The roots of skepticism [sic] in India go back a long way, and it would be hard to understand the history of Indian culture if skepticism [sic] were to be jettisoned. Indeed, the resilient reach of the tradition of dialectics can be felt throughout Indian history, even as conflicts and wars have led to much violence.
Author Amartya Sen, 1998 Nobel Laureate in Economics, in The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Sen, 2005, p. xii)
German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas in 1962 theorized a 19th century bourgeois public sphere as a social space for political dialogue, debate, and dissent in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. His idea of the public sphere was initially propounded to delineate the vibrant realm of social discourse between the state on one hand and the private sphere of the market and family on the other (Habermas, 1989a, 1989b). Since then, the theory of the public sphere has spawned a wealth of related concepts and counter theories that re-defined the role of the media in a democracy (Curran, 1991; Dahlgren, 2009; Dahlgren & Spark, 1991; Friedland, Hove, & Rojas, 2006; Kellner, 1990).