[Air-l] habermas on the internet

[Thomas Koenig]

Maria Bakardjieva wrote:
> Thank you Jeremy and Christian for bringing this very interesting piece of 
> information to the attention of AoIRs. I wonder if any of our 
> German-speaking colleagues could translate the few sections of the speech 
> dealing with the Internet and post them to the list. My German is too rusty 
> and it would take me hours to make sense of the text on my own.
>
>   
FWIW, I translated the following two paragraphs, but remember, I am not 
a professional translator and Habermas is not Thomas Mann:

"The usage of the Internet proliferated and expanded communicative 
networks at the same time. Therefore the Internet does have a subversive 
effect onto the rigidities (structures) of the public sphere. At the 
same time, the horizontal and deformalized (increasingly more informal) 
network of communications weakens the traditional public spheres. The 
latter used to focus within political communities the attention of an 
anonymous and fragmented public in a way that enabled citizens to 
critically evaluate the same filtered topics at the same time [I am not 
kidding you here, I even left out an obscure causal relationship 
"naemlich"]. The desirable increase in egalitarism that the Internet 
delivered is paid for with a decentralization of the admission of 
unedited contributions to the discourse. In this medium, intellectuals 
lose the power to focus the discourse." 

In plain English: "The rise of the Internet has led to more and easier 
access to the public sphere. Increased access has led to difficulities 
to focus public debates, a prerequisite for rational deliberation."

Auf Deutsch: "Oeffentlichkeitsdiskurse sind egalitaerer, aber dafuer 
weniger fokussiert-sachlich geworden."

 
"The idea that the electronic [sic] revolution destroys the stage for 
intellectuals is premature, though. Take TV, which basically operates 
within the public spheres f nation states: It only expanded the stage of 
the print media and literature. At the same time, TV changed the nature 
of the stage: It needs to visualize, what it wants to say, and it 
accelerated the iconic turn, the shift from words to images. This 
relative deprecation the wights between the two functions have also 
shifted in the public sphere."

In plain English: "Intellectuals still occupy a crucial role in public 
discourse, they just have to adapt to the new playing field. Take, for 
example, TV: It made visual communication and its discourse logic more 
important and devalued speech."

HTH, maybe somebody else want to take over.



-- 
thomas koenig
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/staff/thomas/index.html