The Wikipedia entry on blogosphere doesn’t say anything like this in its account of the word’s origin:

The term was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke.^[1] It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick,^[2] and was quickly adopted and propagated by the warblog community. The term resembles the older word logosphere (from Greek logos meaning word, and sphere, interpreted as world), “the world of words”, the universe of discourse.^{[citation needed]}

Despite the term’s humorous intent, CNN, the BBC, and National Public Radio‘s programs Morning Edition, Day To Day, and All Things Considered have used it several times to discuss public opinion. A number of media outlets in recent years have started treating the blogosphere as a gauge of public opinion, and it has been cited in both academic and non-academic work as evidence of rising or falling resistance to globalization, voter fatigue, and many other phenomena,^[3] and also in reference to identifying influential bloggers^[4] and “familiar strangers” in the blogosphere.^[5][6]

Rebooting the News #56 is a lively discussion of the rhetorical question, “Is blogging dead?” The interlocutors are Dave Winer, Jay Rosen, and guest Brendan Greeley, who now writes for The Economist about technology and culture. I first knew his work when he was blogger-in-chief for Radio Open Source with Chris Lydon.

The liveliest part of the discussion wasn’t the future of blogging but its history, as experienced by three early practitioners. I listened to the podcast a second time so I could write these notes:

Brendan Greeley is now technology and policy correspondent at The Economist. Similar beats:

Jose Antonio Vargas | Huffington Post | Technology as Anthropology

Evgeny Morozov | Net Effect | FOREIGN POLICY

BG asks “Is blogging dead?”

Attention has moved to FB, that’s where people are.

Cross-blog links are decreasing, Technoratti  traffic has dropped while FB traffic has skyrocketed.

Dave: FB is blogging, why attachment to the word blogging, or to particular software, or form of presentation

Dave never did a Google Blog Search

BG: Could we define blogging as a set of habits?

Dave: natural-born bloggers,

Dave never liked word “blogging” – which he considers a trademark for Blogger software

Dave’s description: “unedited voice of a person”
Which Jay translated as “a person talking with you” – A medium for individuals

Jay’s first look at a blog – InstaPundit.com – didn’t know what he was looking at; appears at first glance to be  like a page from a book, magazine or newspaper, but it’s real power comes from linking to the blogosphere. Blogging is blog + blogosphere.

Concentration of “sphere” into several huge sites, not as decentralized as blogging was originally.

Dave sees this as cyclical ebb and flow of technology.

BG: holy grail of radio: finding voices of real people. Blogs provided a database of what real people thought.

Dave on Twitter search: 140 characters not worth searching for.

Next level of innovation: someone breaks 140-character barrier, and we’re back to blogging!

“Facebook is training wheels for whatever will come next”

Dave: Twitter is a river of news aggregator; notification system and blogging tool, an integrated aggregator and blogging tool. Can you imagine FB or Twitter without RSS?

Blogging was this in 2002, Twitter is now”:
DW: “an integrated aggregator and blogging tool”

Jay: Life cycle: new tools emerge, learning curve, adaptations evolve that shape tools to life rhythms

Dave: Twitter isn’t just an outgrowth of blogging, but also SMS, texting. Esther Dyson predicted this in 1990s when web went so graphic.

All these things are iterations of RSS, river of news systems

Jay: media industries grew up around fixed ideas about how media works, understood attributes as assumptions, as givens – ideas about media thought to be unchanging

Brendan: what we used to call blogging has turned into publishing. Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan

Jay: when journalism was professionalized, it came with “de-voicing” of individual journalists. Now a new age of personal journalism – “re-voicing” of American journalism

Dave’s epiphany: writing tool should not be in WP dashboard; something lost with transition from RadioUserland and Manila to WP. He’s working on new blogging software.

Dave: When everyone thinks it’s all locked up, it’s about to blow wide open.

Dave: “Once the users take control, they won’t give it back.”

The public sphere is an area in social life where people can get together and freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. It is “a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment.”^[1] The public sphere can be seen as “a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk”^[2] and “a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed”.^[3]

The public sphere mediates between the “private sphere” and the “Sphere of Public Authority”,^[4] “The private sphere comprised civil society in the narrower sense, that is to say, the realm of commodity exchange and of social labor.”^[5] Whereas the “Sphere of Public Authority” dealt with the State, or realm of the police, and the ruling class,^[5] the public sphere crossed over both these realms and “Through the vehicle of public opinion it put the state in touch with the needs of society.”^[6] “This area is conceptually distinct from the state: it [is] a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state.”^[7] The public sphere ‘is also distinct from the official economy; it is not an arena of market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling.”^[7] These distinctions between “state apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic associations…are essential to democratic theory.”^[8] The people themselves came to see the public sphere as a regulatory institution against the authority of the state.^[9] The study of the public sphere centers on the idea of participatory democracy, and how public opinion becomes political action.

The basic belief in public sphere theory is that political action is steered by the public sphere, and that the only legitimate governments are those that listen to the public sphere.^[10] “Democratic governance rests on the capacity of and opportunity for citizens to engage in enlightened debate”.^[11] Much of the debate over the public sphere involves what is the basic theoretical structure of the public sphere, how information is deliberated in the public sphere, and what influence the public sphere has over society.

The concept of public sphere is grounded in the work of Jürgen Habermas, who wrote the book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962). I plan to undertake a systematic close reading of the book, which I will document here in the Fair Use Lab. The first step will be rendering the text in a format accessible to me.

Other Internet sources:

• Public Sphere Guide A Research Guide, Teaching Guide and Resource for the Renewal of the Public Sphere
• Transformations of the Public Sphere Essay Forum
• Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article,” New German Critique 3 (1974)
• Spark summary of Habermas’ public sphere book