In Light of Contemporary Social Media, Can We Still Speak of a Digital Public Today?

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.211120.007How to use a DOI?

Keywords

digital public sphere; social media; Habermas’ public sphere; political communication

Abstract

Even though Habermas’ public sphere is already a highly debated subject in academia, the growth of social media in the previous decade appears to generate a new transformation and influence the conception of the public sphere. While we consider the advent of digital media as the second structural transformation of the classic public sphere, some scholars have also criticized it for eroding the idea of ‘public’ and idealistically engaging every individual into the debate. Since it is still a controversial question lately, in this context, we are not able to declare with certainty whether a digital public is ‘alive’ or not. Based on two case studies about democratic social media, this article states that social media supports and revives the public sphere to some extent, but that the structural transformation brought about by this new media is limited. This article aims to shed some light on this topic and thus improve the public understanding of the role of social media in modern civil society.

Copyright

© 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Shuran Zhao
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/11/29
TI  - In Light of Contemporary Social Media, Can We Still Speak of a Digital Public Today?
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 3rd International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 42
EP  - 47
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211120.007
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.211120.007
ID  - Zhao2021
ER  -