Mediated Public Spheres: The problem of politics and dream of democracy

Over the last three decades we have seen the neoliberal destruction of solidarities, the disintegration of the unions, the criminalization of protest and the systematic weakening of the demos from group solidarities into individual identities. More recently, with the likes of the Occupy movement inspired by the Indignados, a new progressive collectivism has begun to emerge re-establishing the idea of the demos from a different perspective in a way that challenges many of the assumptions of liberal democracy. The internet has played an important role in these emergent publics enabling the return of a globalised critical discourse based on inequality and the destruction of public goods. But it has also revealed crucial problems in the realization of mediated public spheres and in particular the difficulties with the enactment of democracy in the context of global corporate capitalism. This paper discusses these issues in relation to pluralism and horizontalism; freedom and autonomy; solidarity and the ‘problem of politics’, then asks what we can do to re-imagine democracy in a radically altered yet feasible form to enable the re-establishment of public value.