Abstract

This paper draws on a recent interview with Jürgen Habermas, in which he says that the revolution of Ict has led to a massive growth of recipients and volume of information, but did not result in an improvement of the quality of political communication. Instead of focusing on politically relevant issues, public attention has been overwhelmed by a centrifugal force, with no equivalent forces which are able to mitigate the dispersion. After the last technological revolution, we discover ourselves wandering among countless archipelagos of fragmentary communication. The paper describes some social and political consequences of this transformation, stressing how the disintegration of the public sphere produces injustice and, ultimately, a vast array of situations characterized by the emergence of hidden epistemic violence.