Populist politics, communications media and large scale societal integration
Sociological Theory 6 (2):219-241 (1988)
| Abstract | Faced with a minimally participatory democracy, a variety of populists have sought to revitalize popular political participation by strengthening local community mobilizations. Others have called for reliance on frequent referenda. Assessing the limits of these proposals requires theoretical attention to two key issues. The first is the growing importance of very large scale patterns of societal integration which depend on indirect social relationships achieved through communications media, markets and bureaucracies. This split of system world from lifeworld, in Habermas's terms, poses a challenge to democratic theories which assume that the lessons of local social life and political participation are directly translatable into the necessary knowledge for state level (let alone international) activity. Secondly, changes in patterns of community formation and communications media have transformed the basis for democracy. In particular, socio-spatial segmentation by life-style choice, market position and other factors limits direct relationships increasingly to similar individuals. Mass media become increasingly predominant sources of information about people different from oneself, and indirect social relationships form the structural basis for the social integration of most politics. The present paper revised and adapts Habermas's conceptualization of system world and lifeworld in order to address the transformation of patterns of societal integration. This forms the basis for a critical analysis of the implications of changing community form and especially communications media for populist political proposals | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,679 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesMark Whipple (2005). The Dewey-Lippmann Debate Today: Communication Distortions, Reflective Agency, and Participatory Democracy. Sociological Theory 23 (2):156-178.
Patrick Lee Plaisance (2011). Moral Agency in Media: Toward a Model to Explore Key Components of Ethical Practice. Journal of Mass Media Ethics 26 (2):96 - 113.
Niklas Luhmann (2008). Law as a Social System. OUP Oxford.
Jack A. Nelson (2000). The Media Role in Building the Disability Community. Journal of Mass Media Ethics 15 (3):180 – 193.
Barney Warf (2007). Oligopolization of Global Media and Telecommunications and its Implications for Democracy. Ethics, Place and Environment 10 (1):89 – 105.
George A. Gladney (1991). Technologizing of the Word: Toward a Theoretical and Ethical Understanding. Journal of Mass Media Ethics 6 (2):93 – 105.
D. Beybin Kejanlioğlu (2007). The 'Public Sphere' and the Problem of 'Information'. The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 6:43-50.
Richard D. Anderson (1998). The Place of the Media in Popular Democracy. Critical Review 12 (4):481-500.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads14 ( #83,077 of 549,070 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,185 of 549,070 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
