Browsing by Author "Ciulinaru, Dragos"

This thesis approaches a mass media campaign against urban rudeness as a form of public deliberation. The goal is to examine the structuring role of politics of difference and modern media on a person’s participation in public sphere. The theoretical framework is based on Jurgen Habermas’s normative concept of public sphere, and on the revisions brought to it so that it better accommodated issues of difference and that it responded to the evolutions in the field of media and communication. The media campaign chosen for study used the internet extensively. The public had a substantial input in producing the content. None the least, the initiators envisaged the campaign as a space of regrouping and retaliation for a particular category of urban inhabitants. By using an analysis method based on the discourse-historical approach, the stories of encounter with the 'urban rude' are examined as discursive practices intended to warrant a particular version of the relations between Bucharest’s groups of dwellers. Through these practices are justified systems of classification and practices of division. The findings point to particular groups being constructed in terms of deviations from the norms. These groups’ presence in the urban public space and in the public sphere is relegated. A privately owned media organization’s interest exacerbated differentiation and had a major impact on the qualities of public deliberation. Despite their potential to enhance democratic validity of the concept of the public sphere in what difference is concerned, use of modern interactive media and the formation of counter-discursive arenas resulted in anti democratic and anti egalitarian outcomes.