Social Media, The New Public Sphere?
The Public sphere is the foundation of communication in a democratic society. It is through the public sphere that facts and opinions circulate, knowledge is built and a basis for collective action is made. Habermas (1989) defines the public sphere as a place everyone has access to, in which the public opinion is formed, where people conference in an unrestricted manner about the general interest of the population and debate over the rules and the government. However, some critiques believe that the public sphere is a bourgeoise and male-dominated concept as it does not take into account lower classes, women and minorities. It brings us back to the anti-feminist times when it was thought that women should be confined to the private sphere. In the digital age, social media might be on the way to becoming the new public sphere. This notion causes a lot of debate concerning who creates the news, the circulation of fake news and the idea of what do people actually use social media for.
The problem that democratic institutions are facing along with media institutions is that social media has now changed the way information is created and circulated as well as who creates the information. This made people switch from mainstream media to using social media as this is where they feel like their voices can truly be heard. It also made political parties need to change the ways they reach out and communicate with voters and citizens. Because social media has created what Henry Jenkins calls “spreadable media”. He said, “Consumers play an active role in “spreading” content” (Jenkins, Li, Krauskopf and Green, 2009). However, the problem with social media is that it does not have rules, anybody can post anything that may or may not be true. When this starts spreading, this is where we have a fake news crisis, and this can get people to do crazy things, like this shooting that happened in a pizzeria in DC because the 28 year old shooter was investigating a conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton, that claims that she is running a secret child sex ring in a pizzeria (Colbert, 2016). Thankfully nobody got hurt this time, but this should not be allowed to happen again. Yet, this problem is not improving, the latest algorithm designed by Facebook that prioritizes friends and family’s posts over the posts of pages, this helps in the spread of fake news. What is posted by news outlets and is actually fact checked is now being deprioritized. As fake news gets more likes and comments because people are attracted to the dramatic and fantastical, these get even more attention as there is actually a priority given to posts with high numbers of likes, reactions, and comments (Notopoulos, 2018). Guillaume Chaslot, a French Ph.D. in Artificial intelligence, worked on YouTube’s algorithm and here is what he has to say about it: “The recommendation algorithm is not optimizing for what is truthful or balanced, or healthy for democracy” (Lewis, 2018).
Since mainstream media is actually fact checked and attempts to be as accurate as possible and free of the dramatic and the fantastical, it is starting to be challenged by social media. Social media operates following the logic of “if media does not spread it’s dead” (Jenkins, Li, Krauskopf and Green, 2009). Indeed to spread their content mainstream media outlets are starting to have to publish their content with attention-grabbing titles on social media to get people to read their articles. People are not opening their phones to check mainstream media but to check out social media and so mainstream media has had to adapt over the years to remain in business. However, this certainly does not mean that social media is better than mainstream media. As previously mentioned since the power dynamics of who owns media has now shifted and anyone can create media not everything is accurate, yet this is not the worst part. The social media algorithms actually track the type of content that a user consumes and identifies with. Using this information, the medium pushes the same type of content towards the user making sure that nothing that contradicts or comes against the type of content the viewer consumes ever reaches him or her. In fact, “the very nature of how Facebook presents information to someone is biased based on their self- selection” (Gainous & Wagner, 2014). Some people think this is actually really good for each person’s, feed and account are personalized to their own liking. But in reality, this is what we call a “filter bubble”. The name is appropriate as the user gets stuck inside this bubble of thought in denial of any opposing viewpoints. This is detrimental as the most important thing in a diplomatic debate is to be able to compare opposing views to your own and be able to form your personal opinion that ideally stands in the middle. Rather, this makes users feel that everyone thinks just like they do because of the lack of any opposition.
Social media is also creating not one but many public spheres as people with rather uncommon viewpoints find each other and identify with another, “thus, individual and collective identities are simultaneously presented and promoted” (Papacharissi, 2011). The issue with that is that politics is made to govern everyone in general not to fill the needs and solve the problems of certain groups in particular. In addition, if the public is divided into even smaller groups than what political parties used to be, then there is no unity to the people. Unity is what helps a people reach a participatory democracy and an egalitarian society.
Looking at it objectively, social media looks like it is the ideal platform for sharing opinions and opening discussions. The way information is easily spread can be used as a tool to educate the population on matters of state and reach a society where the people actually understand the true complexities of politics. It could be a platform where people express their opinions diplomatically and in a way that the government can reach and read and adapt to the needs of its population. Sadly, with the way people are using social media, this seems unlikely to happen. A platform becomes what the users make of it, no matter what the creators intended. As Dr. Cal Newport (2016) mentioned in his Ted talk, social media is actually at its core a source of entertainment and so people are uninclined to talk about politics on them. Twitter was originally thought of as a microblog to share opinions and viewpoints on; however, in 2010 only 3% of the trending topics on Twitter were about politics, 28% about entertainment and 40% about hashtags. Even an analysis of the most used hashtags in 2010 showed that music and dating were the most popular topics while politics was marginalized (Fuchs, 2017).
With democracy, something called the public sphere was created somewhere everyone has access to and where everybody discusses ideas related to government and policies. In this day and age, there is a question whether social media has now become the new public sphere, well if so we might be facing many problems. Looking at the way social media is designed we can realize that anybody has the right to post anything amounting to the creation of fake news which is spread thanks to social media’s algorithms. These same algorithms keep a person trapped inside their own bubble of thought with nothing contradicting them, and by doing so are impeding the existence of a healthy political debate. On the other hand, an analysis of what people talk about on social shows that people are mostly using it for entertainment rather than politics. All of this combined shows how much social media is unfit to be the new public sphere.
References
Colbert, S. (2016, December 08). Pizzagate Is An Alt-Right Fever Dream. Retrieved March 12, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfXWXNItF_Y
Fuchs, C. (2017). Social media: a critical introduction. Chapter 8: Twitter and Democracy: A New Public Sphere? London: Sage Publications.
Gainous, J., & Wagner, K. M. (2014). Tweeting to power: the social media revolution in American politics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jenkins, H., Li, X., Krauskopf, A. D., & Green, J. (2009). If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Two): Sticky and Spreadable -- Two Paradigms. Retrieved March 12, 2018, from http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p_1.html
Lewis, P. (2018, February 02). 'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth. Retrieved March 12, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtubes-algorithm-distorts-truth
Newport, C. (2016, September 19). Quit social media. TEDxTysons. Retrieved March 12, 2018, from https://youtu.be/3E7hkPZ-HTk
Notopoulos, K. (2018, February). How I Cracked Facebook's New Algorithm And Tortured My Friends. Retrieved March 12, 2018, from https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/how-i-cracked-facebooks-new-algorithm-and-tortured-my?utm_term=.xfVRavbe5g#.ve9WRNo708
Papacharissi, Z. (2011). A networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites. Chapter 12: Identity Performance and Sociability on Social Network Sites New York: Routledge.
