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M3-Lesson 1-Part 3

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher who was a leading thinker of the Frankfurt School. One of his well-known theories is the theory of the public sphere, which he defined as the domain where public opinion can be formed. However, Habermas argued that the rise of commercial mass media has damaged the public sphere by allowing private interests to influence public discourse. Both Habermas and Marx were critical of capitalism and how it can compromise ideal systems like the public sphere or exploit and oppress workers. They provide a macro-level analysis of how economic systems and social institutions drive social change.

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142 views

M3-Lesson 1-Part 3

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher who was a leading thinker of the Frankfurt School. One of his well-known theories is the theory of the public sphere, which he defined as the domain where public opinion can be formed. However, Habermas argued that the rise of commercial mass media has damaged the public sphere by allowing private interests to influence public discourse. Both Habermas and Marx were critical of capitalism and how it can compromise ideal systems like the public sphere or exploit and oppress workers. They provide a macro-level analysis of how economic systems and social institutions drive social change.

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William DC Rivera
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M3 Lesson 1 Part 3

Habermas                                                                                                       

          Habermas is a German thinker. A leading representative of the second-generation of the ‘Frankfurt


School’. You remember this group of thinkers we learned in our theory subject? If not, you go to this link
first to refresh: https://iep.utm.edu/frankfur/#:~:text=The%20Frankfurt%20School%2C%20known
%20more,many%20universities%20around%20the%20world.&text=With%20Habermas%2C%20the
%20Frankfurt%20School,European%20academic%20contexts%20and%20disciplines.  (Links to an
external site.)

          One of Habermas’s well-known theories is the theory of the public sphere. He defined public
sphere as a domain of social life where public opinion can be formed.  Read
here:  https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/chapter/habermas-public-sphere/  (Links to an external
site.)

 (Links to an external site.)          In his work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere  in 1991,
Habermas saw the importance of the first news sheets in public discussions especially during its early
development in Europe. But because newspapers were gradually transformed into a market-
driven medium, it had a serious negative implication in the formation of the public sphere:

In England, and France, and the United States, the transformation from journalism of conviction to one
of commerce began in the 1830s at approximately the same time. In the transition from the literary
journalism of private individuals to the public services of the mass media, the public sphere was
transformed by the influx of private interests, which received prominence in the mass media. (Habermas,
1974 in Greer, 2010 p.15).

         Also in that book, he saw the emergence of electronic mass media as damaging to the public
sphere.

          For example, people began to just rely on radio and Television for important information about
politics and governance instead of attending formal gatherings like town hall meetings to obtain
information. The problem is, like in the Print medium that has been commercialized, what you see on TV
are manufactured information created by public relations experts and advertising companies. In our
social media saturated era, the information ecosystem is full of disinformation (they call fake news), and
misinformation that confuse the public on important social issues. In other words, the information that
the people get from the commercial media are not a good basis for intellectual discussions in the public
sphere.

          Now,  where did Marx and Haberma’s strike a similar cord? They are both critical of capitalism. It is
capitalism that   Marx criticized as the reason why workers are exploited and oppressed; in the same way
as how Habermas saw commercial media, under capitalism, as the reason why an ideal public sphere
cannot be achieved.

          If we use the ideas of these two thinkers to explain social change, we will certainly understand
how, in modern society, major conflicts have always been between the rich and the poor. To be sure,
there are some other conflicts like in the area of race, gender, and religion. But it is more pronounced in
the area of our economic life.

          No wonder, that the threat of revolution as a radical method of social change, is always immanent
in societies where social inequality exists like in the Philippines.

Marx, Habermas, and the Media

          It is not Marx, but the neo-Marxists including Habermas, who explicitly included the mass media in
their analysis of social change.

          In the discussion of Habermas’s ideas, you learned how the capitalist or commercial media plays a
significant role in the process of idea formation in the public sphere. If your mass media is dominated by
commercially-driven information, then the public sphere, which is supposed to guide the people in
forming sound opinion, is compromised. The consequences of this are far reaching. In the Philippines for
example, we commonly hear people complaining about the political immaturity of the voting population
because they elect bad leaders. There are certainly a lot of major factors why we elect bad leaders, but
it is also certain that the mass media has a major impact on the way Filipinos understand their politics.
Mass media is also guilty as charged.

          We see this trend happening not only in the Philippines but in many parts of the world where
commercial media is the dominant media.

          Finally, we can see that Marx and Habermas are thinkers in a macro perspective. They look on a
bigger picture like economic arrangement and social institutions. If we will be asking how social change
specifically start on the micro-level, then they are not the ones  we can consult. Social change can
happen within the context of human interactions. And this is the concern of Symbolic Interactionism  as
one of the many theories of social change.

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