Social Media, Democracy, and the Popular Public Sphere

Political theorists have granted increasing attention to the impact of social media on the public sphere. However, scholarly debates remain clouded by an ambiguity over the concept of the public sphere itself, which is today often conflated with deliberative democracy. As a result, discussions of the public sphere in a digital age overwhelmingly revolve—either explicitly or implicitly—around deliberative ideals. This article reappraises these debates by recovering a rich body of scholarship sketching an alternative conceptualization of the public sphere as the site of a struggle between dominant and oppositional publics, and by defending its relevance to understanding social media’s role in democracy. Recovering under-appreciated insights in the thought of Jürgen Habermas and of some of his critics, I argue that social media have benefited the counterpublics that make up an oppositional public sphere, called alternatively “plebeian” or “proletarian” in past scholarship. I defend instead the use of the term “popular public sphere” and argue that it has found in new communication technologies fertile ground. Not only do social media create a durable forum for counterpublics—one closer to the “strong” public sphere of institutions than historical precedents—but their affective affordances also favor popular modes of expression. In line with Habermas’s methodology of immanent critique, the article finally assesses social media logics and practices from the perspective of the popular public’s sphere own ideals, traced back to a radical-democratic horizon. From this vantage point, both social media’s emancipatory promises and shortcomings appear in a new light.