Private Sphere

Zizi Papacharissi is Professor and Head of the Department of Communication, University of Illinois-Chicago.

"This is a deeply thoughtful book that asks a genuinely important questionÑDo the new media empower us or do they trap us in our own cocoons, cutting us off from meaningful contact with others? Papacharissi doesn't let the reader off easily. Insistently, beguilingly, she brings up uncomfortable issuesÑWhy are blogs so narcissistic? What happens politically when YouTube goes beyond the pale?Ñand she never settles for easy answers. If you care about politics, if you care about modernity, read this book."Roderick P. Hart, University of Texas at Austin "Papacharissi is a pioneer in the study of democracy and how it is "practiced" in the digital age. A Private Sphere is a deep, thoughtful exploration of citizenship, information, and technology at a moment of great fluidity. Anyone with an interest in how media shape political culture would do well to engage the arguments of this terrific book."Susan Herbst, Georgia Tech "An thoughtful and thought-provoking book. Papacharissi's argument that the convergence of technology, practices and spaces is opening a private sphere as the locus for reworked modes of citizenship is an intriguing and important one. Read this book!"Charles Whitney, Northwestern University

• Acknowledgements vii1 Contemporary Democracies, Civic Engagement, and the Media 1Media and the mythology of the new 7Old and new democracy 11The conditions of contemporary democracy 12A new(er) civic vernacular 152 Public and Private Expression in Contemporary Democracies 25The dichotomy of public and private over time 26The dichotomy of public and private at present 37Privacy as commodity 42A trichotomy: the social 483 Converged Media, Converged Audiences, and Converged Publics 51Convergence in everyday life 53Convergence of technologies 61Convergence of spaces 68Convergence of practices 74Technology as the architecture of the new 784 The Question of Citizenship in a Converged Environment 80A long history of imperfect citizenship 81The past and contemporary citizenship modalities 88The liquid citizen: a combined model of fl exible citizenship 1075 The Public Sphere, Expired? On the Democratizing Potential of Convergent Technologies 112The public sphere in contemporary democracies 113Access to information 120Reciprocity 121Commercialization 123A new kind of public 1256 A Private Sphere 131Five new civic habits 1381 The networked self and the culture of remote connectivity 1382 A new narcissism: blogging 1443 The rebirth of satire and subversion: YouTube 1504 Social media news aggregation and the plurality of collaborative fi ltering 1525 The agonistic pluralism of online activism 157The private sphere and the networked citizen 161References 168Index 194