Nowe technologie informacyjne a sfera publiczna

The last two decades have faced an intense, and in its essence – revolutionary, development of new information technologies, especially of the Internet, which fundamentally changes political, economic, and social life. The new situation that results from this Internet boom requires redefinition of a number of concepts, including the notion of “public sphere”. The purpose of our work is to describe the contemporary public sphere in the context of the virtual space. The article opens with a framework of the concept of the public sphere, and a short historical outline of its twentieth-century theory. Then, the main trends in the Web activism are presented along with a brief description of social and political campaigns taking place in the virtual world.