In the defense of Habermas

I’m at the moment enrolled in a web course – run by the University of Tampere -, called “Current issues in Communication Studies: Perspectives on Democracy and Citizenship.” One of the tasks during this course has been to comment on Juha Koivisto’s and Esa Valiverronen’s article from 1996, entitled “The Resurgence of the Critical Theories of Public Sphere” (Journal of Communication Inquiry 20:2 (1996): 18-36). I copy and paste my comments on the article here.

A great blog on citizen journalism

Axel Bruns from the Queensland University of Technology runs an excellent blog on matters related to citizen journalism (and to blogs in particular). He just posted an entry about the publication of a couple of new articles, one of which deals with the idea of the Habermasian public sphere: Life beyond the Public Sphere: Towards a Networked Model for Political Deliberation.

I will post my thoughts about the piece; although I already have quite a long list of things to do, this should be priority. (It perhaps won’t come as a surprise that to some extent I disagree with some of the article’s main points.)