What public-discourse theory cannot settle is whether the mediated information environment requires constitutive infrastructure to carry recognition, or whether it is self-correcting under formal liberty and needs no structural conditions beyond protection from state interference. The recognition tradition the section operates within reads the information environment as the mediation layer through which the [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) face-to-face base scales to population size: newspapers, broadcast, and digital infrastructure that can carry recognition when built to preserve it and consume recognition when optimized against it. Three contemporary traditions deny this framing at its premise.

Cyber-utopianism / the networked-community defense (Benkler 2006; Shirky 2008; Rheingold 1993) reads digital infrastructure as capable of carrying community-constitutive recognition without degradation: academic communities, transnational professional networks, fandom and mutual-aid networks, and diaspora communities each carry recognition through mediated rather than face-to-face exchange. To read the mediation layer as systematically degrading distinctness and asymmetric exchange is, on this view, to underestimate what networked technology can carry.

Rawlsian political liberalism (Rawls 1993) reads the polity as not requiring a thick mutual-recognition base of the sort [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) grounds: citizens need share only an overlapping consensus on the political conception of justice, not the deeper recognition the section makes load-bearing for the information environment’s task. To require that recognition-accuracy across the population be sufficient for direction-recognition to land is to import a comprehensive doctrine into the political conception’s neutrality.

The marketplace-of-ideas tradition (Mill 1859; Holmes’s dissent in *Abrams v. United States* (1919)) reads the information environment as self-correcting under conditions of formal liberty: where speech is protected from state interference, truth competes with error and eventually prevails, and no constitutive infrastructure beyond that protection is required. To preclude engagement-optimization or to license platform moderation is on this reading to substitute infrastructural prescription for the marketplace’s self-corrective function.

The recognition tradition the section operates within reaches the opposite destination by multiple lines. At the mediation register specifically, the deliberative-democratic tradition (Habermas [1962] 1989, [1992] 1996) reads the public sphere as constitutive infrastructure of legitimacy, and the critical-political-economy-of-media tradition (Bagdikian 2004; Herman and Chomsky 1988; McChesney 1999) tracks how ownership structure and economic incentives shape what information environments can carry. These join the lines [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) develops at the base register, the classical political tradition (Augustine, *De civitate Dei*; Aquinas, *Summa Theologiae* II-II; Hegel, *Philosophy of Right*), the social-capital documentation of face-to-face civic infrastructure (Putnam 2000; Klinenberg 2002, 2018), and the deliberative-democracy empirical tradition (Fishkin; the Irish Citizens’ Assembly), which establish the non-substitutability of the base the mediation layer scales.

The dispute the section frames is whether the mediated information environment is self-correcting under formal liberty (Mill, Holmes), carries recognition without constitutive infrastructure (Benkler, Shirky), or needs only overlapping-consensus institutions rather than recognition-quality conditions (Rawls), or whether the information environment is a mediation layer that carries recognition only under specific structural conditions, a thesis pressed by Habermas and the critical-political-economy-of-media tradition. What the information environment must preserve to carry the [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) base to scale (derived from the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) mutual-recognition mechanism, with the [§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>) / [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) mediation mechanism) is established at [§9.4.2](<9.4.2 What is Required.md>) by the structural-necessity derivation. *Thus the question stands disputed.*


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← [9.4 Information](<9.4 Information.md>) | [9.4.2 What is Required](<9.4.2 What is Required.md>) →
