Conflicting Approaches About the Development of the Public Sphere in the Cyberspace

Abstract

The development of the Internet as a modern communication technology has raised new, important and different issues regarding the relation between this technology and the public sphere. In this paper, based on Habermaus’s theory, we have proposed four fundamental questions about the possibility and impossibility of development of the public sphere in the cyberspace in order to prepare a systematic review of the proposed theories. Based on the results of the study, it is possible to distinguish three different views toward the development of virtual public sphere: possibility, impossibility, and conditional nature of the formation of the virtual public sphere. The resultant of these three views is that despite the capacity of the cyberspace for the development of virtual public sphere, there are still important challenges such as the digital divide, polarization, cyberspace fragmentation, anonymity, and loosening of the real social ties. In addition, closer study of the relation between cyberspace and public sphere requires us to avoid technological determinism, and consider the institutional and social contexts and perform comparative studies on different social and institutional contexts

Keywords

• public sphere
• cyberspace
• digital divide
• polarization
• interactivity