Social media spaces create an anonymous intimacy that is neither public nor private

Evidence

Social media create freely accessible public spaces that invite all users to make interventions which are not checked by anyone – and which, as it happens, have also long since enticed politicians to exert direct personalized influence on the voting public. … But in these freely accessible media spaces, all users who are, as it were, released from the need to satisfy the entry requirements of the editorial public sphere and, from their point of view, have been freed from ‘censorship’, can in principle address an anonymous public and solicit its approval. These spaces seem to acquire a peculiar anonymous intimacy: according to hitherto valid standards, they can be understood neither as public nor as private, but most readily as a sphere of communication that had previously been reserved for private correspondence but has now been inflated into a new and intimate kind of public sphere. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 45

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘anonymous intimacy’ concept — a third term beyond the public/private binary the mature public-sphere theory depends on — is Habermas’s sharpest new contribution here and destabilizes the whole framework.
• XREF: This third sphere echoes Zamyatin’s We’s collapsing of private/public in a totalizing state and parallels the ‘like/dislike’ plebiscitary sphere with contemporary platform politics; also connects to the 1962 classic’s own historical claim about the bourgeois public sphere’s genesis. — connects to: Social media does not transmit identity but requires its continuous self-production. — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 1463; Social media constitutes a contextual monoculture that destroys meaning-bearing spatial context — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 548; Trivial social media posts create emotional intimacy through ambient awareness — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 562 (+3 more)
• FICTION: The ‘peculiar anonymous intimacy’ of an inflated private correspondence space is fertile — a story about a relationship conducted entirely in a public-but-private space, online parasocial intimacy.
• BMF: The image of private correspondence inflated into an anonymous intimate public sphere obliquely evokes 2001’s HAL, whose private ‘feelings’ are on display to all — an intimate interiority rendered as a public, monitored space. The category collapse (was-private, now-scrutinized) is structurally the same.

Related

• Social media may be changing citizens’ perception of the public sphere itself (similarity 0.83)
• Digital media blur the private-public boundary even though its structural basis persists (similarity 0.80)
• Social media’s fragmentation and boundary-dissolution combine to undermine the national public sphere’s integrating power (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Social media does not transmit identity but requires its continuous self-production. #expands (0.78) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 1463
• Social media constitutes a contextual monoculture that destroys meaning-bearing spatial context #complicates (0.72) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 548