A Review of Research on the Public Sphere and Audience

Name: D. Beybin Kejanlioglu
Institution: Yeni Yuzyil University, Istanbul
Country: Turkey
Email: [email protected]
Key Words: public sphere, critical communication studies in Turkey, Ankara
University, audience research
Working Group: Audience Interactivity and Participation
A Review of Research on the Public Sphere and Audience Participation in
Turkey
D. Beybin Kejanlioglu
This essay reviews the studies on the public sphere in Turkey with a particular emphasis
on its link to critical communication studies and its institutional origins at Ankara
University. If we endorse the view that the public sphere is "a realm of our social life in
which something approaching public opinion can be formed" and that "newspapers and
magazines, radio and television are the media of public sphere" (Habermas, 1979: 198)
then, audience research is expected to be at the core of the research on the public sphere
as it is directly related to "public opinion". However, critical communication studies in
Turkey have usually dealt with the uses of the concept of public sphere in a proper sense
or with its different interpretations in the Turkish context and the research on it has
mostly focused on textual analysis. This review will hopefully justify a need for further
research on audience and political participation in Turkey.
1. Mapping the Use of the Concept by Critical Communication Scholars
The use of the concept of public sphere has become widespread in Turkey after a debate
over women's veiling in "public" buildings. Public authorities have used the concept to
imply a ban on headscarves in state buildings, schools and universities. Even though the
secularists versus Islamists positioning has had a long history in Turkish political scene,
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the association of the concept of public sphere with "the authoritarian secular state
operating against citizens/Muslims" has served to deepen the polarisation.
Ironically, "public sphere" could be a critical concept against such polarised
comprehension of the relations between state and citizens, between secularists and
Islamists/(Muslims?),1 and had already been widely discussed by academic and
intellectual circles in Turkey. One of the prevailing fields in this discussion had/has been
the media studies, others being political philosophy and sociology.2 This prevalence, I
argue, has all to do with the critical approach to media and politics, developed in Ankara
University.
The School of Journalism and Broadcasting was founded in 1964 under the umbrella of
the Faculty of Political Sciences at Ankara University (Tokgoz, 2003). Hifzi Topuz, a
UNESCO officer at the time drawing up plans for the school, and Nermin Abadan-Unat,
a political sociologist doing empirical research on media and public opinion amongst
other research, can be considered as pioneers. While Oya Tokgoz and Aysel Aziz from
the first generation of communication scholars have continued their academic careers
with administrative communication research on political communication and social
development, Unsal Oskay among them became the founder of critical theory in Turkish
communication and media studies (Turkoglu, 2008). He introduced H. M. Enzensberger,
W. Benjamin, T. W. Adorno, L. Lowenthal, their political stances, their analyses of
culture, their aesthetic debate to Turkish readers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact,
Oskay also made one of the earliest references to Habermas in 1980,3 and to Arendt in
1982. He moved to Istanbul in 1986, and his assistants at Marmara University (who had
been their students in Ankara), Nurcay Turkoglu, Beybin Kejanlioglu and Ayse Inal,
pursued critical work in varied aspects of communication and culture.
1
In Islamist discourse one can find the use of the word Muslims in general, yet many Muslims are also
secularists and of course most of them are not Islamists. Even uses of words show a somewhat constructed
character of the debate.
2
This discussion includes the views of Arendt, Sennett, Rawls, Habermas, S. Benhabib, N. Fraser, I. M.
Young, O. Negt and A. Kluge.
3
This piece also includes references to other Frankfurt School philosophers along with Stuart Hall, Kaarle
Nordenstreng and Herbert I. Schiller (Oskay, 1980).
