February 3, 2010

Jürgen Habermas: not on Twitter

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Jürgen "Hashmark" Habermas

Last week, a slew of bloggers, including NYU professor Jay Rosen, wondered if Twitter user “@JHabermas” might actually be Jürgen Habermas, the historian and theorist of the public sphere.

Well, it isn’t, and this has been confirmed by Habermas himself who told Jonathan Stray via phone on Monday that “No, no, no. This is somebody else. This is a mis-use of my name.”

Habermas is the author The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, one of the first academic works of media theory and an influential text on the development of modern democracy.

As Stray notes “I know many people will be disappointed, especially @bitchphd who tweeted ‘JURGEN HABERMAS is on twitter. definitive response to all future articles about how stupid twitter is.’ Personally I believe that Twitter is significant even without Habermas, but it’s clear that this is an issue for the next generation of theorists to decide.”

Kelly Burdick is the executive editor of Melville House.

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