The post-World War II media-political order has undergone far-reaching transformation in recent years, marked by a shift from “legacy media” to a digitalized and increasingly decentered landscape. Philip Schlesinger has adopted the term “post-public sphere” to designate this still open-ended set of relations.
Jürgen Habermas has invoked the regulation of digital platforms as a key corrective to a “post-truth” and polarized political culture. What does this imply for the fast-moving regulatory challenges faced by states? In April 2025, the US government’s new tariffs immediately posed questions about the impact of shifts in international trade on states’ digital regulatory goals.
Digital regulation in key jurisdictions—China, the USA, and the EU—is being pursued in a contested global communicative space. Conflictual relations often exist between global platforms and states as well as between systemic competitor states themselves. The regulatory practice of capitalist liberal democracies is now being transformed by national security concerns.
Moreover, this global regulatory pivot is seeing the emergence of a “neo-regulatory" framework, responding to geopolitics, geoeconomics, and technological change. After discussing a range of issues, Schlesinger will reflect briefly in conclusion on his empirical research on current regulatory innovation.
Philip Schlesinger is a professor in cultural theory and a professorial fellow at CREATe, the Centre for Regulation of the Creative Economy at the University of Glasgow. Educated at Oxford University and the LSE, Schlesinger is a political sociologist whose work—often ethnographic in nature—addresses culture, communication, and media. He is currently researching the crisis of the public sphere in democracies, with a focus on digital regulation. Schlesinger is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Academy of Social Sciences, and has held visiting professorships and fellowships in France, Italy, Spain, and Norway.
IWM Rector Misha Glenny will moderate the discussion.
