Posts under ‘public sphere’

I’ve mused for some time about the ways in which the public sphere has been transformed by blogging. I didn’t make an etymological connection between public sphere and blogosphere, though, until I listened to Rebooting the News #56. Jay Rosen spoke several times in that podcast about how the “sphere” of media is changing, and I got the connection, finally. Duh. “Sphere” is the root of both phrases, linguistically, and I would argue that public sphere is conceptually central to the vast hyperlinked network called the blogosphere.

I’ve been musing about 40 years of experience with two careers that necessarily intertwine and overlap. The first is my career as a media professional. The second is my career as a person with a disability. You could think of one as the day job and the other as my second gig, but the experiences cannot be separated into such neatly distinct categories. If anything unifies my work in both areas, it is the concept of public sphere. Here is how Wikipedia currently defines it.