The Public Sphere: A Private Space
According to Habermas, a German sociologist and philosopher, the public sphere should be a place or platform where the public can formulate their opinion, everyone has equal access, where people can assemble, and debates of how to be governed may be discussed. (FUCHS)
But in reality, the public sphere isn’t really public and equally accessible for everyone. “…public sphere is a question of the command of resources (…) by its members”. (222) So basically, whoever is advantaged with more money and power would control and influence the public sphere the most, therefore, making it unequal. Just like the picture above, the ideal and real public sphere do not match up. It is controlled mainly by wealthy white males. With so much power and control of the public sphere, the “public sphere of media would thereby have become undemocratic and a privatized realm…” (223)
Social media is suppose to be a platform in which people have a chance to post whatever they want and supposedly have an equal amount of participation in the public sphere. But as we have seen in social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, they have these suggested pages in which they promote certain topics or ideologies. This in turn disregards other ideologies and pushes them into the margins and creates a disproportionate realm in which those with more money and power have the ability to greatly influence the “public sphere”.
Huge private companies with the money to afford advertisements and post them on social media sites gain more traction than the smaller businesses that are not able to effectively use the same resources as the bigger businesses are. This idea of the public sphere becoming more and more of a private space (mainly for businesses that thrive in the capitalistic society) is most apparent with Twitter’s business model. They use “promoted tweets, promoted pages, promoted accounts”. (242)
So how do we as a people regain or even take this public sphere as our own? We have to become active users and be able to filter out the noise of the bigger businesses.
