TITLE:
Transformations of Contemporary Public Space: Publicity and Visibility in Speaking out on the Internet
AUTHORS:
Christian Abolo Mbita
KEYWORDS:
Publicity, Visibility, Internet, Web, Public Space
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Journalism and Communication,
Vol.5 No.4,
September
30,
2017
ABSTRACT: Since the publishing of Jürgen Habermas’ masterpiece where he described the public sphere as an illustration of publicity in the bourgeois milieu of the 18th century, the public space went through substantial changes. This transformation, in the first instance, was due to the fact that laymen speeches have been excluded from it for a long time. The liberation of expression led to a remarkable change i.e., the control of utterance no longer intervenes before but after publication, though this used to guide interventions in the public space. As a result, visibility gained the upper hand on publicity. In other words, self- presence replaced the filtering by gatekeepers. The Internet and its numerous developments symbolized this tendency.