Political Deliberation vs. Social Media Branding in Crisis-Prone Capitalist Democracies

A Discussion of Habermas’s New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Abstract

This review essay discusses Jürgen Habermas’s recent reflections on the threats to deliberative politics by a new structural transformation of the public sphere. Renewing his 1962 concept, he analyzes “crisis-prone capitalist democracies” as the necessary condition for transforming the public discourse of self-determined citizens into political branding that seeks to manipulate the citizen as a consumer. Habermas then identifies social media’s blurring of the private and the public realms already in the perception of democratic deliberation as the sufficient condition for today’s commodified discourse in a new political public sphere that has been colonized by the digital marketplace.