which, again, concentrated on the problems of the mass-mediated public sphere. But in the last decade, interest in the public sphere has expanded hugely, with 247 articles in Media, Culture & Society (and many more in other journals), covering a diversity of themes and greatly stimulated by the advances of globalisation and mass internet use. For those who find the public sphere newly fascinating in a globalising network society, such interest is encouraging. For those who consider the concept to have been roundly critiqued or already superseded, this fascination merits pause for thought. It is in this context that the editors of this special issue invited us to initiate a conversation over what we might term ‘the rise and rise’ of the concept of the public sphere within media studies. Scholars are already familiar with the trajectory of the concept in academia, and most can outline Habermas’s original theory, detail the many critiques it has attracted and discuss whether these undermine the concept, its continuing relevance and how it

Is ‘mediatization’ the new paradigm for our field? A commentary on Deacon and Stanyer (2014, 2015) and Hepp, Hjarvard and Lundby (2015)

In responding to the debate about the theory of mediatization, we reject criticisms that foreclose prematurely on this set of new ideas potentially worthy of further exploration, and we give more attention to the fundamental questions that critics have asked about mediatization. We note that controversy centres on the claim that mediatization is a societal metaprocess of the order of globalization, individualization and commercialization. Substantiating this claim would require an ambitious, evidenced account of socio-historical change over centuries, along with recognition of mediatization research as a valuable contribution to the analysis of modernity on which scholars of other supposedly mediatized domains now draw. We invite sceptics of mediatization to articulate their critique by reference to the now sizeable body of writing on this concept. We call on proponents of mediatization – along with others keen to understand social and media change within the history of modernity – to consider: (1) whether and how existing research on media’s changing role within a variety of domains can be productively reinterpreted within a mediatization frame; (2) the implications of such work for existing theories, including those of other disciplines; and (3) how to advance analysis of the relations between mediatization and the other metaprocesses of modernity.

Tamar Liebes: A scholar extraordinaire of audiences as citizens in public and private spaces

In researching this short piece, Sonia contacted Elihu Katz, long-time co-author of Tamar Liebes, who mentioned that one of Tamar’s persistent ideas had been to compare the personal diaries of corr...