The Experience of Public Discussions in Media as a Political-Phenomenological Research Object

This chapter takes a deeper look at the characteristics of communication in public discussion in media by the means of a phenomenological analysis, providing the basis for the bigger argument of the book. This chapter presents the philosophical-phenomenological method for analyzing a phenomenon from the first-person perspective—how something appears to the engaged subject—and argues that this perspective reveals the aspects of public discussion in media as a phenomenon that remains undiscovered in mere conceptual analysis or in a description of the object from the so-called outside observer perspective. In this and the following chapters of Part II, the theory used and analyzed mainly contains classical and political phenomenology.