Deliberative Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere

• In Event: Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Digital Public Sphere

Abstract

Political communication and opinion formation have always been central topics in democratic theory. Today all eyes are on the new digital landscape and the ways that it is affecting these central elements of democracy. The diagnosis in both the popular press and scholarly research is that the digital revolution has been anything but good for democracy. Assessing the threat of the present information revolution is especially relevant for theories of deliberative democracy that place communication and deliberation at the center of the democratic system. In this essay I focus on Jurgen Habermas’ version of deliberative democracy and the assessment of the digitalization of the public sphere that follows from that democratic theory. This assessment identifies fragmentation and privatization as the most serious threats to a properly functioning public sphere. While I agree that fragmentation and privatization are threats to the democratic function of public sphere, I question whether digitalization is the cause of these threats and suggest that we should be focusing on political actors who intentionally pursue strategies that fragment and polarize public debate. Thus, the culprit here is not so much technology and acquisitive platforms as authoritarian political elite intent on dulling the power of the public sphere to hold political actors to account.

Author

• Simone Chambers, University of California, Irvine