Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In this paper, we describe how social media platforms have become the new centers of civic participation, leading to political polarization that poses serious risks to our democratic communities. Given these circumstances, social media has created a new digital locus for the daily transmitting, diffusing, and contesting of ideas. Before the digital age, citizens met in public spaces to exchange news and opinions in a shared hub of daily civic activity. However, now these public spaces of daily interaction among citizens have now shifted to the comment sections of photo and video posts on social media platforms. We call this the new “digital public forum”, a new kind of virtual agora, a space for the constitution of a public forum. When examined closely, these platforms create the conditions and environment conducive to deliberative activity. But they also challenge analytically rigorous definitions of deliberation, and instead introduce us to new ways of thinking about deliberation online. We argue that, although social media sites help users unite through their status as “followers,” these “followers” do not comport by the same decorums they otherwise would in the non-digital public forum. Our argument is situated at the nexus between democratic theory and new media studies. If civic participation is relegated to the online sphere, divorced from everyday life, the notion of a citizen is transformed into a consumer. We no longer view each other as citizens. Consequently, democratic life is transformed into a dangerous game, a hallowing out of civic participation.