Emancipation, the Media, and Modernity

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Abstract
This book approaches the problems raised by the media via a set of arguments with post-modernism and Information Society theory. It argues that the media are important because they raise a set of questions central to social and political theory. It focuses on the problem raised by what Kant called the unsocial sociability of human kind. Then, it examines the implications for emancipation of seeing the media as cultural industries within the capitalist market economy; of seeing the media as technologies; of the specialisation of intellectual production and of the separation and increasing social distance between the producers and consumers of symbols. The problem of how the symbolic forms that the media circulate can be assessed is provided. It is argued that evaluation is in practice unavoidable and without some standards that are more than just subjective any criticism of the media's performance is impossible. Via an examination of the debate between the sociology of art and aesthetics the book argues for the ethical foundations of aesthetic judgement and for the establishment of agreed standards of aesthetic judgement via the discourse ethic that underlies the argument of the entire book. Next the book gives a discussion of the media and politics. Hereafter the book returns to the roots of public sphere theory.

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