Broken Understanding: Corrupted Participation in Emerging Public Spaces

This contribution develops a concept of reflexive intercultural mediation in orientation on obstacles to understanding in emerging public spaces as criteria to assess processes of social inclusion and exclusion. Among the discussed obstacles to understanding are the anatomy of political communication, the ascription of value-laden emotions to others and self, culture-specific emotion worlds and conflict models, the global spread of highly ritualized models of communication with their respective forms of capital or “media of success” such as popularity and authenticity, the crisis of public institutions, particularly of truth as opposed to the triumphant progress of highly sensitized subjectivities, and the economic dynamics tech companies are involved in. The concept of mediation across social and cultural differences that is developed here considers mediation as a reflexive practice and societal arrangements that aim at generating understanding and, in order to do so, lay open obstacles to understanding and highlight the underlying divides.