Communication Among Strangers: Concepts of the Public Sphere in American Newspapers of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

The chapter harks back to an era when the notion of transparency as a socio-political category did not yet exist. The author demonstrates that the issues of information, knowledge, communication and the control of political power that are today connected to it, were then still discussed under the heading of “the public sphere”. Reconstructing the development of the American press from its inception at the turn to the eighteenth century until the second decade of the nineteenth century, when it made the transition to becoming a mass medium, the chapter shows that this development illustrates a historic transformation of the notion of the public sphere. As Jaeger concludes, even current debates on transparency are still within the tradition of this transformation.