Does the Personalization of Publics Undermine Democratic Participation in the Public Sphere?
Social media has many impacts on people’s lives, it has its positives and negatives. People use social media to accomplish many things, for example they use it for socializing, shopping, communication, finding and sharing information, and most importantly to form their opinion. Therefore, lately social media have played a big role in forming the public opinion and affecting it on so many levels.
Social media platforms have a huge impact on shaping the public opinion of the masses, it can modify the opinion of the public in several different ways according to the objective. Lately it’s been used more often during the elections period for the candidates to gain more publicity and audience, they use media exposure to have more control over the public opinion, so they can receive more votes.
Personalization of publics is recently found due to the rise of social media, in a matter of few seconds you find yourself in a group discussing with hundreds of people and planning, which made it easier for the social movements to be activated, and I think the most powerful example would be the Arab spring and media’s role in it.
Social movements are caused by opportunity structures such as economic, institutional, and social contexts of a country conditioned by its access to social media. Social movements are not created by a single variable but rather by a set of variables that create an interaction effect. Moreover, they have been implemented in many different forms and on different levels in order to transform societies.
The most fascinating ability of this new tool is that social media enables ordinary citizens to connect and organize themselves with little to no costs, and the world to bear witness. Social Media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the various online blogs have arguably given a voice to individuals that otherwise would not be heard.
What is a public sphere? It is an area (physical in pre-digital era) where individuals can come together to freely discuss and find solutions for societal problems, and through that discussion, influence political action (Fuchs, 2013, p. 181).
Lindgren and Lundström (2011, 1015) argue that Twitter and the Internet have “a particularly strong potential” to create a space for what Ulrich Beck terms sub politics: politics that are not “governmental, parliamentary, and party politics”, but take place in “all the other fields of society” (Beck 1997, 52).
There are some differences between social media platforms, as for example Facebook is where we find news that are selected for us rather than us selecting what we are interested in, unfortunately we don’t have the control over our news feed. Whereas on twitter, we tend to choose what we want to be seen in our feed, and to express our opinion more “freely”, maybe.
Adriana Stan is the public relations director of W magazine and a writer on media, culture and technology. She believes that algorithms we’ve built to make our lives easier have ended up programming the way we behave. As many people are pro-algorithms, many people are not.
In the pre-digital era, social movements were organized through people gathering in a certain place and discussing what they wanted out of a movement, those kinds of meeting were not very successful because of the limited number of people reached. On the other hand, in our digital/news era, it became much easier for people to communicate across regions, within hours a huge movement can be created, and the goals are set. Participants don’t even have to meet to organize, it all happens through a group chat on a social media platform, and through shares and posts on the platform they can reach thousands if not millions of people within a short period of time. In this kind of suggestions or movements, the government might directly react on it, and the participants can be alerted before actually being in danger. Moreover, nowadays, such movements can be supported worldwide, and the public opinion then won’t be regional, but it would reach internationally with a press of a button.
The power of media in the personalization of publics have changed the balance of power. Fake news, a new way used by many politicians and people in power was a major change in their publicity, nowadays, fake news is being used to gain more power and votes. Just like what happened through the elections of the United States during 2016, Trumps was using the word “fake news” whenever he did not want to be asked about a certain subject, which ended up giving a bad image of journalists and news sources. President Trump used fake news through his campaigning and continued using them even after the elections. It gave him power and publicity, which is basically what he was aiming for as was elected.
Lastly, even though social media has several negative effects on us and human being and on the society in general, we can’t deny its role in the help of communication between people, if it wasn’t for social media and people being heard we wouldn’t have reached this level of awareness concerning several aspects such as feminism and black lives matter. I believe that social media and us being part of it have become a need for people to survive in the tech-world we live in.
References
Fuchs, C. (2013). Social media: A critical introduction (pp. 180–209). Los Angeles: Sage.
Stan, A. (2018). Are algorithms hacking our thoughts? https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/20/are-algorithms-hacking-our-thoughts/
Lopes, A. (2014). The Impact of Social Media on Social Movements: The New Opportunity and Mobilizing Structure. Creighton University
