Digital Media & the Public Sphere
Within What Facebook Did to American Democracy we see the often polarizing and strategic isolation of digital strategy in campaigns. Throughout the article, we not only observed these factors but delved into how digital platforms who allow these forms of media to run are essentially whether unconsciously or consciously spreading misinformation and encouraging sensationalist journalism. As the article reads “Things we thought we understood — narratives, data, software, news events — have had to be reinterpreted in light of Donald Trump’s surprising win as well as the continuing questions about the role that misinformation and disinformation played in his election.” The overarching argument I believe was made within this piece was that Facebook now posits itself in the center of information circulation, and this has very strong implications that spans beyond the knowledge of what your friend is doing in their day to day life, ones that have and continue to sway political opinion and promote partisan rhetoric. A quote in relation to this notion from the article explains “Facebook’s enormous distribution power for political information, rapacious partisanship reinforced by distinct media information spheres, the increasing scourge of “viral” hoaxes and other kinds of misinformation that could propagate through those networks, and the Russian information ops agency.”
In Social Media and the Public Sphere the author argues that we need to analyze social media through the perspective of critical political economy. Within this realm and assessing social media materialistically through Habermas’ definition of public in terms of the authors opinion “we can say that social media has a potential to be a public sphere and lifeworld of communicative action, but that this sphere is limited by the steering media of political power and money so that corporations own and control and the state monitors users’ data on social media.” Social media is limited in its ability to be a public sphere because regulations and government and political forces can often skew digital media in order to capture a target demographic’s attention and commodify them. Therefore they state “Contemporary social media as a whole do not form a public sphere, but are in a particularistic manner controlled by corporations and the state that colonize and thereby destroy the public sphere potentials of social media.”
The Inescapable Town Square argues a similar sentiment. The author’s main argument hinges upon the notion that “social media platforms have had a corrupting influence on public discourse. Moreover, they are now widely viewed as agents of division and radicalization. Once heralded as the agents of democratic reform, today they are derided as abettors of authoritarian regimes.”
I believe that digital media does support the public sphere by giving at the least an illusion of being heard from an international if not global audience although realistically many messages remain visible only at a local level due to the completely saturated channels. But digital media supports the public sphere to an extent. I truly believe at times digital media leads to suppression, exclusion, and deception. I think back to the Facebook article that explained how “The Trump campaign was working to suppress “idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans,” and they’d be doing it with targeted, “dark” Facebook ads. These ads are only visible to the buyer, the ad recipients, and Facebook. No one who hasn’t been targeted by then can see them.”
I believe that like the digital sphere which is comprised of our own segmented realities and algorithm rich digital landscapes, culture too has its own set of beliefs systems and values embedded within it that at times separates and alienates. As Social Media and the Public Sphere article notes, “Contributions to discussions of Internet, social media and the public sphere often tend to stress new technologies’ transformative power.” And within the same air of this quote I found myself thinking of culture. When discussing culture we often talk about its transformative power, its ability to bring people together in inculcate values and tradition within individuals, but we often don’t talk about its isolative repercussions. Like digital media and public spheres, we often don’t talk about digital media ramifications in regards to misinformation and the values that we are passively allowing to get inside of our heads through seeded political or social messaging on platforms like Facebook.
