Postmodern Publicity: The Internet and the Public Sphere
The name Jürgen Habermas is familiar to anyone who took a college-level course on the French Revolution, or who read a little academic literature on media studies. Habermas is a German thinker, whose work includes a broad body of material on philosophy with which I shall not pretend to be familiar, and who wrote the seminal work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962/1989). This text, cited endlessly by academics regardless of whether or not they have actually read it, describes the development of a modern public sphere in the 17th and 18th centuries, followed by its disintegration into a fragmented arena of specialisms, induced by the emergence of mass media. Habermas’s argument is complex and extensive, but one of its pivotal points is the question of access to the public sphere:
“The public sphere of civil society stood or fell with the principle of universal access. A public sphere from which specific groups would be eo ipso excluded was less than merely incomplete: it was not a public sphere at all.” (85)
Universal access does not, in Habermas’s account, immediately produce a public sphere, but it is an essential characteristic of one. This leads to a question: whether the Internet, the most accessible arena of discourse in human history, is an ideal public sphere, a place in which all people could share all ideas, producing a transcendently accurate public opinion? The question of accessibility was certainly on Tim Berners-Lee’s mind, as the first webpage in history declared its intention “to give universal access to a large universe of documents”, whilst during the 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, he tweeted, “This is for everyone”. In abstraction, the concept of a disembodied location in which anyone can hear what anyone else has to say, and freely publish their reply, would appear to be the perfect type of arena for effective political discussion. In reality, political polarisation is, as we know, probably more intense than it has been for decades, whilst you need only glance at the replies under a contentious tweet to see that online discourse is not exactly characterised by what Habermas would call “people’s public use of their reason”.
Where, then, is the disconnect? Was Habermas incorrect to emphasise the significance of accessibility? Or are there things about the Internet and its various subworlds that undermine its capacity to function as a public sphere for our civil society? It is by no means clear that Habermas’s analysis applies to our postmodern times: after all, he was writing about a western European society that was still learning how dangerous the printing press could be, while we live in a world where 90% of existing data was created in the last two years. Still, I would argue that Habermas’s approach can offer some important insights, insights which indicate that to brazenly declare the Internet as the new public sphere, a proclamation which many journalists are fond of making, is to misunderstand the nature of public discussion.
The conception of a public sphere is, of course, founded on a distinction between the private and the public. This was not always a definitive separation. As Habermas shows us, the line between private and public developed as a consequence of mercantilist economic activity, which encouraged the distinction between society and state, private individual and public regulation, creating the need for the formulation of critical judgment about the exercise of administrative power. He writes:
The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. (27)
Habermas does not state it outright, but I think it is fair to say that the distinction between these two spheres gave rise to two distinct codes of conduct: one for the private, one for the public. That which belonged in the one, ought not to be seen in the other.
The difficulty, however, is that technological advancements have made that delineation of spheres rather elusive. Roland Barthes made this observation, with regard to photography, the advent of which
“…corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly…” (Camera Lucida, 98).
This explosion detonates in two directions. Public photographs are privately read, as famous images are interpreted by each person according to their own impressions: “I don’t like that actor, he looks full of himself” or “It looks like they’re always killing each other in that place”. Conversely, private experience is mediated into a public arena by visual material, as your solitary moment is documented and shared, either with close family members by the means of a print, passed from hand to hand under tungsten light, or with the online users of the world, logging onto their smartphones for the pleasure of seeing the curious shapes that the barista conjured across the surface of your coffee. Barthes wrote his words in 1980, yet “the explosion of the private into the public” characterises our time more than any other, and not just because of photographs. Twitter, depending on how you use it, combines the intimate whisperings of a private journal with the firebrand declarations of a public protest, while drawing upon every shade of personal and impersonal statement in between. Even Facebook, while in some senses a “private” medium due to those ever-confounding privacy settings, nonetheless presents private moments to the (admittedly smaller) public of your family, friends, and ill-remembered acquaintances.
Social media, in this sense, represents the collapse of the private and public spheres into one another, the elision of indoor and outdoor activity into a single, unmitigated melee. A great many things are left unclear, in particular, the question of conduct. We know pretty well how to act in private, and we know, more or less, how to act in public, and the two are usually different. When the two spaces exist on the same spot, however, the standards of behaviour and judgment become far more opaque. The level of self-awareness and concentration required to maintain the public/private distinction is profound. In theory, when I tweet about what I had on my sandwich, I should know that this is different to when I tweet my views on foreign policy; yet when I commit both actions on the same device, from the same real-world physical position, perhaps even within a few minutes of each other, the line vanishes.
