The Zombification of the Public Forum
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17161/star.v38i.23075Keywords:
public forum, public sphere, public square, social media, internet, digital technology, disembodiment, digital sociologyAbstract
The all-encompassing nature of digital technology has killed society’s public forum and resurrected it into a zombie. Tracing the public forum from its historical roots to the age of social media, this analysis highlights how the advent of digital technology has fundamentally altered the nature of the public forum. Social theorists including Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Ellul, and Sherry Turkle are invoked to show how the nature of the new digital public forum is from centuries past, exerting its efficient yet dysfunctional influence over human communication and connection. With technological innovations like the internet and social media that foster discourse, the digital public forum is as loud and active as ever. But this resurrection is not organic. Because of the nature of digital technology and how human interaction is mediated through it, this new public forum is zombie-like. Crucially, the public forum in the digital realm exists in a state of constant contradictions. It features and fractures democratic deliberation, connection, and identity. While powerful, ever-expanding, and a lively setting for political discussion and social interaction, the public forum is nonetheless a shell of itself, having lost the crucial human element of organic connection, much like a zombie brought to life in its original body but without the human spirit that defines it. It will take a concerted effort among the public to reclaim it.
Downloads
References
American Psychological Association. 2023. Health Advisory on Social Media Use in Adolescents. https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advisory- adolescent-social-media-use.pdf
Andrejevic, Mark. 2013. “Public service media utilities: rethinking search engines and social networking as public goods.” Media International Australia Incorporating Culture & Policy. (146) 121–132.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulacrum. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Bawden, David, and Lyn Robinson. 2000. “A Distant Mirror?; the Internet and the Printing Press.” Aslib Journal of Information Management 52(2): 51-57.
Benson, Rodney. 2009. "Shaping the Public Sphere: Habermas and Beyond." The American Sociologist 40(3):175–197.
Bernays, Edward L., and Mark Crispin Miller. 2004. Propaganda. New York: Ig Publishing.
Bollen, Johan, Marijn Ten Thij, Fritz Breithaupt, Alexander T J Barron, Lauren A Rutter, Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces, and Marten Scheffer. 2021. “Historical Language Records Reveal a Surge of Cognitive Distortions in Recent Decades.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 118(30).
Breese, Elizabeth Butler. 2011. "Mapping the Variety of Public Spheres." Communication Theory 21(2):130–149.
Buongiorno, Federica. 2019. “Embodiment, Disembodiment and Re-Embodiment in the Construction of the Digital Self.” Humana. Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies 12(36): 310-330.
Burgess, Matt. 2023. “The Bizarre Reality of Getting Online in North Korea” Wired https://www.wired.com/story/internet-reality-north-korea/
Carr, Nicholas G. 2010. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. First Edition. New York: W.W. Norton
Collins, Brian, Jose Marichal, and Richard Neve. 2020. “The social media commons: Public sphere, agonism, and algorithmic obligation.” Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 17(4): 409–425.
Cooley, Charles Horton. [1902] 1964. Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Schocken Books.
Cramer, Benjamin. W. 2020. “From Liability to Accountability: The Ethics of Citing Section 230 to Avoid the Obligations of Running a Social Media Platform.” Journal of Information Policy (10): 123–150.
Dewar, James A. 1998. “The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead.” RAND Corporation Santa Monica, CA.
Eisenegger, Mark, and Mike S. Schäfer. 2023. "Editorial: Reconceptualizing Public Sphere(s) in the Digital Age? On the Role and Future of Public Sphere Theory." Communication Theory 33(2–3):61–69.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 1979. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ellul, Jacques. 1964. The Technological Society. New York, NY: Vintage.
Ellul, Jacques. 1990. The Technological Bluff. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Erikson, Erik H. 1950. Childhood and Society. New York: Norton.
Firth, Joseph, John Torous, Brendon Stubbs, Josh A. Firth, Genevieve Z. Steiner, Lee Smith, and Mario Alvarez‐Jimenez. 2019. “The “Online Brain”: How the Internet May Be Changing Our Cognition.” World Psychiatry 18(2): 119–29.
Fraser, Nancy. 1990. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25 (26): 56–80.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1960. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum.
Giannelos, Kalli. 2023. Recommendations for a Healthy Digital Public Sphere. Journal of Media Ethics, 38(2): 80–92.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy . MIT Press.
Hanks, J. Craig and Emily Kay Hanks. 2015. “From Technological Bluff: Jacques Ellul and our Technological Condition.” Human Affairs. (25):460-470.
Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books
Hoskins, Guy T. 2014. “Meet the Habermasses: Charting the Emergence of a Social Media-Enabled Public Sphere in New Democracies.” International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society 9(4):25–39.
Huang, Ching. 2017. "Time Spent on Social Network Sites and Psychological Well-Being: A Meta-Analysis." Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 20(6):346-354.
Jurgenson, Nathan. 2012. “When Atoms Meet Bits: Social Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution.” Future Internet, 4(1):83–91.
