Hating Habermas

Grabbing has overt political dimensions: consider the expression ‘screen grab’, in which an image, sound or line of text is excised out of its original context and often sent travelling the internet, spinning into what danah boyd calls the ‘super-public’ sphere, beyond geography, intention and even time. This chapter discusses how pivotal the politics of grabbing were going to be online, the more trouble with conceptions of the internet as a public sphere dominated by Habermasian rational subjects. Reading more deeply in philosophy and history, the author learned that the eighteenth century was actually full of competing notions of how a proper citizen should behave: for every Edmund Burke, there was a Thomas Paine or a Mary Wollstonecraft.