Abstract
This paper looks into the crisis of the public sphere, marked by the rise of the social media, post-truth fake news and conspiracy thinking. Recently, critical scholars in social sciences and humanities have published the calls to restore the modern public sphere model of deliberation, based on the Enlightenment principles of reason, objective truth and scientifically driven, fact- based arguments. The restoration of the rational public discourse is deemed vital to face current challenges to democracy, including the rise of right-wing populism and wide-spread turn to autocratic political leaders. The call to bring back “sanity” to the politics, this paper argues, falls short in understanding the popular turn to the politics of emotion, irrationality and charisma. Theoretically, however, we have had a plenty of insights into the emotionality of the 20th century publics, provided by media studies’ audience research. The aim of this paper is to open a debate on how conceptual and methodological toolkits of media studies can be fruitful in mapping up the research of the post-truth publics. Conceptually, the relationship between the audience and the public is examined. This demands a novel approach, where the Enlightenment philosophical legacies of reason and emotions are revisited. This merging of two aspects of the voice of the public is necessary to pave the ways to fresh understanding of citizenship and public sphere of the 21st century.
Presenters
Ksenija Vidmar HorvatProfessor, Sociology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Public sphere, Social contract, Democracy, Post-truth public
