The End or the Reconstitution of the Public Sphere? Communication, Meaning, and Society in Baudrillard and Habermas

This article offers a comparative examination of Jean Baudrillard’s and Jürgen Habermas’s conceptions of communication, meaning, and the public sphere. Baudrillard argues that in the modern era communication and information lead not to an expansion of meaning but to its collapse, resulting in the disintegration of the public sphere within the domain of hyperreality. Mass media, accordingly, does not aim at genuine communication; rather, it seeks to simulate meaning and render it consumable. This