I was intrigued to read recent reports of the coming changes to our Facebook feeds. Facebook will change its algorithm to prioritize posts from families and friends and decrease advertising, news, and other branded content. Facebook has experienced some fairly serious criticism over “clickbait”, the proliferation of ads, and misleading or deceptive information. I see many articles and concerns across the net, struggling with ideas of “true” – we see ‘catfish’ and social posturing but we also see political lies and manipulations – people desire something ‘real’. I think these concerns speak to our increasing uncomfortability with how information is vetted and communicated in digital spaces. I feel like the veil of on-line simulacra is wearing thin.
However, the big takeaway for me is a sudden awareness how much our digital spaces are mediated and curated. My engagement with Facebook is enabled and directed by an algorithm that was constructed specifically to direct my gaze, to record my interests and mine me for consumer data, and fill my feed accordingly. And it is not merely Facebook. In the text Hashtag Publics Bruhns and Burgess (2015) point out that in twitter when users click on a tweet they assume they are getting all of the associated tweets for this hashtag, but are instead receiving “a constructed, partial, and curated view” (p. 25). If our relationship with technology are as, McLuhan says, technological extensions of the self, they are limbs over which we have very little control and understanding.
Can an actual Public Sphere be constituted in the context of “communicative capitalism” (Dean, 2003, p. 104). Dean cogently argues that “technologies, the concentrations of corporate power, the demands of financial markets, the seductions of the society of the spectacle that rule in and as the name of the public have created conditions anathema to democratic governance”(2003, p. 104). How can we have free speech and contribute to a public debate in the context of a mediated format and content manipulation? Does the architecture of the net allow us to achieve the “equality, transparency, inclusivity, [and] rationality” that Habermas requires as norms for his concept of the Pubic Sphere?
References
Dean, J. (2003). Why the Net is not a Public Sphere. Constellations, 10(1), 95-112
Rambukkana, N. (2015). Hashtag publics: The power and politics of discursive networks: New York: Peter Lang