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February 24, 2008
If "public culture" is often perceived to be under threat from processes of globalisation, the effects of new technologies and the privatisation of public utilities, then twenty-first century technologies have changed the contours of existing public spheres and produced virtual communities. So how have they changed the public sphere around our democratic institutions?
The standard narrative is one of a crisis of disengagement from politics, a disappointment with politics and a turning away from our political institutions. Canberra or Washington isn't working is the public feeling. There is a disconnect between what we do in our personal lives and in collective lives as citizens. Global warming is a good example.
Liberal democracy looks sickly and this malaise of democracy is often expressed in the decline of
participation and the decline of the public.The centralisation of decision-making at a federal and state level has made government remote from citizens, and the rewards from participation increasingly slim, because theprospect of having any influence on decisions is so small. The effectivenessof representation has been increasingly questioned. The sense ofpowerlessness which citizens have when confronted by the modern state contributes to a mood of fatalism and cynicism where public policy is concerned.
Andrew Gamble says that there has been a marked shrinking of the public domain, in the sense of a weakening of the public ethos and the idea of public service. A public domain:
is not the same as a public sector, and is not to be measured simply by the
services directly controlled and provided by the government, or by the proportion of the national income taxed and spent by the state. The public domain is a political space, overlapping both state and civil society, and sustained by particular institutions among which the universities and the media are particularly important. It is a space where the public interest can be determined through debate and deliberation, a public ethos generated, and a public ethic articulated. Independent, critical intellectual work is essential for it, and those who perform that work are public intellectuals. If the public domain is today in trouble, it is because the kind of intellectual work which public intellectuals have performed in the past is less common than it once was, and increasingly under threat.
The public domain has always been vulnerable to erosion, depending as t does on sustaining a public ethos, a set of norms and values indicating how public affairs should be conducted and how the public interest should be determined.
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Gary,
The public culture is as important as the public sphere. If the public sphere is the arena of participation, then the public culture is where the normative processes and promotions of democratic culture happen.
The two have eroded in the weighty deliberative democracy sense, but democratic culture is very strong in the public culture. That's part of Turner's demotic turn. Big Brother and Australian Idol may be garbage, but they depend on both direct and indirect public participation. The drives behind them are fame and democratic participation.
The current public culture channels democratic culture away from the overtly political, towards entertainment, but the will to have a say and be heard is very strong. It's not hard to imagine popular public intellectuals bridging the gap, as we've seen in popular science.