Nancy Fraser, Victor Kempf, Martin Seeliger & Sebastian Sevignani
Property, Media and the public sphere
The transformation of property relations undeniably has profound consequences for the public sphere and, by extension, for the functioning of democracy. Yet public sphere theory — including its critical variants — has largely neglected the question of property. This neglect concerns ownership of media outlets and means of communication, such as mass media, social media, and their platforms; but it also concerns the questions of who holds the power to influence the public through organised communication, and whether citizens are able to participate in public discourse at all. We are currently witnessing a far-reaching structural transformation in this regard: digital technologies have generalised and partially democratised the ability to disseminate one’s own views through media. At the same time, social and economic conditions are becoming increasingly polarised, giving rise to a more intense defence of property and identities — a dynamic that also shapes patterns of participation in public spheres.
Meanwhile, the commodification of attention continues unabated, and we observe a multi-layered process of privatisation: individual nodes of public communication — newspapers, film studios, television broadcasters — have long been in the hands of a small number of large media and communications conglomerates. Public service media are under pressure. More recently, the infrastructure of the (digital) public sphere has become concentrated in the hands of a few digital companies that own the most influential platforms resulting in monopolized control over the technical means of distributing content from providers. As a result, media organisations and journalism alike are being drawn into the sphere of influence of these actors. These developments are connected to, and driven by, new business models, including the appropriation, exploitation, and structuring of communicative activities — for instance through the harvesting of data traces for machine learning and targeted advertising. Moreover, deliberate political interference by platform owners in the infrastructure of the public sphere can no longer be ruled out.
The contributions in this dossier analyse the social conditions underlying this situation and examine the structural transformation of property and the public sphere. It opens with texts addressing property and the public spheres, before turning to the more specific role of (digital) media. It concludes with an exploration of the contested form of intellectual property in digitalization processes, e.g. in regarding knowledge, information, and data that circulate in the public domain or are withheld from it.
Property and the public sphere
Property and (digital) media
Intellectual property and digitalization
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If you are interested in further information, you can also use the searchable text database/bibliography of the New Library of Property; we recommend, for example:
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Boyle, James. 2008. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the mind. New Haven, Conn. Yale Univ. Press
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Butollo, Florian und Schneidemesser, Lea. 2022. Who runs the show in digitalized manufacturing? Data, digital platforms and the restructuring of global value chains. Global networks: a journal of transnational affairs.
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Theine, Hendrik und Sebastian Sevignani. 2024. "Special Issue: Media Transformation and the Challenge of Property". European Journal of Communication 39 (5).
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Sevignani, Sebastian, und Hendrik Theine, Hrsg. 2025. „Special Section: Unpacking Property: Media, Ownership, and Power in Transformation“. International Journal of Communication 19 (2025).