A virtual European public sphere? The Futurum discussion forum

This paper empirically analyses whether ‘Futurum’, the online discussion forum linked to the Convention on the Future of Europe, constituted a public sphere – and, if so, what kind. Although the debates were discursive and had an institutional context, they were not filtered into the convention process and had an unrepresentative group of participants and thus they sit ill at ease with established conceptualizations of the public sphere.