We the Iranian bloggers are “made up of private people gathered together as a public [though virtual] and articulating the needs of society with the state", and thus we define a public sphere as Habermas would have defined it.
My dear Habermas, this weblog thing, is it private? Is it public?
If it is public does it have enough power to be counted in a “representative democracy”? Is it powerful enough so that it can shape political power and policy making? Or is it simply a powerless public which is essentially private? Yet again, how private is private when our most private thoughts and feelings are influenced and derived from language and thus the linguistic constructs of the public we live in…Yet again for the second time, if it is powerless and private why are Mortazavi and his bosses closing the weblogs down?
Dear Habermas, “could you please find the seller of the orange” or shove your private sphere up… cause I am loving it and just not getting it….!
Read:
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.