{"id":12129,"date":"2024-11-20T10:50:52","date_gmt":"2024-11-20T09:50:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arantzazulab.eus\/?p=12129"},"modified":"2024-11-20T10:50:52","modified_gmt":"2024-11-20T09:50:52","slug":"the-plebiscitary-democracy-of-social-media-reactions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arantzazulab.eus\/en\/the-plebiscitary-democracy-of-social-media-reactions\/","title":{"rendered":"The plebiscitary democracy of social media reactions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Prof Paolo Gerbaudo<\/strong> – Complutense University, Madrid<\/em>.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The plebiscitary democracy of social media reactions<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

What is wrong with it and what we can learn from it<\/strong>.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

During the pioneering phase of the internet pioneering thinkers and practitioners envisioned a future where digital technology would have ushered in a better democracy. Concerned about decreasing trust in public institutions and growing citizens\u2019 apathy towards a representative system, they hoped that the interactive features of digital media would have allowed to create a sort of digital version of the direct democracy of Athens or of the town-hall assemblies of New England. The general framework was that of a deliberative democracy made of in-depth and open-ended discussions among citizens, seen as a radical alternative to a representative and mediatised democracy, reduced to the banalisation of TV talk-shows.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we have now reached the half of the 2020s, several decades since those utopian ideas were first formulated, we are faced with a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, digital democracy is not anymore just a utopian vapourware, concocted by few techno-utopian thinkers in their small intellectual thinkers but with no wider applicability. Hundreds of millions of people every day participate, perhaps unknowingly in a sort of mass connected democracy. On the other hand, this connected mass democracy is far more shallow, disappointing, and in many of its manifestations far more reactionary, than the idealist advocates of digital democracy had originally envisioned. What do I have in mind when painting this paradoxical picture of \u201creally existing digital democracy\u201d.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The digital democracy that is already here and rolled out on a mass scale is the online democracy of social media reactions, in which every click counts as a vote of sorts. Social media reactions are arguably the most important and consequential innovation of social media.\u00a0 They are simplified and instantaneous responses to a given content. From Facebook Likes and emotional reactions (Haha, Angry, Wow, Love, etc.), to Reddit down- and upvotes and TikTok Gifts, these forms of digital feedback constantly track individual feelings, which are then aggregated and quantified into collective affects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Reactions may appear trivial, but they play an important role in digital politics. They not only measure the popularity of given contents but also contribute to their algorithmic visibility and therefore, ultimately, to their influence. The more reactions a piece of content gets online, the more social media algorithms make it visible. The \u201cclickers\u201d, \u201clikers\u201d and \u201csharers\u201d may be derided as clicktivists, but they have de facto acquired a role as micro-opinion leaders and amplifiers of political messages. And in turn now political leaders constantly try to maximise the number of reactions they get, and they often celebrate these metrics as a proxy of their popularity.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this time of social media reactions, it is democracy itself that seems to have become \u201creactive\u201d, with reactions acting as a key means of establishing legitimacy of given contents and views. Social media discussions have become an ongoing micro-referendum on the most disparate issues, often in response to specific incidents that have attracted public attention (for example, the declarations of politicians or news of police killings, acts of war \u2013 crises of any kind), with factions positioning themselves in favour or against a given event, issue or statement. In this context, reactions acquire the semblance of an ongoing public vote on various issues and on whether or not they deserve support and visibility.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This \u201creally existing digital democracy\u201d paints a very different reality from the reality imagined by early theorists of digital democracy. It carries a plebiscitary logic, in which mass participation is accompanied by shallowness of interaction. Only a minority of activists engage in high-intensity online political behaviour, with the mass of users engaging only in simplified forms of political behaviour such as reacting to content. Rather than promoting democracy, social media may be creating \u201cochlocracy\u201d, or rule of the mob.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For the activists, organisers and developers who want to develop a progressive vision of digital democracy, this democracy of reactions provides many cautionary tales \u2013 and some ideas on how to connect deliberative processes which are often confined to small groups of people with mass publics. On the one hand, reactive democracy alerts to the way in which digital democracy is open to the risk of manipulation and retro-alimentation. Alike what has happened historically in referendums before the digital era, digital reactive democracy creates the illusion that people are actively deciding while often they are just reacting to questions that have already been formulated and pushed from the top onto them.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, taking a more positive perspective, deliberative processes could benefit from integrating more plebiscitary components, in their consultations, realising that any democratic process, or at least the ones that work well, tend to have a combination of different democratic logics. Thereby often, deliberative processes are used in the early stages, when it understands of problems and the formulation of possible options; and more elective processes when it comes instead to picking which option among the ones that have been identified is preferred at the mass scale. Some developments in digital democracy, such as deliberative polling already try to integrate these two logics, thereby trying to make the most of both deliberative and elective moment.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All in all, the manipulative reality of the plebiscitary democracy of social media democracy should both spur us to develop alternative forms of democracy, and to realise that for these forms of democracy to be successful and popular they need to take some lessons from the success of corporate platforms and from the shallow democracy they have ushered in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can download the text of Paolo Gerbaudo\u2019s keynote presentation here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prof Paolo Gerbaudo – Complutense University, Madrid. The plebiscitary democracy of social media reactions What is wrong with it and what we can learn from it. During the pioneering phase of the internet pioneering thinkers and practitioners envisioned a future where digital technology would have ushered in a better democracy. Concerned about decreasing trust in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":12110,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arantzazulab.eus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arantzazulab.eus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arantzazulab.eus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arantzazulab.eus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arantzazulab.eus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arantzazulab.eus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arantzazulab.eus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arantzazulab.eus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arantzazulab.eus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arantzazulab.eus\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}