Habermas, in “Civil Society, Public Opinion, and Communicative Power,” starts by laying out the public sphere: an egalitarian social space where differing opinions; private experiences and problems; are spontaneously shared. By sharing their private experiences and problems, the people found in the public sphere notice the social issues that are behind the causation of their problems. Therefore, from the public sphere emerge the civil societies: movements that seek to bring wide attention to the social issues affecting the private sphere of the people. If the civil societies are able to mobilize the people, it can obtain political power that can be used to pressure politicians to engage in what the civil societies and the public sphere want.
Nonetheless, Habermas claims that the strong sedimentation of people into different social classes, with the current avoidance of differences, and the suffocation of unsupervised discourse, have led to the decline of the egalitarian public sphere and its diversity of opinions; and the expression of experiences and problems. This has left the people of the public sphere feeling dissociated. Taking advantage of this, those who are able to monopolize the now-weak public sphere are the ones who now mobilize the public to achieve the interests of their financial backers. This, along with the media’s incrementation of influence, have caused the voices once heard in the public sphere to be shut off, and interest-backed forces be the ones heard the most.