Public sphere

Summary

The public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. A "Public" is "of or concerning the people as a whole." Such a discussion is called public debate and is defined as the expression of views on matters that are of concern to the public—often, but not always, with opposing or diverging views being expressed by participants in the discussion. Public debate takes place mostly through the mass media, but also at meetings or through social media, academic publications and government policy documents. The term was originally coined by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas who defined the public sphere as "made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state". Communication scholar Gerard A. Hauser defines it as "a discursive space in which individuals and groups associate to discuss matt

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sphere

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (6)

Related publications

Related people

Related units

Related concepts (9)

Related concepts

Related courses (3)

Related courses

Related lectures (3)

Related lectures

La place de l'école. Un lieu de vie et d'apprentissage à Romanel-sur-Lausanne

Alix Martin, Eleanor Thalia Mir

Accueillant des structures parascolaires et des infrastructures publiques sur leurs sites, les écoles deviennent aujourd'hui de véritables centres de gravité. Concernant un plus large public, elles enrichissent la vie sociale des habitants du quartier et deviennent pour eux un lieu emblématique. Romanel-sur-Lausanne se situe à 5 km de Lausanne et bénéficie d'une bonne connexion avec la ville grâce au LEB (train Lausanne-Echallens-Bercher). Au vu de la forte expansion démographique de l'arc lémanique et faisant partie du PALM (projet d'agglomération Lausanne-Morges), la commune prévoit plusieurs projets de développement urbain, dont un nouveau quartier de logements comprenant plus de 600 habitants. La définition d'une centralité qui dynamise le village devient alors nécessaire. Le projet propose un complexe formé de trois entités reliées par une place centrale, la piazza, visant à offrir aux habitants de la commune un lieu d'échange et de partage. Un passage public situé au Nord de cette place est défini comme axe principal; il permet de relier la station du LEB au nouveau quartier d'habitations. Tout en formant un ensemble identitaire, la répartition des activités en trois bâtiments permet aux enfants de se repérer spatialement et contribue à la bonne cohabitation des divers utilisateurs. Chaque bâtiment est en lien avec la piazza par un espace commun, afin de sensibiliser les usagers à la notion de collectivité dès leur plus jeune âge.

2014

Background: The discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9-based gene editing method has opened unprecedented new potential for biological and medical engineering, sparking a growing public debate on both the potential and dangers of CRISPR applications. Given the speed of technology development and the almost instantaneous global spread of news, it is important to follow evolving debates without much delay and in sufficient detail, as certain events may have a major long-term impact on public opinion and later influence policy decisions. Objective: Social media networks such as Twitter have shown to be major drivers of news dissemination and public discourse. They provide a vast amount of semistructured data in almost real-time and give direct access to the content of the conversations. We can now mine and analyze such data quickly because of recent developments in machine learning and natural language processing. Methods: Here, we used Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), an attention-based transformer model, in combination with statistical methods to analyze the entirety of all tweets ever published on CRISPR since the publication of the first gene editing application in 2013. Results: We show that the mean sentiment of tweets was initially very positive, but began to decrease over time, and that this decline was driven by rare peaks of strong negative sentiments. Due to the high temporal resolution of the data, we were able to associate these peaks with specific events and to observe how trending topics changed over time. Conclusions: Overall, this type of analysis can provide valuable and complementary insights into ongoing public debates, extending the traditional empirical bioethics toolset.

JMIR PUBLICATIONS, INC2020

Pedestrian Navigation for the Benefit of Mobility

Michael Flamm, Pierre-Yves Gilliéron, Monique Ruzicka-Rossier, Dominique Von Der Mühll

This chapter presents the various positioning technologies used in pedestrian navigation. The basic principles as well as the main advantages and disadvantages of positioning methods in the context of urban mobility are discussed. The development of navigation systems has led to the establishment of digital navigation maps containing the network of different traffic routes. In the future, pedestrian navigation technology, both attractive and feared, will be accepted if legal and commercial regulations of use prioritize the protection of the private sphere, preserving individual and free mobility.

John Wiley & Sons2013