If Habermas could Twitter

A presentation I put together a few months ago for Social Media Camp got a bit of interest recently on Twitter, so I thought I should do a blog post to give the slides some context!

The subject was ‘If Habermas could Twitter’. The presentation was an attempt to look at whether the internet could facilitate a more pefectly functioning public sphere. Put simply, a public sphere was a concept developed by the theorist Jurgen Habermas : it is a space that is entirely separate from the state, in which a separate discourse can develop that rejects the messages fed down to us ‘from above’.

Jurgen Habermas utlimately predicted the demise of the public sphere, as the media became tools of the state and were used to carry advertising, rather than a source of news. I wanted to look at whether the tools of online, in particular social media, can facilitate a more perfectly functioning public sphere than Habermas could ever have predicted.

In the presentation above, I’ve included examples that show the public sphere is still alive and well.

Picturegate for example – more info here – demostrates how the original message was rejected and the public began creating their own discourse, through self-constructed media (the majority of activity taking place on blogs). The message created by the people became the message that shaped the news  and it developed as a backlash against what the official channels were communicating. This is an example of the public sphere functioning well in a modern, connected socity.

There are clear obstacles though. For a public sphere to fully develop, it must be open and accessible by all. As open and democratic as social media is, there is the huge barrier to entry that is the physical computer, or any means by which you can get online. Without this, you are essentially shut off from the discourse, both as a consumer and even more so as a producer of content.

There is still the major issue that media, albeit social, is still subject to state interference and advertising, which ultimately shapes and distorts the message. We are all more subject to monitoring now than ever before. While we can construct our own messages through blogs, Twitter etc.. pretty much anyone can interpret these. I used the example of the ‘Cisco Fatty‘ incident to demonstrate this. The message was constructed and distributed through someone’s personally constructed medium, but this was broadcast for all to see and the subsequent ‘official’ interference was evident.

I am leaning to the idea that social media does facilitate a public sphere, but that this can never be without its flaws. It’s still not the case that everyone has a voice, but there is certainly a lot more noise now than there has ever been before.

About SimplyZesty

We are a Social Media Agency located in Dublin, Ireland who offer a range of Social Media Marketing Services (including Video Production. Contact us if you want help with your Social Media Strategy.