In this workshop at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology in Göttingen, we discussed the question of the constitution of the public sphere against the background of the perception and media-analytical description of a “double transformation”: With this term, we referred, on the one hand, to the infrastructural changes driven and supported by media and communication technology, which are especially researched and negotiated under the keywords “social media” or “multimodality”. On the other hand, this description referred to a development in terms of content that has recently been theorized and captured under the heading of an “authoritarian turn” or authoritarian transformation. Both dynamics lead to a drastic fragmentation of the public sphere, which leaves far behind Habermas‘ understanding of the democratic public sphere, which is subject to and presupposes specific rituals, practices, modes of speech and reception.

Program