Kaiser, Jonas, and Adrian Rauchfleisch. 2019. "Integrating Concepts of Counterpublics into Generalised Public Sphere Frameworks: Contemporary Transformations in Radical Forms." Javnost - The Public 26(3):241–257.
Kavada, Anastasia, and Thomas Poell. 2021. "From Counterpublics to Contentious Publicness: Tracing the Temporal, Spatial, and Material Articulations of Popular Protest Through Social Media." Communication Theory 31(2):190–208.
Keles, Betul, Niall McCrae, and Annmarie Grealish. 2019. "A Systematic Review: The Influence of Social Media on Depression, Anxiety and Psychological Distress in Adolescents." International Journal of Adolescence and Youth 25(1):79-93.
Kühn, Simon, and Jürgen Gallinat. 2015. “Brains Online: Structural and Functional Correlates of Habitual Internet Use.” Addiction Biology 20(2):415-422.
Lührmann, Anna, and Staffan I. Lindberg. 2019. “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New About It?” Democratization 26(7):1095–1113.
Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. London: Routledge.
Murphy, John W. 2022. “Community-based Work in the Context of Digital Interaction and COVID.” Humanity and Society 46(4):652-664.
Mun, Seung-Hwan. 2013. “Printing Press Without Copyright: A Historical Analysis of Printing and Publishing in Song, China.” Chinese Journal of Communication 6(1): 1–23.
Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. 1990. "Selections from ‘The Proletariat Public Sphere.’" Social Text 8(3): 24–32.
Norris, Pippa. 2000. A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Papacharissi, Zizi. 2012. "Without You, I’m Nothing: Performances of the Self on Twitter." International Journal of Communication 6(2012): 1989-2006
Peters, Bernhard. 1997. “On Public Deliberation and Public Culture: Reflections on the Public Sphere.” Arbeitspapiere Bremen: Universität Bremen, FB 08
Petrosyan, Ani. 2023. “Worldwide Digital Population 2023” Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population- worldwide/#:~:text=As%20of%20July%202023%2C%20there,percent%20of%20 the%20global%20population.
Primack, Brian A., Ariel Shensa, Jaime E. Sidani, Erin O. Whaite, Liu Yi Lin, Daniel Rosen, Jason B. Colditz, Ana Radovic, and Elizabeth Miller. 2017. “Social Media Use and Perceived Social Isolation Among Young Adults in the U.S.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 53(1): 1–8.
Richtel, Matt. 2023. “The Surgeon General’s New Mission: Adolescent Mental Health.” The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/21/health/surgeon-general-adolescents-mental-health.html.
Roos, Dave. 2023. “History of the Printing Press”. https://www.history.com/news/printing-press-renaissance.
Seeliger, Martin, and Sebastian Sevignani. 2022. "A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere? An Introduction." Theory, Culture & Society 39(4):3–16.
Smith, Justin E. H. 2022. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Thompson, Stuart. 2022. “Musk Lifted Bans for Thousands on Twitter. Here’s What They’re Tweeting.” The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/musk-twitter-bans.html.
Turkle, Sherry. 1984. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Turkle, Sherry. 1999. "Cyberspace and Identity." Contemporary Sociology 28(6):643–648.
Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.
Twenge, Jean M., Thomas E. Joiner, Megan L. Rogers, and Gabrielle N. Martin. 2018. "Increases in Depressive Symptoms, Suicide-Related Outcomes, and Suicide Rates Among U.S. Adolescents After 2010 and Links to Increased New Media Screen Time." Clinical Psychological Science 6(1):3-17.
Twenge, Jean M., Jonathan Haidt, Andrew B. Blake, Cooper McAllister, and Hannah Lemon. 2021. "Worldwide Increases in Adolescent Loneliness." Journal of Adolescence 93:257-269.
United States Surgeon General’s Advisory. 2023. Social Media and Youth Mental Health. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-health-social-media-advisory.pdf
Vilhauer, Monica. 2013. “Gadamer and the Game of Understanding: Dialogue- Play and Opening to the Other.” In The Philosophy of Play pp 89–100. United Kingdom: Routledge.
Vogel, Emily, Risa Gelles-Watnick, and Navid Massarat. 2022. “Teens, Social Media, and Technology 2022.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/
Volkmer, Ingrid. 2019. "The Transnationalization of Public Spheres and Global Policy." Pp. 241–256 in The Oxford Handbook of Global Policy and Transnational Administration, edited by D. Stone and K. Moloney. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Winner, Langdon. 1995. “The Enduring Dilemmas of Autonomous Technique.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 15(2): 67-72.
Winner, Langdon. 1977. Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
World Health Organization. 2022. “COVID-19 pandemic triggers 25% increase in prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide” News Release. https://www.who.int/news/item/02-03-2022-covid-19-pandemic-triggers-25-increase-in-prevalence-of-anxiety-and-depression-worldwide
Zaner, Richard. 1964. The Problem of Embodiment. The Hague: Nijoff.
