Fragmented and Polarized? The Public Sphere in the Postfactual Age

Abstract

Against the backdrop of debates on post-truth politics, this panel aims to analyze the polarization and fragmentation of contemporary public spheres in the digital age. Because of the rapid proliferation of mis- and disinformation via social and other digital media, the burgeoning literature on post-truth politics has tended to speak of post-truth politics as a transformation of political culture characterized by a declining of the status of the truth in political discourse. This refers in large part to the resurgence of right-wing populism and the intimate connection between populism and a post-truth style of communication. But it also underlines the contested nature of claims to the truth, as post-truth populists emphasize the distinction between popular truths and the elite lies propagated by experts and mainstream media. One presumed hallmark of post-truth politics is the decline of the public sphere as such and of the communicative processes taking place within it. In post-truth politics – or in the digital age as such – the public sphere fades away as a shared communicative space where matters of public concern can be discussed and where collective opinion and will formation can take place, regardless of differences between theoretical models of the public sphere. The existence of such a shared communicative space has certainly always been questioned by critics of the deliberative model, but in recent years, the existence – or even the very possibility – of such a shared communicative space has been questioned further by reference to the increasing relevance of social and digital media, both as channels through which citizens in the digital age obtain their information on political and other matters, but also where they discuss political and other matters with one another. In such debates, social and other digitial media tend to be construed as an infrastructure that facilitates the emergence of echo chambers of like-minded people, thereby undermining the foundations of a public sphere understood as a shared communicative space. This can be presumed to have detrimental consequences for the functioning of the democratic public sphere and, by extension, for democracy more broadly. Against this backdrop, the main aim of this panel is to analyze the state of play as regards the polarization and fragmentation of the contemporary public sphere, specifically in relation to the challenge of mis- and disinformation in the digital age.

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