The public sphere
The public sphere has served people and communities to grow over the years. It serves as a place where opinions are formed or reinforced. The public sphere is defined by Habermas (1991) as an “imaginary” society that includes private people that engage together as a public to discuss matters and need of a society through either assembling or discussing certain matters. In order to have a public sphere and for publics to become personalized, many things should be achieved; a formation of an opinion is required, access to all publics and discussion in an unrestricted way is also a must and finally the public should be able to debate general rules concerning relations (Fuchs, 2014). In order to have a public sphere before the digital era, people would have to meet in a certain location to be able to form a public and discuss. There used to be a difference between the private and the public sphere. But with the rise of social media came a blur between what is private and what is public. Today, posting an opinion or a thought on social media gives us the illusion of being private, yet the boundaries between public and private spheres are shattered since anyone could have access to this opinion (Papacharissi, 2010 as cited in Fuchs, 2014). Many opinions about this matter are formed; this widespread and easy access to public spheres through social media could have a huge impact on society or could in another way make advancement minimal or impossible.
In our world today, anyone can state their opinion, yet it doesn’t always mean that it is going to be heard. Our social media platforms are being catered by what a system or an algorithm believes we are most interested in therefore some opinions are not reaching us. This helps reinforce certain ideas in our minds since our opinions are not being challenged by opposing thoughts or views. Let us take the example of Cambridge Analytica and how it affected the most recent U.S. presidential elections. Cambridge analytica was a company hired to study people’s account on social media platforms in order to see who is more likely to vote for Trump, who is undecided for the elections, and many other things. After analyzing thousands of profiles, they were able to target many people and try to manipulate them into voting for Trump. By tampering with posts people saw online, they were able to form a lot of opinions through “subliminal messages” and that helped Donald Trump to win the elections. This type of algorithm is only one type amongst many others. Another way algorithms also shape the public sphere is through hyping information that might not be relevant to us, but that is liked and that gained widespread recognition in a short amount of time. For example, let us talk about the Ferguson protests. After the murder of an innocent black man, a huge wave took over twitter and all the local twitter users knew about the shooting which helped start a conversation in order to change things and protest. Yet, Facebooks algorithm is different that twitters, and the event was barely mentioned on there. The fact that twitter helped hyping the news and lead to protests is a great thing, yet the fact that it reached mostly locals is where it fails. On Facebook, since the ice bucket challenge was trending and many celebrities were posting about that, most of the attention went to that, and no conversation on Facebook was started. Algorithms in general, even if unintentional, could shape what our society find more important, and could either silence the voices of certain minorities or make them heard. Even though there are many disadvantages in the shift of the public sphere, we still have some positive outcomes to that. Today, the youth can engage and participate more easily and freely to the public sphere and can have their voices heard. The #YouStink movement for example had a lot of engagement coming from the youth as well as a lot of other people in the community, the information and their opinions were shared and heard rather than the elite’s (Khalil, 2017). Just like the arab spring, this spreading of opinion from voices that are not usually heard, led to many protests and people started taking actions.
The shift of the public sphere has changed how people look at the world and interact with it. Even though there are many disadvantages to it, this can still change and we can use this new way of communicating our ideas to the better. Social media and this kind of public sphere is still a new phenomenon, therefore we still don’t know how to properly interact with it and how we can change it for the better. A combination of both this new kind of public sphere and the old kind of public sphere including physical action can truly help our society improve and form new opinions yet we just need to learn now we can do that effectively.
References:
Fuchs, C. (2014). Twitter and Democracy: A New Public Sphere? In Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Khalil, J. F. (2017). Lebanon’s waste crisis: An exercise of participation rights. New Media & Society,19(5), 701–712. doi:10.1177/1461444816686321
