A sociology of knowledge of media and public sphere critique

The malfunctions of the contemporary media and the public sphere, and its destructive effects on democracy, social order and individual well-being, is among the most frequently discussed and controversial topic in political communication research. In this book, I am not so much interested in advancing a further diagnosis of the current malaise of the media and the public sphere but instead aim to understand how we as researchers, and in parallel also as members of a public, translate this knowledge into critique. I am taking the view of how critical knowledge about media and its effects is generated and used. How and by whom is such knowledge produced, how does it feed into public debates or trigger political mobilization, and what impact does it have on the functioning of the public sphere? In other words, what happens to the public sphere if it gains knowledge about public sphere disruptions? Thus, this book is a sociology of knowledge pertaining to contemporary media and public sphere analysis and critique. In examining the world of contemporary (digital and global) media, and the public sphere and democracy, it seeks to address the following questions:

• • What do we know about contemporary transformations of the media and the democratic public sphere?

• • How can we know?

• • Who knows? And who produces that knowledge?

• • What follows on from that knowledge? How is it received by users and critical publics, and what do they do with it?

The following pages will provide a systematic overview of our stock of knowledge about media and public sphere disruptions. I will turn to the process of knowledge production and dissemination that leads to such a diagnosis within critical media studies. Such an assessment will allow me to identify the social carriers of the discourse about public sphere dystopia: the knowledge producers and their recipients. I will then show how the producers of knowledge about public sphere disruptions are at the same time promoters of critical discourse. Their knowledge is not confined to academia but becomes common knowledge that is taken up by other social carriers and translated into forms of political mobilization. We thus observe a translation process of critical (dystopian) discourse into new utopias for society and democracy.