ABSTRACT
The concept of the ‘public sphere’ is of central importance to media research and integral to thinking about both political culture and popular culture.1
While the relations between mediated communication and publicity, publics and public opinion have been on the agenda from the very start of analytical reflection on mass communication (Splichal 1999), it would be true to say that for recent generations of scholars, Jürgen Habermas’s (1989) classic formulation of the structural transformation of the public sphere has constituted a decisive starting point for debate and investigation – whether one is in agreement with or in dissent from his views (Calhoun 1992). The discourse on the public sphere is proving to be one of the most fruitful contemporary conjunctions between political theory and media research and has become indispensable to how we think about the communicative conditions of a democratic polity and politics.
