Meet the Habermasses: Charting the Emergence of a Social Media-Enabled Public Sphere in New Democracies

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The International Journal of

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VOLUME 9

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Meet the HabermassesCharting the Emergence of a Social Media-Enabled Public Sphere in New DemocraciesGUY T. HOSKINS

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The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society is peer-reviewed, supported by rigorous processes of criterion- referenced article ranking and qualitative commentary, ensuring that only intellectual work of the greatest substance and highest significance is published.

Meet the Habermasses: Charting the Emergence of a Social Media-Enabled Public Sphere in New

Democracies Guy T. Hoskins, York University, Canada

Abstract: The role of the Internet in connecting social movements and state at the extreme poles of the democratic continuum has been the subject of great scrutiny. Orthodoxy suggests online platforms may engage apathetic voters in mature democracies like the US, and embolden the protest of activists living under autocracies such as Iran, but what of the political impact on citizens living in “emerging democracies”? Such a question has been largely neglected, yet this tier of polities, with a burgeoning and restive middle class, a rapid diffusion of ICTs and highly fluid public spheres represents fertile ground for innovations in democratic communication. Against this background, my paper has two principle goals. Firstly, through a review of social movement case studies in Brazil, Chile and India I seek to understand the connection between the often low levels of media plurality in immature democracies and the uptake of new media as a more effective/trusted channel to mobilize and then petition the state. Second, I hope to discern whether social movements in emerging democracies are making claims of their political elites using digital communication technologies in a development broadly analogous with the emergence of the “Habermasian” bourgeois public sphere in Europe, or if an entirely new model needs to be devised. The results of this paper will inform not only academic debate but also several important policy areas. With a fuller understanding of the way in which civil society can be mobilized using ICTs to demand democratic concessions from the state, international agencies could more effectively advance their goals of democracy promotion in the Global South. The lessons could also be transposed domestically, where civic and voter disengagement in mature democracies, as well as the goal of maintaining the cohesion of a similarly heterogeneous - and “wired” - civil society present formidable challenges.

Keywords: Technologies in Community, New Media, Social Movements, Emerging Democracies

Introduction

cholarly attention has certainly been lavished on the impact of online platforms in the developed Global North - especially in the electoral politics of the United States - but the focus of communications researchers afforded on nations of the Global South tends to be

forked between analyzing the role the Internet may play in resisting authoritarian regimes (Diamond and Plattner 2012) and the celebratory rhetoric that often accompanies the ICT for Development field (Russill 2008). The influence of the Internet on democratic life in the so-called ‘emerging democracies’ – countries that gained independence from colonialism or that dismissed dictatorships from the 1950s onwards - has been largely overlooked; an oversight that cannot be allowed to persist indefinitely.

This bracket of polities includes such economic and demographic heavyweights as India, Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia. Though hardly understudied in other contexts – indeed, scholars of the stature of Benedict Anderson warn against the “‘big country’ bias” that predominates in academia generally (2006, 210) – there is a confluence of factors present in these countries worthy of much greater attention, an interplay that creates especially fertile ground for innovations in democratic communication. Evolving representative institutions, a burgeoning and restive middle class and a rapid diffusion of digital communication technologies are all defining features of these societies and lie at the heart of the case that is developed here. That argument, in essence, is that within these societies a public sphere is being created within a particular economic class: one that exploits the communicative possibilities and fervent adoption of social networking sites (SNS), one that negates dependence on elitist traditional media and that is being used as an important forum for contestatory politics. Furthermore, while the

S

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conditions accounting for the emergence of this communicative arena bear some compelling parallels to those associated with the rise of the European bourgeois public sphere famously sketched by Jürgen Habermas (1991), and merit recognition here—hence the ‘Habermasses’ of this paper—it also exhibits some crucial differences in its communicative and associational practice, suggestive of a quite distinct public sphere model.

To make this case, this paper – which is primarily exploratory and theoretical in nature - will be structured as follows: an introduction to three episodes of contestatory politics that have unfolded recently in the societies of Brazil, India and Chile that appear to exhibit the common traits identified above; in more detail then, I scrutinize the constitutive features of a public sphere that are observable in all of these episodes, relating them to their antecedents in the Habermasian reckoning, while also charting those conceptual departures that make these phenomena much more than shallow replicas of the classic bourgeois model. I conclude by sketching three scenarios: ‘threat repression’; ‘polity absorption’ and ‘elite tokenism’ that demonstrate the range of potential state response to these episodes, as well as by directing attention toward some of the bigger unresolved questions that emerge from them. In advance of any of the above it behooves us to undertake a brief tour of the public sphere tradition, surveying how it has been reformulated to account for the disruptive impact of new media and to assess its continued relevance to our understanding of the 21st century communication ecology.

