Igor Sacramento 246 Habermas’ notion of the public sphere had a double impact: it strengthened the process of public opinion formation and al- lowed agents to become public defenders of groups previously “invisible” or “excluded” from the public view and debate. Habermas’s notion of the public sphere evolved along with his ideas about legal change. For him, the institution of law has become a local of strains between the discourses of facticity and validity, i.e., between the domains of everyday experience, on the one hand, and the normative dimension of what should be different, on the other. The idea of justice as a struggle for public visibility has proved extremely useful for feminists and minority groups. The normative advertising category helped to set the stage for a radical social and political transformation. Habermas’ idea of the public sphere helped show how modes of exclusion were the tools that allowed male domination. White bourgeois structured a kind of rationality that made their particular perspective seem like the universal form of in- clusion and representation. More than anything else, the last few decades have re- vealed the ambivalence not only of articulated expectations but also the development of the real itself. The vision of a digital public sphere transformed as a networked global sphere, recon- figured in its distribution of power and deterritorialized, is chal- lenged by the reality of a disintegrated public sphere shaped by cybernetic ghettos (DAHLGREN, 2005), where public discourses are increasingly managed by the political use of algorithms. Generally speaking, the concept of public sphere refers to the discursive process through which public beliefs and opin- ions are produced and legitimized: in essence, it mainly involves the communicative processes underlying the construction of opinion. Public space, on the other hand, can also exist without the public sphere. In the case of the Internet, particularly online social media, mediated public spaces that tend to be framed in communicative ecosystems become places that assuredly rep- resent the politics and determined public discourses but do not configure themselves as deliberative ways. On the other hand, they can exert pressure on deliberative political instances. The development of digital media has accelerated the process - ac-
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