ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relevance of Jurgen Habermas’s thinking in a conception of communication technologies and explains its most important shortcomings, where structuration theory provide correctives. In Habermas’s theory of modern rationalisation, the concept of the lifeworld appears in different shapes and for different theoretical purposes. In the theory of Habermas, cultural patterns of interpretation, evaluation and expression supply resources of meaning for the process of reaching a common definition of the situation or some issue. Although Habermas develops a sociological lifeworld concept concretely related to the daily constitution of meaning in time and space, he is tied up to his theory of language. Habermas thus works out a critical theory of modernity by combining theories of meaningful interaction, and theories of abstract systems which works beyond the level of action and meaning. As a science of modernity, sociology may be understood as the science of the changing relations ‘between’ social spheres, their emergence and disembedding from others.