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Unsal Oskay's students, now working at different universities in Ankara, Istanbul and
Izmir, have set the pace for critical communication studies, including research on the
public sphere and the media. Elaborations of the concept, translations of main materials
and research on it started almost at the same time in the early to mid 1990s. But
preceding this period, the must BA course, "Public Opinion", taught at Ankara University
first by Meral Ozbek from 1989 to 1991, then Eser Koker, had already included reading
materials by and on Habermas, Negt and Kluge. Koker also drew heavily on Habermas in
her postgraduate courses.4 In fact, Koker's Communication of Politics and Politics of
Communication grew out of her lecture notes in 1998; and Ozbek's edited book, The
Public Sphere, was published in 2004 after nine-year-long preparation. Ozbek argued for
maintaining some normative aspects of the conception of public sphere by Habermas for
Turkish politics yet supporting mainly an improved version of Negt and Kluge's
comprehension, including all the oppressed groups along with the proletariat, and a link
to the concept of experience.
Other lecturers of the "Public Opinion" course (Sevda Alankus from the mid- to late1990s and Beybin Kejanlioglu from 1999 to 2002) were luckier in terms of publications.
Although Alankus has not published her post-doctoral thesis, which includes a
comparison between, Arendt's and Habermas' conceptions of the public sphere, her
translations of Nicholas Garnham's and John P. Thompson's pieces on the public sphere
and media were both published in 1995.5 She also published articles on the public sphere
and representation of others in the media in the second half of the 1990s. Kejanlioglu's
research about a current affairs/public discussion programme on TV ("Arena of Politics")
in terms of Nancy Fraser's critique of Habermas and her conception of the public
sphere(s) was also published early in 1995. Kejanlioglu's literature review on the public
sphere and the media along the lines of public broadcasting and audience participation
programmes on TV was completed in 1996 yet could be published in 2004 in Ozbek's
4
The publication of the translation of The Transformation of the Bougeois Public Sphere from German into
Turkish was in 1997 yet it included Habermas's Preface of 1990. The short encyclopedia article by
Habermas on the public sphere has 3 translations: 1990, 1995, 2004.
5
Translations of other related materials from English were also published such as Curran’s pieces and
debate between Keane and Garnham. All were translated into Turkish by Suleyman Irvan (1997, 2002),
who was a student of Ozbek and Koker and classmate of Kejanlioglu.
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edited book mentioned above. Her critique of Habermas, his model of "intersubjective
transparency" and lack of analysis on "information" which actually feeds the "informed
citizen" was presented in the World Congress of Philosophy in 2003 (Kejanlioglu, 2007).
Nurcay Turkoglu at Marmara University has given a significant role to Habermas and
Benhabib's critique in her discussions about public sphere, ethics and communicative
action. Negt and Kluge's emphasis on experience has also taken place in her studies on
media and culture, especially in her analysis of TV programmes (Turkoglu, 2004).
2. Research on Public Sphere and the Media
Most of the recent research on public sphere and media in Turkey grew out of the studies
of these communication scholars either through their supervision of graduate theses or
through their published work.6 In fact, Turkoglu supervised several theses that include the
concept of public sphere, two of which deserves particular attention. Artun Avcı's (2008)
PhD thesis, The public sphere and television in Turkey: The transition from civicoriented television to consumer television, focuses on how commercialization
undermined the discourse on citizenship and political potential of the broadcasting media
whereas Gulum Sener's (2006) PhD thesis, Internet as a new public sphere in the age of
global capitalism: the use of internet by new social movements, applies a user-oriented
research to discuss the potentials and the pitfalls of a new medium.
Similarly, two theses written under the supervision of Kejanlioglu have different
orientations. Abdulkadir Cetin's (2006) Sokak/Street both as a Public Place and Public
Sphere takes a short-lived magazine, “Sokak/Street”, as an instance for the discussions on
the public sphere and considers Negt and Kluge's views as a more suitable frame of study
whereas Ilker Ozdemir's (2007) Strategicalization of communication: a critical
evaluation of guide books, personal development courses and communication training
6
Of course, this review is not all exhaustive, just tries to map out the research orientations via putting
Ankara University at the centre. Other related theses can be found at Marmara University, written under the
supervision of Ozden Cankaya and Yasemin Giritli Inceoglu for instance or one can see a project of
personal interest on video and experience by Akbal-Sualp (1999).
