[Air-l] habermas on the internet

[Maria Bakardjieva]

Thank you, Thomas! Royal job! For the citation experts out there: What is 
the right way to include the translator's name in your citation?

I hope other people will jump in and translate Part 1 of the speech (Der 
Standard, March 10), where he talks about the changing role of 
intellectuals, to the end.

A reader's comment following Part 2 made me laugh:  "Der Mann hat ja 
interessante Gedanken .kann sie aber leider immer noch nicht verständlich 
formulieren." In that sense, Thomas' efforts are really appreciated.

Maria


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Thomas Koenig" <T.Koenig at lboro.ac.uk>
To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 7:09 PM
Subject: Re: [Air-l] habermas on the internet


> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> The air-l at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: 
> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>