“the ideal public sphere he described — a bourgeois public sphere dominated by broadcast media — should not be taken as the model for the formation of public opinion in 21st century democracies”. And that, to me, resonates with your point here.

In [this post here] I very nearly mooted the point entirely, suggesting that we had more/less missed the point of disruptive innovation. And, specifically, I think w/respect the HReingold has missed the point of discourse ethics … not that he’s wrong about Habermas and broadcasting. But that the bourgeois traditions arise up out of the age of rationality and the emancipation project … the freedom from religious cant, so often traded in for political cant, and now-days *I submit* traded for serial moments of superficial attention.
And not that he’s /wrong/ with his view of discourse, just that he’s missed the pointy end of the stick, the bit that allows us to operationalize it.

Jingoism, “spin”, marketing blather … the oligarchs’ variant of the rainbow-coloured smoke used throughout history to bamboozle and en-thrall. And the precious yada-bla-yada-blah of aspirational clap-trap is just the chirping of the crickets.

Greets -
I feel myself at a disadvanted; much more at home with MIL-SPEC tech_docs (Look Ma! I completed FMECA!!) … lacking honed scholastic skills. (Oh, did I get my elbows up there? *grin*)

I was drawn to this post by a tweet by dweinberger tagged #habermas … like a fish to water in a deep sense.
The works of Jurgen Habermas have been with me for years. (AJ Ayer I left behind.) Alongside Paulo Freire (“Education for Critical Consciousness”, not “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”) and Matthew Fox (famous for “On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear: Spirituality American Style” (1976), but I’m partial to “A Spirituality Named Compassion and The Healing of the Global Village; Humpty Dumpty and Us”), he has reminded me of our fundamental humanity. (I can say that Fukayama dignifies intellect, but when reading his work I Skinner’s behaviourism keeps rising to front of mind.)
This to say why I’m rising to the point here and now.

The point I’m taking on (I’ve begun to essai a fuller expression at my “Many2Many”) is that we have failed to grasp … what … not “the nettle” … more like we’ve failed to grasp, say, the rose … as sign and symbol.
A technocratic appreciation of exchange (may we say “intercourse”?), however veiled by hi-falutin sophistry or the cant of aspiration values, diminishes participants’ humanity by devaluing the communicative gesture. We can, as I’m sure we’re all aware, engage in parallel soliloques.

It was (long story / short) while happening to have both Habermas’ “Discourse Ethics” and John Willinsky’s recently released book on the OpenAccess project open both together and in mind at once that my three decades of work on what I call “participatory deliberation” (“group discernment”, anyone?) veered off, away from the techniques of Semantic Web and the methodologies of concept mapping and I found myself with a foundationally new design. New like Socrates teaching the slave boy in Phaedrus. (Teach? But to elicit … edu.care … Freire’s instructions to “agents of extension”!) New like Hegel and Marx with the dialectic. And *drum roll please!!* new like Hesse’s glasperlenspiel.

“Information” contra “data” … and the subjectivity of narrative we should hallow falls through the distributed middle.

Discourse … dialectic … subjectivity … no matter how entertaining, nonsense is merely self-referential, while human discourse is ?what? fractal.

So … this clumsy blurt from a silly old man.

and greetings to those here assembled

ever-playfully yours
and truly
ben