CREATe is happy to present the ninth entry in our series of working papers released in 2025 – ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere and the Regulatory Turn: An Interview with Philip Schlesinger’ by Wei Zhao (Beijing City University) and Fei Huang (Jiangxi Normal University).
Read Prof. Schlesinger’s reflections on the paper below.
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In an interview recently published in Chinese in the Shanghai Journalism Review, CREATe Professorial Fellow Philip Schlesinger reflects on his recent work on the post-public sphere and developments in the neo-regulation of digital space. Today we are publishing the English-language original.
Schlesinger’s academic interviewers, Wei Zhao and Fei Huang, queried his views on the future of regulatory governance at a time of intensifying global competition. They were also curious about a distinctive British regulatory innovation, the Digital Regulators Cooperation Forum (DRCF), which Philip Schlesinger has been researching along with CREATE’s Director, Martin Kretschmer. Topically, how the regulatory field might change given the far-reaching challenges posed by AI was also on the agenda.
The conversation eventually turned to the little discussed role of ethnographic research in studying how regulatory bodies work. As Schlesinger’s sociological research on media and culture has regularly used ethnographic methods, his Chinese interviewers asked whether it was relevant for studying regulation. There had been a vogue for such work in the field of journalism, they pointed out, although maybe it had peaked.
In his interview Schlesinger maintains that ethnography is indeed highly relevant for research on regulation. In some respects, he suggests, regulatory bodies have become strategic central institutions in their attempts to deal with the challenges of digital space. Their rationale is to maintain cultural, political, social and economic order in times when national security dominates the agenda. As he puts it, amid a profound crisis of the public sphere, ‘They bear the weight of increased expectations among governments and publics’. It is this pivotal role that makes research into regulation so interesting and significant.
Rethinking the Public Sphere and the Regulatory Turn: An Interview with Philip Schlesinger
Wei Zhao and Fei Huang
CREATe Working Paper 2025/9
Abstract
As digital platformization continues to disrupt traditional media ecosystems and transform the infrastructures of public communication, regulatory frameworks worldwide remain in a state of transition, grappling with the challenges posed by algorithmic governance, media fragmentation, and shifting power relations. In this interview, Philip Schlesinger elaborates on his use of the concept of a post-public sphere to theorise the structural rupture of rational-critical discourse in the digital age. He discusses the implications of these changes for democratic governance, the emergence of neo-regulation, and the evolving role of cross-agency regulatory mechanisms such as the UK’s Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF). This interview offers timely theoretical insights and empirical reflections that contribute to current debates on digital regulation, making it a valuable point of entry for those seeking to understand the institutional logic and geopolitical stakes of digital governance today.
Full paper can be downloaded here.