How to be critical in a digital media world?

The argument in the previous chapter was that public sphere disruptions are not part of an abstract knowledge that is reserved to media and communication experts but are experienced by members of the audience in everyday media use. The dystopia of the public sphere is a lived experience of those individuals and publics who populate the public sphere. The question I will address in the following is what media users do with this type of media knowledge. This means that I will need to approach the social field of public sphere criticism as a field of political struggle. The task in this chapter will be to identify the positioning of actors and their motivations to become involved in political struggles about media. Such struggles can be about: media content and representations, media policies and regulation, and access to and participation in media.

By raising this question of the social and political field of public sphere criticism, I depart from the narrow confines of media research to explore the full potential of public sphere research as a theoretical foundation of digital society and its rapid transformation. Within communication studies, we traditionally perceive of audiences as receptacles of media content. In social media research, for instance, online audiences are often seen as manifestations of public sphere dystopia, blind followers of the populists, echo chambers, bubbles and originators of hate (Pariser, 2011; Helles et al, 2015). Such a notion of audiences is incongruent with the notion of the public, which is not distinguished by reception but by critical reflection (Splichal, 2012). Whereas disrupted audiences are often quoted as evidence for dystopia, the public is a driver of utopia. A public can also engage in subversive practices or undermine values; yet, in so doing, it is norm-guided and recouples to a utopian vision of society and democracy. A public is constituted by reacting to the troubles to which it is exposed. It is not disruptive, but corrective, otherwise it ceases to be a public.

In the positioning of audiences and publics, we again find the interlinkage between dystopian and utopian elements as a driving force of public sphere transformations.