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seminars is based on a Habermasian conception of communication, even if with a critical
tone, and includes both an analysis of books on communication and participant
observation in training courses and seminars on personal development and
communication.
One crucial PhD research deserves a particular attention as it was published. Ulku
Doganay's (2002) PhD thesis under the supervision of Eser Koker is on the practices of
political discussion and the democratic process in Turkey, looking at (a) a local political
meeting organised by Local Agenda 21 which got the best application award by the UN
in 2001, (b) an assembly of Women's Shelters, and (c) three discussion programmes on
television. Having a solid theoretical discussion on deliberative democracy, local
governmental practices, the public sphere, the feminist critique of the public sphere and
"tele-democracy", this study compares and contrasts forms of political discussion for
democratic politics. In fact, she published her thesis under the title of Reconsidering
Democratic Procedures. In cases of meeting and assembly, Doganay's research is based
on participant observation and interviews, yet for TV discussion programmes, she
analyzed three deciphered texts of the programmes. As to the third set of research that
involves media, partially a rather pessimistic response to Kejanlioglu's analysis of one of
the programmes in 1994,7 Doganay reached to a conclusion that several exclusionary
mechanisms from thematic limits to sensationalism exist in such TV programmes.
Programme presenters supported some speech at the expense of others and instead of
discussing altogether, they tried to underline the contrasting views. Exclusions and sharp
encounters could not of course lead to a shared basis for understanding each other.
Overall, Doganay criticizes procedural comprehension of democracy at a time when
prevailing power relations persist.
In fact, Doganay also started supervising theses in the mid-2000s and one of them by
Demircan (2006) was on the Internet and public sphere. Analysing online forums as a
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Kejanlioglu analysed the very same programme in terms of the flexibility of its format, which was
changing every week and Doganay's choice was one of the most limited and closed one. Actually both
consider the programme as presenting a forum not for rational discussion but a site for discursive
contestations in a society marked by huge inequalities. Such visibility of inequalities through contestations
was rather interpreted optimistically by Kejanlioglu.
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basis of public discussion in the context of the arguments set forth by Habermas and
theorists of deliberative democracy, Demircan says different viewpoints could be relayed
in online forums yet discussions were not developed through argumentations.
3. Research on Public Sphere and Audience Participation?
The literature review on public sphere and the media in Turkey shows that a rather
conceptual debate over the issue has dominated the research. Yet, still, four veins of
research can be identified: (a) deregulation and public broadcasting; (b) representation of
excluded groups and/or others in media; (c) TV discussion programmes; and (d) the
Internet as a medium of public sphere or/and an alternative media. The first vein is
related to the deregulation policies of the 1980s, using the concept of public sphere as a
cure for revitalising public broadcasting/media. The second set of research has more to do
with representation and textual analysis that also constitutes a part of the third vein. Most
of the research on public discussion programmes is based on textual analysis to register
audience participation. Even some of the research on Internet limits themselves with
texts.
Above-mentioned PhD thesis on the Internet by Sener (2006) was among the research
that "went to public but not publicized/published". A rare example of such user/audience
research on TV programmes was conducted by Emek Cayli (2009), who used to be a
teaching assistant of Kejanlioglu at Ankara University and got an invaluable support from
Koker for her PhD thesis. Cayli questioned the relations between privacy and publicity in
the morning TV talk shows that consisted of women audience both via textual analysis
and audience research -participant observation and in-depth interviews. Such focus, I
argue, needs to be elaborated and more research should be conducted in Turkey along the
axis of “audience participation”. Nico Carpentier’s (2007: 106-110) discussion on the
concept of participation can be a starting point.
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both as a Public Place and Public Sphere). Ankara: Ankara University.
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ve
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elestirel
bir
degerlendirmesi
(Strategicalization of communication: a critical evaluation of guide books, personal
development courses and communication training seminars). Ankara: Ankara
University.
Sener, Gulum (2006) Kuresel kapitalizmin yeni kamusal alani olarak internet: yeni
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