Social Media and the Public Sphere

A new structural transformation

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) Habermas traced how a bourgeois public of coffee houses, salons and journals emerged and was later absorbed by commercial mass media. Sixty years later (A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, 2022) he argued that platforms are bringing about a further transformation: they turn every user into an author but take no editorial responsibility for what circulates, so that the public splinters into self-referential, sealed-off spheres in which arguments no longer have to prove themselves against all others. Maintaining a media structure that makes an inclusive public possible, he concluded, is not a matter of political preference but a constitutional requirement.

Held by

• Jürgen Habermas1929–2026

Infocracy

Han argues that the digital public is no longer a space of discourse at all. In the “information regime” (Infocracy, 2021) power works not through repression but through data, visibility and the constant stimulation of attention; information, unlike argument, is short-lived and comes in fragments, leaving no time for the slow listening that discourse requires. Earlier (In the Swarm, 2013) he described the digital crowd as a swarm of isolated individuals that can produce waves of outrage but no shared “we” capable of political action.

Held by

• Byung-Chul Hanb. 1959

The attention market of the unique

Reckwitz (The Society of Singularities, 2017) places social media within a broader shift of late modernity: social esteem goes less and less to the standard and general and more and more to what appears unique – singular people, places, experiences and things. Digital technology, he argues, is a powerful engine of this singularisation, in which everyone competes for visibility and attention by presenting a curated, distinctive self. The result is not only fragmentation but a new social divide between those who succeed in these attention markets, often the highly educated new middle class, and those whose ways of life count as ordinary and lose esteem.

Held by

• Andreas Reckwitzb. 1970

There never was one public

Systems theorists doubt the very premise of a single public in which everyone deliberates. Luhmann held that “whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media”, which construct reality by selecting what is new, conflictual and quantifiable – not through rational debate. Armin Nassehi (Muster, 2019) builds on this: digitalisation does not invade modern society from outside but answers its long-standing habit of making itself visible through data and patterns. The fragmentation lamented today, on this view, reflects a society that was always differentiated into many perspectives, and nostalgia for a unified public obscures how few voices the old one admitted – an objection that feminist critics such as Nancy Fraser had already raised against Habermas’s account in 1990.

Held by

• Niklas Luhmann1927–1998
• Nancy Fraserb. 1947

Check the evidence

Empirical researchers warn against assuming effects that have not been shown. Axel Bruns (Are Filter Bubbles Real?, 2019) finds little evidence that algorithms trap most users in sealed-off information worlds; many people encounter a wider range of sources online than offline, and polarisation often rests on how they interpret what they see. In large experiments that researchers carried out with Meta during the US election of 2020, changing users’ feeds – to chronological order, for example, or with less content from like-minded sources – altered what they saw but not, over three months, their political attitudes (Guess et al. in Science and Nyhan et al. in Nature, 2023). The researchers stressed that this does not settle long-term effects; the dispute between Jonathan Haidt and critics such as Candice Odgers over social media and young people’s mental health turns on similar questions of evidence.