Now, for me a more damning critique of Habermas, is his tripartite division of rationality into instrumental/communicative and affective rationalities (ok I accept this is an analytical one but the slippage occurs in his work occassionaly). This is unfortunately because it means conceptually the realm of technology in any form is banished to instrumental reason and hence outside of the sphere of communicative rationality. This is why he does not talk about technologies - as they are in direct contradiction to his realm of communicative practices. Before, anyone starts to jump on this, please accept that these are meant to be analytical distinctions within a normative conceptual schema. Habermas is most definitely not writing scientific theories and I don’t believe he is making correspondance like claims about the ‘real’ (whatever that is).

But, bugger that, let me cheerfully wade in over my head at least for a second, before withdrawing demurely to the shore. Axel, you’ve raised a question that isn’t just about the objectivity or adaptability of theory, but its purpose. The uses of theory, if you like. So - and please, this question is not an intentionally naive one - are capital-S Scientific theories allowed to have a normative function? Are they so reflexive about their own communicative power or agency that they can be intentionally formulated so as to facilitate changes in the world in and of themselves?

Perhaps you’re right that for Habermas’s research agenda the shape of the communications technologies used is peripheral; however, in that case I would ask whether his research will still be able to address those important questions related to the public sphere in the current communicative environment.

In other words, I think you have it backwards when you suggest that “this … raises questions to the Internet’s applicability for the kind of theorisation that Habermas is concerned with” - I think the more pressing question is to what extent, and with what alterations, Habermas’s theories are still applicable to a communications environment which does now prominently include decentralised public many-to-many communications media that operate differently from the mainstream media we used to be used to.

Over on Jill’s blog you say “it’s hilarious to think that you have to *update* a theory everytime a new technology comes along”. I couldn’t disagree more. Any scientist knows that theories are just that - theories, and not eternal truths. To refuse to adapt a theory (as you appear to follow Habermas in doing) when what the theory aims to describe changes - not simply because of a new technology coming along, but because of significant changes in the social and societal uses of the available mix of communications technologies - is a position that I find incredibly myopic, I’m afraid.

Anyway its too late for me here… I will take up the thread tomorrow… hopefully theyll be more discussion on the other side…

David - I *do* begin from a very different place, of course I do. That’s why I said “against his will”, and almost entirely tongue in cheek - of course any use someone like me might make of Habermas is a complete misappropriation. So beat me over the head with the *real* Habermas all you want. But I do think there are ways in which everyday participation in networked culture might amount to the practice of cultural citizenship, but I don’t even start there, I ended up there via observation and description.

Also, I’m confused as to why a normative claim would necessarily inhere in a description like “more direct” - although of course the implied but unspecified normativity of many such statements is precisely what is wrong with technohype.

And I thought it was implied as well that I meant “more direct communication between individual citizens, although not necessarily significantly culturally diverse citizens, than that which structured the imagined nation-space of the cultural public sphere as constituted via the dominance of individual channels within the broadcast television system” . Something like that. But if I was being all rational and precise even to that extent, this blog would be a very different communicative space too