Mass media were once viewed as dialogic, as open for engaging readers and political leaders in a common discussion, in sharp contrast to the "refeudalization of the public sphere" Habermas has written of, in which politics becomes a spectacle wholly outside the daily lives of citizens who have little possibility of entering into or shaping that discourse.

While such an outcome is far from certain, new media forms have the potential to facilitate democratic communications. The obstacles to expanding upon these models are not technological, rather they are political and economic. If we are to reinvigorate the public sphere, we must ultimately revive the intermediate publics through which people were once brought into political discourse and action. 

This paper is interested in how "media" operated as technologies instrumental to the emergence of "neo-liberal" modes of governing in the U.S. during the 1980s. The paper is particularly concerned with how the convergence of media and other technologies during the 1980s contributed to the formation of a new social arrangement that depended upon a particular model of domesticity. My focus on the domestic sphere as a space of "self-governing" is, in part, intended to amplify the spatial problematic that is central to Foucaultian critiques of neo-liberalism, i.e., how the domestic sphere was integral to a broader social arrangement and for governing at a distance. The paper also considers how media, in their relation to other household technologies (particularly "programmable appliances"), came to support and to rely upon a particular model of the domestic sphere during the 1980s--one that I refer to as a "(neo-) liberalized" domestic sphere. Although this is a model that had been taking shape for some time, it became crucial to neo-liberal forms of governing over the 80s. Its endurance and strengthening over the 90s affirms that neo-liberalism has less to do with political philosophy than with the emergence of new social spheres and new techniques of managing them in the last part of the twentieth century.

Globalization is creating a new kind of 'public sphere' which challenges traditional definitions and conceptions. This paper will map the parameters of this emerging worldwide political community and the new (satellite- and cyber-) media environments that enable it.