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Document Details :

Title: Media Multiplication and Social Segmentation
Author(s): KATZ, Elihu
Journal: Ethical Perspectives
Volume: 7    Issue: 2-3   Date: September 2000   
Pages: 122-132
DOI: 10.2143/EP.7.2.503797

Abstract :
By now, everybody has heard of the `bourgeois public sphere,' that moment in history when a rising merchant class felt empowered enough to deliberate public policy rationally and universalistically, and to transmit its conclusions to the powers-that-were with the expectation of being taken seriously. By academic standards Habermas's (1962/1989) thesis has become a household word, perhaps because it offers a nostalgic reminder of a lost utopia of participatory democracy, or because it offers hope of what yet might be — if we could only learn to translate the seventeenth century into the ostensibly compatible conditions of a modernity in which widespread education, universal suffrage and the new communications technologies would seem to invite such translation.

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