Category Archives: Privacy

The Socio-Sphere

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The digital media revolution has largely made both the private sphere and the public sphere obsolete, or at least questionable, and has created a domain that is neither private nor public, a domain in which traditional forms of association, including politics, are being called into question.  Bruno Latour (Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) chooses not to use the terminology of modern social theory at all and speaks of the “collective,” a space of networks instead of a public sphere bound on the one side by a radically individualized privacy and on the other by hierarchical and oppressive social structures. Following Latour we propose dropping the categories of private and public and exchanging them for a new term, the socio-sphere. The socio-sphere is neither private nor public, but is based upon the new form of communication made possible by digital media, namely, “many-to-many” communication. The age old limitations on communication forcing it into either a one-to-one mode or into a one-to-many mode created a public sphere that was inherently contradictory. One-to-many communication disguised itself by means of the concept of representation and pretended to be one-to-one communication, that is, a form of communication in which all co-participate equally. The affordances of digital media create an entirely new form of communication capable of overcoming the limitations imposed upon communication since the beginnings of human history. This is what the technology does. The possibility of many-to-many communication brings with it the hope of resolving the contradiction of representation created by traditional media, namely, that one speaks for the many by means of speaking to the many.  In the wake of the digital media revolution the public sphere, and with it, the private subject of modernity, vanish into the socio-sphere. There is no longer anything like privacy and there is no longer a specifically public space.

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Mass Media, Representation, and Network Society

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The public sphere of modern bourgeois society is supposed to be the domain in which everyone can speak freely to everyone in order to reach consensus on matters of concern and on that basis coordinate cooperative action. The problem with this concept is that the spatial and temporal conditions of face-to-face interaction make it impossible for everybody to speak to everybody. Within the parameters of modernity this contradiction could not be resolved. The media, at first print media in the form of leaflets, newsletters, and newspapers, and then electronic broadcast media came to be the forms of communication structuring the public sphere. When private individuals came together to form a public, they lost their privacy and individuality and were transformed into anonymous masses. The defining characteristic of mass media is “that no interaction among those co-present can take place” (Luhmann). The private individuals of the public became the masses of the silent majority, who had restricted access to information and could therefore be manipulated by those in control of the media. Cooperative action was in reality not the outcome of one-to-one deliberation, but of one-to-many, hierarchical communication. No modern politician, businessperson, or scientist denies the power of the media, and no one who does not use the media effectively will gain and maintain political power, successfully market their products, or even get research grants. Modernity attempted to solve this problem by means of the concept of representation. Representation explains how democracy is possible under the conditions of the dichotomy between interaction and organization. Democratic process and the counting of votes became the mechanism of transforming one-to-one into one-to-many. Under the regime of the hierarchical one-to-many communciation, however, representatives could only speak for the people in the mode of speaking to the people.

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Private and Public

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Before the digital media revolution, communication articulated itself into two domains, interaction and organization. If one understands society from the perspective of the theory of communication, this distinction can be considered the foundation for the important distinction between private and public. The one-to-one communication of interaction produced a private domain in opposition to a public domain of cooperative action that was structured by hierarchical, one-to-many communication. Private and public are dependent upon each other. The one-to-one communication of interaction characterized by freedom of expression and egalitarian turn-taking in which everyone has a chance to express their opinion became the basis for economic activities in a liberal capitalistic society. In the liberal view, business takes place in a realm not directly under government control. From Luhmann’s perspective this marks the differentiation of the functional sub-system of business in distinction to the political system. From Habermas’ point of view, the realm of free and unrestricted interaction became the basis, at least in theory, for legitimating political power. It was supposed that if anyone was to take on the role of speaking to the many, then this had to arise from out of and in continuity with one-to-one communication in which everyone had a chance to speak freely. Interaction, although only possible for small groups, came in modern bourgeois society to mediate a “public sphere” in which, as Habermas has pointed out, large numbers of individuals could openly and freely discuss not only their business plans, but also criticize government policies and power. In modern democratic societies the legitimation of government power and policy, as well as hierarchy of any kind, is based upon communication in what has come to be known as the public sphere.

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