Splichal’s book argues that the attempts at erasing “the public” from the map of publicness inevitably lead to blunting the intellectual power of critical theory; thus, much of the work presented in this book is aimed at “rehabilitating” the notion of “the public” in critical theory, as well as its French and German (alongside with British-American) godfathers. Splichal sets out to restore the almost forgotten figure of the public and the neglected idea of publicness to the core of debates on the future of the public sphere. The result is an exhilarating intellectual journey that combines a masterful history of these ideas in motion, as responses to the emergence of democratic nation states, with a trenchant discussion of the challenges they now face in a world system where issues around cosmopolitanism, regional integration, and global governance are moving to centre stage.
COBISS.SI-ID: 30762333
This article investigates the patterns of social use of interpersonal communication technologies that can be discerned in todayćs complex media environment, in which people have many channels available for interpersonal communication. The article starts with a comprehensive review of the comparative uses and gratification research of interpersonal communication media. It argues that these studies are efficient in answering questions such as why one device is preferred over another, but the approach they take is less suitable for an analysis of the patterns of actual use of interpersonal communication devices. While they build on various typologies of motives for media use, based upon psychological theories of motivations and needs, this article proposes that a valid typology of actual social uses of interpersonal media should be based on a social action theory in order to find general patterns of social use of interpersonal communication devices. Hence, this article follows recent developments of the uses and gratification approach which suggest treating social use as a social action and finds a fruitful starting point in Habermasćs typology of social action. From this, a typology of social uses of communication devices is derived, allowing a general and comprehensive, yet condensed empirical insight into the social uses of contemporary interpersonal communication technologies within a nationwide sample. Using various statistical techniques, an assessment is made of how five communication channels (i.e. mobile phone, short text messages, telephone, face-to-face and the Internet) are employed for four social uses, i.e. informational-cooperative, strategic, relational and expressive.
COBISS.SI-ID: 30475613
Modern university constitutes a public according to Kant’s dimensions of publicness since it (1) authenticates and demonstrates the principle of publicity in public debates, (2) promotes personal enlightenment, and (3) transcends ethnic/national boundaries. Normatively, university may be considered an environment in which “a learned individual […] publicly voices his thoughts on the impropriety or even injustice […] as a member of a complete commonwealth or even of cosmopolitan society." As specific “publics”, universities would also foster the transnationalization of the public sphere. The question is, however, if such a university can really flourish in today’s economically driven globalized governance, and what would be the consequences if university as “a public” dies in global environment.
COBISS.SI-ID: 30532189