6. Social Media Broke our Public Sphere
It is difficult to envision what globalization would be without the internet. It erased borders, democratized access to information, and undermined censorship by authoritarian regimes. But then came social media.
As early as 2006, Jurgen Habermas, the world’s leading thinker on the public sphere, weighed in on what the internet would mean for democracy:
…the rise of millions of fragmented chat rooms across the world tend instead to lead to the fragmentation of large but politically focused mass audiences into a huge number of isolated issue publics. Within established national public spheres, the online debates of web users only promote political communication, when news groups crystallize around the focal points of the quality press, for example, national newspapers and political magazines.
The “public sphere” is that domain of our social life in which public opinion is formed — it is, Habermas tells us, essential to the health of a democracy, and must be inclusive, representative, and marked by a respect for rational argument.
In his 2006 warning, Habermas expressed two primary concerns. First, he said, discussions on the internet are too fragmented — instead of having a single public sphere, we’re ending up with several non-overlapping ones. Second, he noted, the democratization of expression will increase, rather than reduce, the need for “quality press” of “national newspapers and political magazines”.
What Habermas referred to as “the fragmentation of publics”, we today call the “filter bubble”. When we can choose who to connect (or not connect) with, we tend to connect with people with views similar to ours. Social media are, by design, built to allow us to do exactly this. “Filter bubbles” worsen polarization, making us live in our own online echo chamber, accessing only opinions that validate rather than challenge us.
Habermas’s warning also emphasized the role of “quality press” for a healthy public sphere — and with “fake news” making the headlines, we’d all nod in approval. How’s our “quality press” doing, then?
It’s not a pretty picture. The newspaper industry initially benefited greatly from the rise of the internet — until social media and search engines changed the rules of the game. By giving marketers a clearly superior advertising tool, search engines and social media led to enormous loss of advertising revenue for news media.
The internet gave news establishments wider distribution than ever before — but it also cut off their income source, and the industry still hasn’t figured out a viable alternative. Underlying our fake news problem is a business model problem in the news media industry, and until that’s fixed our public sphere will continue to suffer.
It is tragically ironic how the greatest democratization of expression in history led to the breakage of our public sphere — and it just happens that a failing public sphere has a symbiotic relationship with demagogues: Desperate news establishment, in their search for ratings, subsidize demagogues, whose outrageous rhetoric is in turn, well, “good for ratings”.
Menu:
Introduction
#1 The Triumph of Globalization
#2 The Loss of Anchors
#3 Economic Transformation
#4 Obsolete Nationalism
#5 Political Failure (Previous Section)
#6 Social Media Broke our Public Sphere (You are here)
#7 The Unravelling of the Middle-East
Conclusion: The Trump Effect
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