CHACALES Y ÁRABES [36]

The topic of the internet and the public sphere now has a permanent place on research agendas, noted Dahlgren (2005).

This study has not been an attempt to evaluate the internet or social media as manifestations of a Habermasian public sphere. It is much more about the private realms of the individual minds whose various interactions contribute to one of a different kind. Nonetheless, any review of literature in this area benefits from positioning itself in relation to these ideas, which provide justification and further context. Habermas’s ideas about deliberative democracy remain an immensely influential

16 | P a g e benchmark in the field of political communications, an implicit point of reference, and ‘a source of inspiration’ (Dobson 2014). Rasmussen describes how Habermas distinguishes between three forms of power in the public sphere, political power which needs to be legitimised by agreement and which supports decision-making, power such as economic power, arising from functional systems, and media power arising from technology and infrastructure controlled by powerful individuals who set public agendas and inform public communications. All three types of power, according to Habermas, must obey the ‘communicative logic’ of the public sphere, all participants must

contribute facts and arguments which get exposed to critical examination, and, in theory, despite inequalities the most reasonable and convincing arguments will prevail (Rasmussen, T. 2014).

Habermas supplies a critique of current democratic practice, with its declining participation and disaffection with the establishment, while still optimistic that ‘real participatory democracy’ is possible given the ‘right’ conditions (Henneberg, Scammell, & O’Shaughnessy 2009). This ‘rightness’

is a conception of the public sphere which by implication privileges aspects of the status quo and can marginalise more complex everyday political expression, discussed below.

The emergence of the internet, and in particular, social media, as settings for political debate have inevitably led to many assessments of their status as the ‘right conditions’ to be potential public spheres of this type. This persists despite the notion of a rational deliberative public sphere per se having been broadly criticised as coming from a particular, hegemonic perspective with ‘a number of significant exclusions’ (Fraser 1987). From current popular perspectives it might indeed be

vulnerable to accusations of ‘tone policing’² or the ‘tyranny of decency’³, amongst other things. As Dahlgren notes, the rationalist bias excludes communicative modes including the affective, poetic,

2 See (Jasper 2017)

3 See (Fogg 2012)

17 | P a g e humorous and ironic which are enduring aspects of public political discourse. Worse, it downplays power relations built into such communicative situations. He quotes Kohn: ‘reasonableness is itself a social construction which usually benefits those already in power’ (Dahlgren, 2005, Kohn, 2000). It has indeed been interesting to note from this field research what types of people found the rational, deliberative Habermasian ideal most appealing, and also to hear very personal subjective accounts of the factors which challenged people’s ability or willingness to comply with a rational ‘ideal’.

It is arguable that in privileging such an abstract ideal, insufficient attention is paid to the ways people themselves account for the way they think, act and feel in practice and why. To ignore these realities is to risk having expectations of people that they are unlikely to deliver, or, as has been proved latterly, being surprised by the turn of events. Given newer understandings from fields ranging from neuroscience to social justice discourse, such a standard might indeed be seen

increasingly to make hegemonic, subjective and unfair demands. This suggests a need for better all-round understanding of the wider and deeper factors behind people’s behaviour in practice and allowing their voices to be respectfully heard.

Papacharissi notes that the internet has the potential to revive the public sphere, but aspects of the technology have both positive and negative effects on this. Information storage and retrieval features support political discussion, but access inequality and online literacy affect

representativeness. Also, while enabling discussion between people geographically distant, it can also fragment political discourse. She suggests that internet-based technologies may adapt

themselves to the political status quo, rather than create a new environment. She concludes that the internet has indeed created a new public space for political discussion, but whether it amounts to a public sphere is not up to the technology itself (Papacharissi 2002). Arguably, this perspective has been challenged by the course of political events in the decade-and-a-half since, where surprising

18 | P a g e new pockets of space have presented many challenges to the status quo and access has become very widespread.

Dean dismisses the idea of the internet per se offering a public sphere in the Habermasian sense, and described it as ‘a zero institution’ – ‘an empty signifier without deterministic meaning but signifying the presence of meaning’ and having no governmental or constitutional type role (2003).

It ‘provides an all-encompassing space in which social antagonism is simultaneously expressed and obliterated’ and ‘...it is a space of conflicting networks and networks of conflict so deep and

fundamental that even to speak of consensus and convergence seems an act of naïveté at best.’ The internet is subject, Dean maintains, to the conditions of contemporary techno culture she

characterises as ‘communicative capitalism’ - the online merging of democracy and capitalism into one neoliberal form that subverts the democratic inclinations of people by privileging emotional expression over logical discourse. Something along these lines can clearly be observed, although whether the result of design-led, deterministic ‘privileging‘ or not is arguable. It is not always clear if the issues are with the internet per se or of the inculcations, inclinations, predispositions and indeed general mental wellbeing of its users – or indeed the exploitation of these. It might also be

interpreted as people, despite what they themselves might believe, acting in line with some very visceral drivers. Further, other commentators challenge the notion of emotion in public discourse as necessarily being a negative thing. This is discussed further on in the chapter. Lastly, it is difficult to support the idea of social antagonism becoming obliterated, although it has taken on a very complex form.

Dean expressed her own optimism about the internet and chose to interpret the actions of what are understood to be relatively well educated middle-class web-fed movements such as Occupy (in the US) as being evidence of the beginnings of a ‘revolt of the knowledge classes’ (Milkman, Luce, &

19 | P a g e Lewis, 2013, Dean, 2014). However, more recently, reflecting on the conditions giving rise to the success of Donald Trump, she has commented:

‘The shift from message to contribution subjects speech or language to an economic logic. Communicative interactions take on crowd dynamics. This is because the channels through which we communicate reward number: the more hits and shares the better. Words are counted in word clouds, visualized in terms of numbers of time repeated. What they might have meant, signified, implied doesn’t matter’ (Dean 2017).

