ABSTRACT
It is perhaps unsurprising that the theoretical constructs of one of the most important social philosophers of the present time have been applied to the study of the Internet. These the oretical constructs offer not only a clear factual explanation of how democracy has become subverted, but also, more recently, a normative guide out of the impasse envisioned by his predecessors. Habermas (1996) has recently attempted to apply his vast theoretical framework to a proposal for a constitutional democracy. In so doing, he has attempted to provide an explanation of how flows of influence may be organized so as to allow the most extensive democratization as possible, without that democracy becoming subverted by systemic imperatives. It has seemed clear for some time now that the informal layers of political society identified by Habermas have suffered a communicative deficit that may well be filled by a medium such as the Internet. In various discussions, the work of Habermas has been used as a theoretical backdrop to the claim that either the Internet provides citizens with a public sphere, or that it does not. 1 To be sure, there have been numerous conflicting accounts of the degree to which the Internet does or does not constitute a public sphere. Many such discussions suffer one or both of two fundamental flaws: Either that they fail to make use of an appropriately hermeneutic methodology, such as that employed by Dahlgren; 2 or they have tended to restrict themselves to the notion of the public sphere developed in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Structural Transformation), mentioning other aspects of Habermas’s work only in passing, if at all. However, to be sure, there is a wealth of insight and analysis in the work of Habermas; much of this has yet to be employed in analyses of the Internet.
