The Kind of Global Public Sphere

The concept of the global public sphere is an interesting one. In some ways it is almost a forum where everyone comes together to decide whether something is acceptable or not. On a global level and at the person to person tier such a forum doesn't exist. I, for example, do not have a way of sharing my thoughts with a man in Bangladesh on gun violence in the US, nor he with me. More formally, however, I believe that such a sphere does exist.

Take an organization like the UN, where one could reasonably say things are decided as "okay" or "not okay" by representatives of states. The argument could be made that states represent their respective publics, thereby ensuring that those "publics" all come together whenever the UN meets. It may sound like a stretch, but honestly I do not find any reason to discount it. Is every viewpoint held by every member of each public represented? No, but as the representatives of those publics, the ambassadors to the UN nonetheless are advocating on their behalf.

Following that line of thought we can see how the global public sphere has influenced our development as a planet over the past 50 years. In the United Nations we created an organization thats purpose is to prevent conflict, specifically great power conflict, but to a lesser degree conflict in general. That's a result of people coming together in an unprecedented way after WWII and declaring that conflict was "not okay." The UN also helped put together some of the most resilient and lasting international agreements on human rights and helping make the term "human rights" accepted vernacular. Representatives of publics came together and decided what was and wasn't a human right. The examples do not end. I focus on the UN because it is an easy target as it is one of the principle forum people think of when they think of formalized international forums, but other international organizations reflect the public sphere as well. At a more localized level, the EU is a perfect example of a public, with different states and peoples coming together because of coming to together and deciding, together, what is and isn't right.

So in summation a global public sphere exists in more formalized spaces like institutions, but a true commons where people from all over the world can come together and solve the world's problems isn't exactly there yet. The internet and communication technology have created the mechanisms for such a sphere to flourish, but as yet it has not.