Reassessing the Public Sphere

According to Habermas’ landmark 1962 text - The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere - the public sphere mediates between the private sphere and the sphere of public authority; it is a discursive space where "through the vehicle of public opinion it puts the state in touch with the needs of society." (1991, 31) As a communicative arena grounded in rational, open debate, that operates between the margins of state, market and civil society, the public sphere is deemed by Habermas as an essential element of a substantive democracy and key to the legitimacy of government. The German intellectual’s historical contextualization placed the public sphere as developing first in 18th century Europe as a newly assertive bourgeois class seized upon the increasingly mass circulation of newspapers, as well as the reading clubs and coffeehouses in which they were consumed and debated, to form a culture of critical discourse around matters of public interest. The current of public opinion thus formed was in turn connected to the Liberal democratic institutions of government.

While the Habermasian depiction has received censure for both its strident emphasis on rationality (Schudson 1992; Sanders 1997) as well as its portrayal of a nominally inclusive arena that was in fact severely curtailed by exclusions based on gender and class (Fraser 1990; Eley 1991) the importance of the public sphere, at its broadest point of interpretation, is seemingly unquestioned. Nancy Fraser, one of the most vocal critics of Habermas’ bourgeois model, has argued indeed that “no attempt to understand or critique actually existing late-capitalist democracy can do without the concept of the ‘public sphere’, nor can any attempt to develop alternative models of democracy.” (Fraser 2007, 7) Accordingly, many substantive attempts have been made to recalibrate the public sphere tradition in order to account for some of the fundamental disruptions of later modernity, such as the fragmentation of traditional media (Keane 1995), the transfer of political power to sites of global governance (Fraser 2007) and especially the diffusion of the Internet and its associated technologies.

The initial emergence of the Internet was frequently heralded in utopian terms when assessing its democratic potential. As Benkler makes clear in his milestone work The Wealth of Networks, “’Everyone a pamphleteer’ has been an iconic claim about the Net since the early 1990s” (2006, 177). The possibility that this new multidirectional communication space offered to reinvigorate the public sphere, by creating a digital townhall or agora, fueled such hopeful rhetoric (Hague & Loader 1999). Writers such as Nicholas Negroponte (1996) focused keenly

HOSKINS: MEET THE HABERMASSES: CHARTING THE EMERGENCE OF A SOCIAL MEDIA

on the participatory promise of the Internet, as it could open up the public sphere to a potentially limitless number of protagonists. A few years later, however, and the accounts became more circumspect as scholars questioned the impact the Internet was actually having on democratic communication (Bimber 2003), especially a perceived tendency toward issue polarization (Sunstein 2002), whether the failure of digital public spheres was because the dominant Habermasian model was simply no longer congruent with the political culture of contemporary societies (Coleman & Blumler 2009) and from the field of cultural studies, whether the Habermasian model ought even to be transposed to the digital domain when its central tenets appeared so exclusionary (McKee 2005).

While explicitly cognizant of the perils of technological determinism, a second generation of ‘hopeful’ explorations of the Internet and its impact on the public sphere have emerged that emphasize the networked nature of the ‘new’ public sphere. The aforementioned Benkler (2006) presents the thesis that the Internet offers us a qualitatively different public sphere than the mass media model because it is based on a “distributive architecture” (212) that allows any actor to publicize their own opinion or react to those already in the public domain instead of relying only on the passive consumption of professionally-created messages. Beyond simply expounding an argument that more access equals a better public sphere, Benkler proposes four “design characteristics” (180) for a liberal public sphere that are best facilitated by online networks: universal intake; filtering for accreditation; filtering for relevance; independence of government control – criteria that ensure that while certainly ‘optimistic’ in tone, this conceptualization moves beyond the crude determinism of earlier claims of ‘digital democracy’. Benkler’s perspective is buttressed by theorists such as Castells – who argues in his later works that it is the connections between mass media and the ‘mass self-communication’ of Web 2.0 social networks that form the new global public sphere (2008) – and Clay Shirky who contends that the communicative affordances of social media consolidate the public sphere in democratic and authoritarian societies alike (2011). An important corollary to these networked conceptions of the public sphere comes in the form of studies emphasizing the fluid boundaries between public and private spheres and forms of civic communication founded primarily on the autonomy of the individual (Dahlgren 2009; Papacharissi 2010). It is the former clause in particular which is salient because, while compatible with recent explorations of the public sphere model that are more flexible in their approach to communication deemed properly ‘public’, it is antithetical to the rigid private/public dichotomy essential to Habermas’ formulation and thus constitutes a definitive rupture with that tradition.

