TRANSFORMATIONS OF PUBLIC SPHERE IN THE ERA OF DIGITAL MEDIA

Dynamic emergence of the digital media has changed significantly the initial understanding of media communication which has once been seen as public, mass-mediated, mostly one-way and passively received form of information dissemination. However, these terminological and paradigmatic revisions have not influenced media communication's other key feature - the fact that it functions as a constitutional element of the public sphere, as a prominent source of dynamic structural transformations which shape the public sphere within specific historical backgrounds and cultural frameworks. The study aims to offer a theoretical reflection on the issue of understanding the public sphere in terms of the current digital media age. The digital media and their extensive, visually rich user environments need to be discussed in the context of contemporary collision between phenomena that were once distinguishable quite easily (e.g. mainstream culture versus alternative cultural elements). The authors thus work with an assumption that the public sphere is expanding in order to include deeply private aspects of human existence, slowly losing its original functions and showing little to no respect towards human privacy.