Part 1:
In “Social Media and the Public Sphere” Fuchs (2014) argues that a public service media is necessary for democracy and that non-capital digital media supports a public sphere. He cites scholar Habermas, who emphasizes the public sphere’s political economy. Similarly, the author has a money-oriented understanding when analyzing the purposes and repercussions of social media. As “tools of cognition, communication and cooperation…each platform has a primary information function” (Fuchs, 2014, p. 58). However, both Habermas and the author argue that a true public sphere must be accessible by all citizens, despite their economic standings, as well as “free from state censorship and from private ownership. It is free from particularistic controls” (Fuchs, 2014, p. 60).
Currently, the capitalist system dictates the political, cultural and economic spheres. The accumulation of money, rather than interpersonal relations and connections, are the predominant, modern-day motives behind the “public sphere”. Social media platforms are run by powerful corporations with capitalist intentions. This has resulted in an unequal society that weakens universal, individual freedoms, as well as unequal access to the public sphere due to the misallocation of resources (Fuchs, 2014). A society’s public sphere shows its shortcomings.
In order to maintain their capital accumulation, social media giants jeopardize their role of making information public by prioritizing advertising through data siphoning while widening the educational and economic gap. However, social media has the potential to be a public sphere once we move beyond the surveillance and data sharing for capital means.
Despite the “public sphere” shortcomings, the author believes a participatory society and a true public sphere is achievable with state-funded public service media. I agree that media reforms, such as PSM, will make educational content, technologies and a place for discourse available to all classes of people, with the purpose of promoting unification and individual freedoms.
In “The Inescapable Town Square”, Sacasas compares past oral cultures to our current literate digital culture. Our means of communication changed with the introduction of social media platforms, evident by the “evanescence of the word” and the transition to large, somewhat anonymous audiences. Contrary to face-to-face communication or writing, the immediacy of digital communication in the public sphere on social media distorts meaning-making, trapping us in this storm of “controversies, debates, and crises”.
In Eli Pariser’s TedTalk, he argued how the lack of healthy public spaces on digital platforms jeopardizes healthy democracy. According to Pariser, a true public sphere requires urban planners to create structural platforms where we can trust and understand each other. Similar to how rich owners of social media can harm the content on their platforms, John Oliver believes the digitization of newspapers is smart yet risks news making for the sake of “clicks” in the digital public sphere.
Part 2:
Similar to how Fuchs (2014) argues that the current digital public sphere is not accessible to everyone, archives are also inaccessible to those who lack the resource. This includes Wikipedia because it requires having certain technologies in order to obtain its plethora of information. Physical archives are more accessible and are not controlled by media capitalists, but are fading away as we enter further into the digital public sphere. This compares to how Sacasas argued about the “evanescence of the word”. Digital archives “dramatically expand our capacity to document and store information” (Sacasas, 2019), but these massive databases are not accessible to everyone. For those who do have access to them in the public sphere, we strictly act in the present and are likely not preserving knowledge any longer.
