ABSTRACT
The twenty-first-century news audience is seen, paradoxically, as both exceptionally passive and unprecedentedly active. On the one hand, the news audience is thought to be made up of apathetic and easily distracted consumers rather than active and engaged citizens; on the other, they are ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen 2006), not consumers but ‘prosumers’, creative ‘generators’ of media content. The first view, often connected to discussions of ‘trivialisation’ and ‘dumbing down’ since the 1990s, would seem to confirm Habermas’s (1989) contention that the commercialisation of media has led to the public sphere becoming ‘refeudalised’. Even among analysts who emphasise the creative and interactive dimensions of the audience’s engagement with new media, there is disagreement between those who make the largely optimistic argument that we are witnessing the development of a ‘transnational public sphere’ (Higgins 2008: 145) and more sceptical diagnoses of a public sphere fragmented into countless versions of the ‘Daily Me’ (Calcutt 1999: 73-7), with the blogosphere and web-based personalised news services feeding a process of individuation in which news no longer constructs ‘the commons’. Contemporary attitudes to the public – frowned upon as passive consumers or
flattered as content-generating users – are often explained in terms of recent technological and commercial developments but are better understood, we argue, as the product of long-term political changes and, accordingly, changes in the way that ‘the public sphere’ and ‘the public’ have been conceived by both journalists and academics. As part of this longer-term shift, both journalism and Journalism Studies have tended to favour ‘difference’, as variously identified with niche markets, segmented readerships and the politics of cultural identity. This development has often been seen as an improvement on the monolithic national political culture of old, but it threatens to undercut the purpose of journalism as a wider, public forum. Today, against the backdrop of declining viewing figures and falling newspaper sales in the West, there is much discussion of how to engage the public. But the general trend is to think in terms of ‘public spheres’ in the plural and to repudiate past unity as being necessarily false. While the terms in which society has previously imagined a unified public and a unitary public sphere
have indeed been problematic, it is nevertheless important, we argue, to hold on to the universalist conception of the public sphere.