Of course, the public use of social media is something that we have, in a sense, projected onto it. Most of the platforms that are now considered to be menacing landmarks on the public square began as ways for individuals to share their experiences. Twitter was a way for users to share their status, Facebook was originally just for Mark Zuckerberg’s college friends, while YouTube was conceived as a way to share videos among friends and family. The idea that these systems would become an integral component of public conversation was nowhere in the thinking of their founders, which partially accounts for why these companies have proven to be entirely ill-equipped for their pivotal role in the cultural maelstrom that is the formation of public opinion. The duality of social media is reflected by that word status. It can refer to a situation in a specific moment: what’s the status on that project? This is a private usage, an occurrence of the word with respect to one time and one set of circumstances. However, status can also mean reputation, the nature of a person’s or an organisation’s image before an audience. This is a public usage, and is far closer to the function of social media today. That it has evolved in this manner is a surprise, to the founders and everyone else, and it is by no means clear how to deal with this development.
What can be said, however, is that social media does not function as an effective public sphere, because inside its world, the necessary exclusion of private matters cannot, and was never intended to, occur. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the rest resemble, less Speakers’ Corner, and more the Roman amphitheatre, where maddened combatants can bring their personal emotions to bear in view of a transfixed crowd. Public things may be addressed there, but they do not offer an effective space for critical public discourse.
Still, despite appearances to the contrary, social media is not the Internet, and dethroning Twitter from its fabled role as the new public square does not help me to explain why the Internet is not the new domicile of the public sphere. To do that, I would like to address another aspect of how the Internet (or, at least, large sections of it) works: that is, clicks.
Clicks, or, to put it another way, attention, is the lifeblood of the Internet. Websites want you to click onto their pages so they receive ad revenue. Apps want you to open them and spend as much time in their world as possible, so that they receive ad revenue, so that you are tempted to pay for the premium version, or so that they can gather more of your data, itself a powerful commodity. Emails want you to read them. Creators want you to view their content. Amazon wants to sell you things. Wearable tech developers want to make their product a part of your life.
All of this is founded on attention, and usually attention of the uncritical type. This is, of course, entirely at odds with what Habermas considers the “principle of the public sphere”: “critical publicity” (140). So long as I, the owner of an Internet business or the developer of some killer code, have your attention, I don’t much care whether you like or dislike what I have to offer, because the most important thing is that you’re looking at it. The sale has, in a sense, already taken place. When this becomes the driving motivation of a medium, its interest in critical discourse becomes a footnote to the clickbait headlines, decontextualised photographs, unbelievable offers, and incessant notifications. Publicity itself has become the goal, and anything beyond that is merely a bit of engaging content. Marshall McLuhan once remarked that the impact of television as a medium is far more important than anything that will ever be on television. To draw this forward, then: the Internet is a public medium, the most public medium ever, and its primary function is to publicise everything. The impact of this is far greater, far more important, than anything that the medium ever happens to publicise.
Of course, Habermas covered this, in some ways, by arguing that the rise of mass media and the unstoppable expansion of the public sphere eroded its political function, a consequence of “the structural transformation of the relationship between the public sphere and the private realm in general.” This led, in his view, to the public sphere of the 18th century being replaced by “the pseudo-public or sham-private world of culture consumption” (140–160). From the perspective outlined above, one could make the argument that the Internet is nothing more than the apotheosis of mass media’s tyrannical subsumption of the discursive field, the final manifestation of what Dwight Macdonald called “homogenized culture” (11). Yet here we must return to that question of access, and the importance of participation. The mass media criticised by Habermas, Macdonald, and many others, was one-way: the dominant class spoke to its captive audience by the means of mass publication and circulation, and the responses of that audience were lost amidst the ephemera of history. On the Internet, however, the crowd gets to answer back. Government declarations are torn to shreds on Twitter. A disappointing movie trailer is lambasted in the comment section. Reputations are saved or destroyed according to popular reactions. If the Internet is a mass media, it is not one that is imposed upon the mass, but rather one that is made and wielded by them.
C. Wright Mills made the distinction between a public and a mass society. In a public, as many people offer opinions as can receive them, there exists outlets for discussing any opinions expressed in public, and there are means for acting upon the public opinion that emerges from such discussion. In a mass society, far fewer people express opinions than receive them, there is no or little means for communicating in response to publicly expressed ideas, limiting the possibilities for effective action. The Internet, however, outfoxes this scheme. Online, everyone has an opinion, far more than anyone can possibly receive, and there are endless outlets for discussing anything that has ever happened. The sheer scale of this discursive terrain, however, makes it rather difficult to identify a unitary public opinion, or to take effective action in accordance with it. Furthermore, so much of the discussion that takes place is not critical or rational, but comprised by mutually exclusive attitudes being hurled at each other in the hadron collider of cyberspace. Unlike the activities of CERN scientists, of whom Berners-Lee was once one, however, this experiment has few useful results, because it has no hypothesis. The Internet cannot be a public sphere, because it crashes together publicity and privacy, and because it values blind attention over considered thought. It could be said that in producing the most public medium, humanity has eroded the usefulness of publicity itself. Perhaps we have reached a point where the only useful discussion is the private one, so that the display of rationality is no longer a public activity. It would be an historical irony, indeed, if the expansion of mass culture culminates in each individual retreating from the giant spectacle, into the specific world of their own privacy.
