Social Media, Democracy, and the Popular Public Sphere

Social media are increasingly accused of degrading democracy, notably by polarizing political discussion and opinion-formation. In political theory, debates often revolve around the conformity of digital communication (or, rather, the lack thereof) with deliberative models of democracy influenced by the depiction of the liberal, bourgeois public sphere of 18th century Western Europe made by Jürgen Habermas in the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Social media indeed seem to be promoting a certain type of public speech that departs from this regulative ideal based on rational discussion and consensus-building; what we see resembles more a rowdy bar than a salon. This paper proposes we take a step back and ask which public sphere, if not the bourgeois, liberal public sphere, has been empowered by the advent online political discussions, and what are the implications for democratic theory. The first part of the paper argues that deliberative theorists often conflate the analytical value of the concept of “public sphere” and a normative vision of democracy. Through a critical reappraisal of Habermas’s early works and his German critics (notably Negt and Kluge), we find instead that the public sphere should not be described as a normative model of democracy or a standard for technological artefacts, but rather as analytical tool to describe a site between the state and society where public opinion is made. Thus, stripped of its normative content, the public sphere in the singular refers to the locus of a struggle between different publics spheres that compete for hegemony. On such footing, I return to the question of the impact of social media on democracy with a fresh perspective, one which allows us to see their generative role. I suggest that if social media have further weakened rational-critical discourse so important to the liberal, bourgeois public sphere depicted by Habermas, they might however have empowered the “plebeian” public sphere he mentions in passing in his work. However, speaking of a “plebeian” public sphere does little to help us understand the crucial role capital plays in the constitution of its contemporary iteration. A more fruitful way of thinking about the role of social media in contemporary democracy, I argue, is to see them as shaping and empowering a popular public sphere. Using Stuart Hall’s work on popular culture and media, this paper argues social media should be seen as a site of the “struggle for and against a culture of the powerful”, the “arena of consent and resistance.” One that is – like the tabloids studied by Hall – irremediably tainted by capitalism, yet which remains a meaningful site of political contestation. This paper thus sheds a different light on what empirical literature on the digital public sphere has labeled “polarization” (or, in more recent years, “affective polarization”) by interrogating the manifestations and implications of this polarization and suggesting that at least part of this polarization might be beneficial to democracy, if channeled appropriately.