Tweeting and the Public Sphere

I’m not sure if this is for real but it does seem that the philosopher Jurgen Habermas has a twitter page. See here. (Thanks to Paul Waldman for the tip).  Since Habermas is noted for his long and complicated sentences, it will be curious to see what he can do with 140 characters or less. I noticed that a recent thought bubble was a done in the form of a series of tweets:

“It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers…

It also counterbalances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as…

it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes…

But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics.”

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