Gallo, Jason. “Weblog Journalism: Between Infiltration and Integration” Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. Ed. Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman. June 2004. 6 Nov. 2005 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/weblog_journalism.html.
Habermas has come up a few times in stuff I’ve read. Gallo writes:
According to Habermas, the public sphere is “a specifically political space distinct from the state and the economy, an institutionally bounded discursive arena that is home to citizen debate, deliberation, agreement, and action.” In other words, it is a venue for individuals to express their interests and opinions, generate discourse about them, and potentially develop a course of collective action to further those expressed interests. In this model, mass media acts as the mechanism that informs the citizen’s worldview as a venue for sustained debate, deliberation, and criticism, and serves as a channel through which citizens express their interests to their leaders (see Dahlgren,1991). While Habermas has been criticized for the limitations of a model based upon the exclusionary bourgeois publics of Western Europe, those who have sought to update his model (Fraser, 1992; Benhabib, 1992) have continued to focus on the democratic/revolutionary potential of a diversity of voices articulating interest in the public sphere. Any medium that possibly enhances access to the wider public carries with it democratic potential.
