ABSTRACT
Although clearly a modern technological democracy, Malta is in many ways also a face-to-face society. As suggested in Chapter 2, such a context means that the attenuated and mass-mediated public sphere of the nation as ‘imagined community’ is cross-cut by face-to-face relationships. The nation’s media are dominated by letters to the editor, phone-ins and hosted chat-shows. In Habermas’ (1984) model of the development of the public sphere, such manifestations are seen as evidence of the shift or transformation from a public sphere that is productive of public opinion – as a genuine and positive contribution to political debate and democracy – to one that is simply an object of consumption. Although apparently generating ‘more’ debate, such mass-mediated communicative activity in fact, claims Habermas, creates less real debate, though creating the impression of there being more. This calculus of the public sphere and public opinion, however, fails to account for situations such as Malta, where the public figures who appear in the mass media are also familiar local personalities with whom the public can – and frequently do – have personal, face-to-face relationships. The situation creates what has been classified as a ‘semitransformed’ public sphere, which sees mass-mediated debate articulating with face-to-face debate in a hybrid public sphere (see Mitchell 2002a).
