Can people participate in the Habermasian public sphere and still preserve their privacy? Of course they can—as long as they transcend their social or group particularities when they are in it. The reason Habermas emphasizes the ‘rational-critical’ nature of the discourse in the public sphere is not because he looks down on other forms of expression, as Jarvis believes him to do, but because rational argument—rather than, say, dance—was the medium that helped individuals to abstract from their social and political interests and engage with the larger fate of humanity. Jarvis seems unfamiliar with Habermas’s work on communicative rationality and thus prefers to read him through the extremely tedious contemporary debate about ‘experts’ (journalists) and ‘amateurs’ (bloggers). Comically, he ends up accusing the great German thinker of being a smug elitist. This is how Sarah Palin would read Habermas if she could read Habermas.
