Portfolio Assignment #3

Claire Lacy
Digital Media & Society Spring 2020
2 min readFeb 13, 2020

In his reading, Fuchs (2014) mentioned that Habermas emphasizes “that the public sphere is not just a sphere of public political communication, but also a sphere free from state censorship and from private ownership” (p. 60). Therefore, digital media in America does support the public sphere. Individuals have the right to speak freely about politics on social media and can criticize the government without being penalized. However, certain countries do enforce censorship on digital media when it comes to topics such as politics. In this way, digital media does not support the public sphere in those countries. There is great evidence to describe America’s digital media as “a sphere of public political communication” (Fuchs, 2014, p. 60).

In Madrigal’s (2017) article, he mentioned how Facebook’s “GOTV effort” helped Democrats during the 2012 election. However, he also brought up how during the Trump campaign, there were “‘dark’ Facebook ads” that were shown only to those targeted (Madrigal, 2017). Therefore, there was a limit to who could be informed about such ads. This relates back to public political communication because though certain political ideas may be free to flow on the Internet, it is possible for one not to be in the targeted group that receives certain political information.

To relate Madrigal’s (2017) article to the keyword, “flow”, the potential influence of digital media on voters during the past two presidential elections should be analyzed further as an example of the impact of the flow of political information on social media. The fact that a Democrat was elected for the 2012 election and a Republican for the 2016 election is an interesting point to focus on. Finally, in Sacasas’s (2019) reading, he noted that when people post on social media, they display similar characteristics to “members of literate but pre-digital societies” (Sacasas, 2019). He also noted the inability to “step out of the chaotic and contentious flux” (Sacasas, 2019). Social media allows for a constant flow of information from anyone on it. In that way, the information is unavoidable and the flow could be argued to be unhealthy.

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Digital Media & Society Spring 2020
Digital Media & Society Spring 2020

Published in Digital Media & Society Spring 2020

Class page for Digital Media & Society Spring 2020 at Rutgers University

Claire Lacy
Claire Lacy

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