My presentation for the New Media & Society course.

1. European public sphere online Tina Hajdinjak

2. Introduction Passive voters, decrease in citizen participation, deliberation and political action ICTs & the web as a solution? Public sphere? Transnational public sphere? RQ: How does the use of web contribute to the European public sphere?

3. Public sphere: J. Habermas Public sphere is conceived as a space for the communicative generation of public opinion, in ways that are supposed to assure (at least some degree of) moral-political validity, so it matters who participates and on what terms. In addition, a public sphere is supposed to be a means of mobilizing public opinion as a political force and it is supposed to correlate with a sovereign power, to which its communications are ultimately addressed. (Habermas)

4. Public sphere: N. Fraser (Normative) theories of the public sphere national communicative infrastructure -> public opinion. mass media are the institutionalised forum of debate = central linkage between the public & institutional structure. Reality profusion of niche media (subnational, transnational) not focused on supervising national state power privatized government operate media outlets instantaneous electronic and satellite information technologies ↓ denationalization of communicative infrastructure: disaggregation + higher complexity of communicative flows.

5. Europeanization Offline 2 general approaches: 1. comparison of how media report on European issues between member states (Trenz 2004, Koenig in Downey 2006). Findings: attention of the national media for European issues is low, compared to global, national, regional or local issues. 2. analyses of media reports on European issues, compared between different types of media inside a chosen member-state (Trenz 2004, Van der Steeg 2004). Findings: Media mostly report on EU issues in a similar way and also give these issues approximately the same amount of space. Koopmans and Pfetch (2007): media are mostly EU-oriented and therefore contribute to European public sphere by establishing transnational communication channels.

7. Janelle Ward (2005) quantitative content analysis of possibilities for online participation available to youth in the 2004 European Parliament election campaign. Findings : selected web sites primarily provided information and only few encouraged participation. Lusoli (2005) discusses the use of the Internet for electoral information regarding the 2004 European Parliament elections by analyzing data from Flash EuroBarometer 161 for 25 EU countries. Findings : Internet remains a secondary source of information, bur voters active on the Internet are also re-producers of content. Kluver et al. (2006) focus on how political actors on global scale used web during national elections in 2004–2005, examining the features of websites = inscriptions of political actions of web producers. Findings : low level of enthusiasm for online structures promoting civic engagement, but use of web did not simply reify exiting political structures in all countries.

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