Available Means of Persuasion, The

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David M. Sheridan. Available Means of Persuasion, The

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New Media Theory

Series Editor, Byron Hawk

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Publics, Publicity, and Public Spheres

If kairos allows us to characterize the inventiveness of the prepared rhetor, public sphere allows us to frame the broader social contexts within which rhetors operate. A highly contested and thoroughly vexed term, the public sphere is commonly defined as the space in which “the citizens of a pluralistic polity speak from and across their differences productively” (Ivie, “Rhetorical” 278). The term owes its popularity, in no small degree, to the work of Habermas, especially The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published in English in 1989. We agree with Kevin Michael DeLuca that something akin to the “concept of the public sphere is indispensible for theoretical and practical reasons” (21; see also Fraser 57). In the remainder of this chapter, we review contemporary conversations about the nature of publics and publicity in order to establish what we have in mind when we use the concept of the public sphere. We begin with a brief outline of the defining features of Habermas’s original model and then trace five broad areas of critique that public-sphere scholars have offered in response.

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