Dissonante Öffentlichkeiten als Perspektive kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Theoriebildung

The article takes up an ongoing conversation among German communication scholarship about the question whether we need new theories and methods to understand the fundamental changes in public communication due to digitalization. We respond to an argument made by a group of academics around Christian Strippel and Annekatrin Bock, who maintain that communication scholarship has already begun to develop and to apply new and innovative methods to deal with new phenomena and problems that stem from digital technologies in communication. In our article we argue that the deficits in the current communication research lies in the discourse about theories. Thus, it is surprising that innovative methods are driving current studies, while the reflection about concepts and theories that help to understand the consequences of digitalization in public communication has been neglected. Provided that communication research is the academic discipline which does have particular competences in describing and explaining public spheres, we call for conceptual work and theory development that revisits public sphere theory to deal with the challenges of digital public communication in contemporary society. We propose to theorize public communication in the framework of dissonance. We suggest to introduce the notion of dissonance in public spheres in order to describe and explain the conditions of multilayered, synchronous and disparate processes of public communication and the contradictory consequences of changing public spheres. The latter are characterized by simultaneous entanglements of traditional mass communication and digital venues of communication which eventually create a hybrid media system. We also call for theory development that takes up critical, participatory and constructivist approaches of public sphere theory such as antagonistic pluralism. However, since these approaches account for the conflicts and antagonisms of contemporary pluralist society but largely neglect communication processes and infrastructures, we suggest to also look into new approaches of digital communication, such as network theories and combine them with the concepts of public sphere sociology. We think that it would be instructive and fruitful to use this newly developed framework of dissonance in public sphere to study communication processes and practices in journalism, civil society and political communication.Our article is organized in three sections. In the first part we discuss the terminology of dissonant communication and review approaches to dissonance as opposed to consonance. We revisit communication theory and music theory in order to develop a definition of dissonance. In the second section we take up concepts of public sphere which stress the coexistence of contradictions and antagonistic voices in the public realm which do not converge into consonance or consensus. We revisit studies on the nature of digital communication which focuses on network theories of communication and call for combining these two trajectories of social thought. In the third section of our article we propose a research agenda that focuses on the conditions of dissonance in public communication and the consequences of communication in dissonant public spheres for information flows and inclusion demands in contemporary society. Finally we argue that dissonant public spheres can be observed and should be studied in the fields of journalism, civil society and political communication. Thus, future research should focus on these areas.