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Jürgen Habermas’s book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, first published in 1962, has long been recognized as one of the most important works of 20th century social thought. Blending together philosophy and social history, he outlined a theory of the public sphere as a domain situated between civil society and the state, a domain in which citizens could scrutinize the activities of public officials and debate matters of common concern. In his later works, Habermas would repeatedly question the role played by the public sphere in the safeguarding of democratic community. Now, in view of the crisis of democracy and the digital revolution, he returns to the same theme.
The central concern of this new book is new media and their platform structure, which are increasingly relegating traditional mass media – significant drivers of the ‘old’ structural transformation – to the background. Habermas argues that the forms of communication associated with new media harm the self-awareness of the political public sphere, inducing a new structural transformation with grave consequences for deliberative democracy, the construction of public opinion and will formation.
