New Forms of Transnational Public Sphere in Social Media?

Public sphere theory has only recently started to digest the idea of a public sphere that contains multiple publics. The next challenge in line is the axiom that a fragmented or segmented public sphere – a public sphere that contains multiple public spaces – cannot perform its core functions of empowering citizens, promoting equality, producing public opinion, monitoring power-holders, and upholding popular sovereignty. This axiom rests on two fundaments. The first is the normative principle that a public sphere should be an open, unified space of political communication and encounter, which is forthrightly accessible by all citizens. That is, a fragmented or segmented communicative space is not a public sphere. The second fundament involves the assumption that a public sphere composed of multiple public spaces is inefficient; fragments and segments obstruct public communication, hinder the making of a common public opinion, and thus, weaken citizens’ power vis à vis power holders. We argue that a public sphere ought to comprise multiple public spaces in order for alternative political visions to flourish and mature before they encounter rival ideas. We use the European public sphere as the least likely case of a well-functioning segmented and fragmented public sphere. Deploying a network approach on communication and page-membership data collected from Facebook pages, we identify how a wide variety of civil society organizations, political parties, individual citizens and other actors are directly or through what we call “connectors” linked to the European Union’s political institutions. Initially, Facebook pages of some transnational institutions were identified by using search words and relevance criteria, followed by chain-snowballing of all other institutions that “liked” the selected pages, until it was no longer possible to find new pages that satisfied the relevance criteria. We ended up with a data set containing 459 Facebook pages with roughly 4.6 million Facebook entries posted by more than 220 thousand unique users for the period 2007-2015. 10 percent of the institutional actors function as “connectors” between networks through active memberships in multiple pages, whereas 37 percent of the posts are “connecting posts” between networks. Although European Union institutions’ pages were not included in the selected 459 pages, they proved to have the highest number of multiple memberships and connecting posts. Thus, the data material shows a high degree of communication intensity around the network of European Union institutions.