Has social media changed the public sphere?
Social media is a phenomenon that all of us are involved in its super-expansionist network capacity. After internet revolution, while the intellectuals thought that there would be no revolution which has an impact on world society such as internet, social media carried the development to another phase. From all over the world, from all strata of the society, people started to be parts of social media and that created a new kind of network society.
Despite the effects of social media in our everyday lives, there is still a big gap in our minds about the proper place of social media in the whole context. It is required to put it into a contextual framework which includes concepts such as public sphere and mass media. As our main subject is “the capability of social media to solve the problems of public sphere and mass media”, we should be focusing on the contextual positioning and restrict our analysis around that point.
It is required to define the concepts of social media, mass media and public sphere in order to understand the keywords that we discuss. Mass media is a denotation of a sector of media which has a capacity to reach large amounts of people (New World Encyclopedia, 2017). It is obvious that conventional mediums such as television and radio are parts of mass media. But several sources such as New World Encyclopedia sees internet and the new communication technologies as a part of mass media too. On the other hand, social media could be defined as computer based technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information and ideas (Obar & Steven, 2015). When it comes to the concept of public sphere, it is needed to stress that this concept has been in the heart of communication studies and political discussions for a long time. A broad definition of public sphere could be found in Habermas literature, as it is defined as a realm of social life in which public opinion could be formed (Habermas et al., 1964). It is also described as an area of everyday life in which people come together and discuss the everyday life problems.
After this short conceptual map, a discussion upon the transformative power of social media today would be more meaningful. Has social media solved the problems and constraints of mass media and public sphere? This could be one of the main questions in communication studies.
As Fuchs stresses in his article, internet, social media and public sphere are commonly combined with new technologies’ transformative power. Scholars who study upon the field, always tend to discuss the issue according to cultural, political, and social aspects but they ignore the political economic aspect. Fuchs asks a reasonable question on his article: who owns internet platforms? Who owns social media? If we think about the role of social media in today’s world, we cannot ignore the political economic part of the story (Fuchs, 2014).
It is obvious that when social media platforms emerged in the beginning, there was a huge positive prediction about the future of public sphere. Social media effect was seen as a key solution for the problems of mass media under authoritarian governments and big corporations. It might have been so, because the fact that social media platforms were mostly startups which
were owned by ordinary young people who wished to change the world. Since then, the developments haven’t proceeded in a way which was supposed to be. Platforms have grown up in a dramatic extent and they also commercialized themselves in a dramatic way. That commercialization included their subscribers who were ordinary people from all over the world.
When approaching to the social media platforms today, it seems that there is a big advertisement world which swallows all of us as their core parts.
Mass media and classical understanding of public sphere have been strongly restricted. Media organs have been under the control of political and economic actors and the information that was taken were being filtered in a systematic way. Public sphere in which the public opinion was shaped has been having the same fate. The control mechanism of mass media and sharing information was creating a restricted public sphere.
After social media revolution on the internet, this reality totally changed. People started to be individual information sources, and they became a part of limitless sharing community. That broke the chains of “ancient information order”. By analyzing that reality, a clear idea appears that social media has changed the mass media understanding which could be called as previous order. However later several developments in internet and social media platforms, new order has also transformed itself to a new structure which has new algorithms. That meant a new style of filtering. It may not have restrictions such mass media applied to its audiences, however it could be seen as another way to create restrictions. To sum up, political economic relationships behind the social media platforms are not totally different than classical media relationships. When we turn back to Fuchs again, we can see that superstructural concepts which are promoted on social media have their strong economic drivers and actors behind.
Another aspect of the discussion is the efficiency problem of social media’s role on political situations. Is social media so powerful to create a change in political area, as many argue? Shirky’s article which was published in Foreign Affairs shows us that social media’s effect could not be generalized (Shirky, 2011). In Phillipines and Moldovan cases, social media created a great impact and resulted in serious political changes. However there are Iranian, Belarusian and Thailandese cases which had serious outcomes for the dissidents who used social media and organized their protests upon its tools. Social media could create a change in comparison with mass media, but it is still a part of the conventional system while technological and scientific control of states and corporations remain in power.
In conclusion, social media created a big change in knowledge — power relations and broke the mass media’s old style. That included great amounts of participants in the process and public sphere must be analyzed regarding that reality. However, political economic actors and relations adapted themselves into the new era, and such problems not different than mass media’s still occur even if they transformed.
CITATIONS
- “Mass media.” Mass media — New World Encyclopedia, www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Mass_media. Accessed 26 Mar. 2017.
- Fuchs, Christian. “Social media and the public sphere.” tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 12.1 (2014): 57–101.
- Habermas, Jürgen, Sara Lennox, and Frank Lennox. “The public sphere: An encyclopedia article (1964).” New German Critique 3 (1974): 49–55.
- Obar, Jonathan A., and Steven S. Wildman. “Social media definition and the governance challenge: An introduction to the special issue.” (2015): 745–750.
- Shirky, Clay. “The political power of social media: Technology, the public sphere, and political change.” Foreign affairs (2011): 28–41.
