Social media’s fragmentation and boundary-dissolution combine to undermine the national public sphere’s integrating power

Evidence

The platforms do not offer their emancipated users any substitute for the professional selection and discursive examination of contents based on generally accepted cognitive standards. This is why there is currently so much talk of the erosion of the gatekeeper model of the mass media. This model in no way implies the disenfranchisement of media users; it merely describes a form of communication that can enable citizens to acquire the necessary knowledge and information so that each of them can form his or her own opinion about problems in need of political regulation. A politically appropriate exercise of the author role, which is not the same as the consumer role, tends to heighten one’s awareness of deficiencies in one’s own level of knowledge. The author role also has to be learned; and as long as authorial competence is lacking in the political exchange in social media, the quality of the uninhibited discourses that are shielded from dissonant opinions and criticism will continue to suffer. This is what first exposes political opinion and will formation in the political community to the danger of fragmentation in conjunction with a simultaneously unbounded public sphere. The boundless communication networks that spontaneously take shape around certain topics or individuals can spread centrifugally while simultaneously condensing into communication circuits that dogmatically seal themselves off from each other. Then the trends towards fragmentation and the dissolution of boundaries reinforce each other to create a dynamic that counteracts the integrating power of the communication context of the nationally centred public spheres established by the press, radio and television. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 35

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Social media fracturing produces fragmented collective time held together by affective endorsement; Social media platforms simulate a public sphere they now merely exploit. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 580; Social media constitutes a contextual monoculture that destroys meaning-bearing spatial context — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 548 (+4 more)

Related

• Social media may be changing citizens’ perception of the public sphere itself (similarity 0.85)
• Social media grew in a civic void and then accelerated that void (similarity 0.82)
• Social media platforms simulate a public sphere they now merely exploit. (similarity 0.80)
• Social media originally appealed through collective joy, now threatened by commercial management (similarity 0.80)
• Digital proliferation collapsed the primary-secondary definer boundary (similarity 0.80)
• Traditional media are institutionalized and gatekept while social media are accessible and reciprocal (similarity 0.80)
• Mass daily news created the modern public sphere and public opinion (similarity 0.80)
• Social media spaces create an anonymous intimacy that is neither public nor private (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Social media fracturing produces fragmented collective time held together by affective endorsement #expands (0.80)
• Communication overload and shallow participation mask genuine community uprooting #complicates (0.80) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 569
• Social media constitutes a contextual monoculture that destroys meaning-bearing spatial context #expands (0.75) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 548
• Social media platforms simulate a public sphere they now merely exploit. #complicates (0.72) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 580
• Personalized internet feeds destroyed shared common knowledge and split the public into oppositional realities #expands (0.72)