Not untrue, but given insights from network theory, for example around scale-free networks, this probably oversimplifies the picture. Twitter, for example can be considered as a scale-free network fulfilling the small world (short paths between nodes) property (Aparicio et al. 2015). In practice, a simple utterance of one individual and what it means and signifies can have enormous impact given the right circumstances.

Dean notes that Habermas more recently modified his own views on the internet’s role in political participation. Indeed, in an interview published in mid-2013, he observed:

‘After the inventions of writing and printing, digital communication represents the third great innovation on the media plane. With their introduction, these three media forms have enabled an ever-growing number of people to access an ever-growing mass of information. These are made to be increasingly lasting, more easily. With the last step represented by the internet we are confronted with a sort of “activation” in which readers themselves become authors. Yet, this in itself does not automatically result in progress on the level of the public sphere. [...] The classical public sphere stemmed from the fact that the attention of an anonymous public was “concentrated” on a few politically important questions that had to be regulated. This is what the web does not know how to produce. On the contrary, the web actually distracts and dispels.’(Schwering 2014).

The implication is that he views the distraction and dispelling as a failure, rather than part of a normal process of murmuration and negotiation between agents in a complex network. It might be observed that the internet does often concentrate around a few politically important questions, but then not often in a regulated or directional manner pleasing to a type of academic viewer. As for the

20 | P a g e tendency to ‘distract and dispel’, this simple phrase hints at a multiplicity of inputs, both negative and positive, both political and otherwise, which make the environment exhilarating, sometimes dangerous and an unprecedented communal learning-ground. It also raises questions around why the medium is such an effective distraction, to which psychology and neurosciences can provide at least some answers, to be discussed further on.

Fuchs discusses the concept of the public sphere for understanding social media and argues against an idealistic interpretation of Habermas and in favour of a cultural-materialist understanding grounded in political economy. He goes further to propose a theoretical model of public service and commons-based media as a potential antidote to ‘unmanageable turbidity’ (Fuchs 2014). Yet the difficulty with turbidity, and an urge to manage chaos per se might come from a particular political perspective. Maybe the mess is the message.

The internet is, of course, just one more part of the real world, but it has its own characteristic affordances. Mahlouly notes that social scientists often distinguish virtual environments from the normative public sphere and one of the reasons is because digital technologies provide everyone with the opportunity to contribute to public discourses. In other words, the factors likely to affect the rationality of social interactions, as well as the sustainability of public opinion in a digital world, might rest on the very fact of the high level of public accessibility. This is one of the more significant distinctions between Habermas's bourgeois public sphere and the online spaces of today, she notes.

It might therefore be exposing to bright light some of the inherent difficulties of democracy, revealing often hidden realities (Mahlouly 2013).

21 | P a g e This situation might also, from some perspectives, be seen to bolster the case for a ‘competitive elitist’ world view. Henneberg et al discuss how contemporary competitive elitists do not necessarily believe that deliberation produces ‘better’ democracy by building consensus about the common good (2009). They quote Shapiro who argues, ‘there is no obvious reason to think that deliberation will bring people together’(2002). This observation is not contradicted a great deal by much online political chatter. Further, if deliberative consensus is achievable, it may lead to the suppression of difference. Even if there are more people who are interested and informed, the majority may remain ignorant and easily manipulated.⁴ This relates tangentially to the vision of agonistic pluralism put forward by Mouffe that ‘… theory needs to acknowledge the ineradicability of antagonism and the impossibility of achieving a fully inclusive rational consensus.’ Yet Mouffe also argues that the idea of agonistic pluralism offers a solution to what she sees as the principal current challenge to

democratic politics, developing democratic forms of identification to mobilise people’s passions in support of democratic design (Mouffe 2000). It is interesting to speculate whether this is what people think they are doing. While this might suggest a role for the internet, she has nonetheless expressed personal scepticism about the extent to which online spaces support democracy in practice, owing to tendencies to exclude, or form echo-chambers (Carpentier & Cammaerts 2006).

The frustration is that the reality is failing to match the model.

In a description that might be applied to each of the major social media platforms, Facebook has been characterised as a ‘privately-regulated public sphere’, a social editor which combines content aggregation and distribution, detailed understanding of users, and moreover the ability to control the structures, processes and terms under which users engage, share and develop social

interactions. This, it is asserted, allows Facebook to control ‘the entire process of political

4 Democratic elitism therefore focuses on the role of leadership (which it suggests should be safeguarded) as well as the political competitive process (ideally fair, open and designed to produce the best leaders), which has a bearing on one of the contextual case studies.

22 | P a g e persuasion’, meaning content, space to deliberate about politics, and the network of people to whom they speak (Helberger et al. 2015). However, platforms would not have take-up if they did not respond to the perceived needs of users. As indicated by a survey undertaken by the Adam Smith Institute many academics have left-leaning sympathies (Carl, 2017, Morgan, 2017). With this might go an inclination towards seeing individuals as vulnerable to bigger machinations of power, to side with a ‘structure’ over ‘agency’ perspective. However, there is a risk of underplaying individual agency and the ability of those actors to be insightful of the conditions within which they act.

Understanding this is surely helped by engaging with participants. One must indeed be mindful of the many ‘nudge’ factors that encourage people to interact the way they do, and the interplay between these and their own private motivations. Whether in the case of Facebook this constitutes

‘the entire process of political persuasion’ is open to debate.

The presentation of just some arguments around a conceptualised online public sphere is primarily to acknowledge an important debt to Habermas, as well as to theories about macroeconomic and political drivers. At the same time, it is implicit that more attention might be paid to the multiplicity of individual human interactions that underpin these arguments and trying to understand what lies behind them.