Even functioning democracy requires publics that stay put in place.

Evidence

Interestingly, John Dewey already saw the related, specifically temporal problem of organizing a stable political public sphere as a core presupposition of a functioning democracy. “How can a public be organized, we may ask, when literally it does not stay in place? Without abiding attachments, associations are too shifting and shaken to permit a public readily to locate and identify itself,” he observed already in 1927. The problem he sketched out is no less pressing in the age of digital media and global flows. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 712

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the structuralist worry about publics and communication technologies found in the Communication as Culture reading notes. — connects to: Democratic politics is structurally incapable of matching economic and technological speed. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 676; Neutral liberal states channel citizens toward one homogeneous capitalist form of life. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 44; Declining voter turnout may express rational withdrawal from insignificant politics. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 718 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Democracy must be deliberately cultivated rather than assumed natural. #qualifies (0.72) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 16