For the purposes of this paper, whilst acknowledging the tremendous theoretical advances of both the ‘networked public sphere’ and the ‘self-actualizing citizen’ approaches mentioned here, they have all been developed in the social laboratories of the developed global North or by studying authoritarian schemas and as such none can be presupposed to precisely fit the political and cultural contexts of democratic environments in the global South. Cognizant then of the perils of uncritically transposing the dominant theoretical perspectives of the west onto their counterparts in other geopolitical regions, it is legitimate (though all the while striving for theoretical coherence) to use a ‘bricolage’ approach; applying those conceptual elements that are viable and abandoning those that are not. In that same pragmatic spirit, although the exigencies of rational deliberation that are central to the Habermasian model have largely lost their relevance within contemporary social realities, there is still much from this account of the public sphere that retains enormous value when considering recent iterations of the same phenomenon. In the case of the instances examined in this paper, it is the historical parallels between the rise of the bourgeoisie in eighteenth century Europe, charted by Habermas, and the efforts of a buoyant middle class in contemporary emerging democracies to assert itself vis-à-vis the state that is most instructive.

The analytic approach applied here – examining public sphere formation through moments of contestatory politics – also requires justification. A public sphere and popular protest cannot


simply be collapsed into the same analytic category. Benkler’s self-declared ‘purposefully narrow’ conception of the public sphere is useful here: “It is a term for signifying how, if at all, people in a given society speak to each other as constituents about what their condition is and what they ought or ought not to do as a political unit” (2006, 178). While a campaign to instigate social change may arise out of such communication, it is far from guaranteed. Working backwards from instances when such campaigns do emerge, however, it is reasonable to surmise that they are underpinned by the architecture of a public sphere that primes (discursively) the participants for action. While it is possible to argue that an episode of contestatory politics could attract like-minded adherents without any associated public discussions, this implies that these political views existed a priori in the minds of the participants without requiring the social construction of a public sphere. Examining public sphere formation through instances of popular protest is not then simply arbitrary, it offers one significant virtue: contestatory politics are necessarily highly visible and through their mobilizations they offer a window into the communicative mechanics of a particular social group.

Defining Social Media

Social media refer to a number of web-based platforms that, according to Boyd and Ellison (2007), “allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others”. As an example of the type of communicative action afforded by SNS, the pioneering structure of Facebook delivers automatic user-to-user recommendations within the ‘Newsfeeds’ that form the mainstay of the platform, while joining a group or becoming a fan of a particular cause creates forums for thematic discussions. “Thus, networks of common interests are created, and the Facebook platform greatly simplifies communicating within and to a network via e-mails, invitations, and reminders” according to Langlois et al (Langlois, Elmer, McKelvey & Devereaux 2009, 418). Where Facebook is supposed to be the online manifestation of offline relationships (however tenuous), Twitter’s open structure permits users to curate diverse information feeds drawn from the ranks of the ‘known unknowns’: influential bloggers, professional media outlets, public intellectuals, as well as personal contacts. The service also allows users to broadcast 140 character updates or ‘Tweets’, often featuring specially shortened hyperlinks, which can rapidly transcend the users own network when their ‘followers’ opt to ‘Retweet’ the content or when a searchable link or ‘hashtag’ is included.

Introducing the Habermasses

Brazil

The first example to examine is that of Brazil and an anti-corruption campaign unparalleled in both participation and effectiveness: Ficha Limpa. According to The Economist magazine in 2010, of 513 members of the Congress’ lower house, 147 of them were either under investigation or were facing charges in front of the supreme court (Economist “Cleaning Up”). Catalyzed by such egregious indices of political corruption, the Brazilian Movement Against Electoral Corruption (referred to hereafter by its Brazilian acronym MBCC) was founded in 2008, including a variety of civil society organizations seeking a legislative change that would bar election to the Brazilian congress to those with prior criminal convictions (MBCC 2013). This movement was seeking to take advantage of a citizen’s initiative enshrined in the country’s 1985 Constitution that demanded Congress consider any legislative proposal that could demonstrate the support of at least 1% of the country’s electorate. It should be noted that such a seemingly


modest goal, in the context of Brazil’s current population, amounts to 1.3 million signatories.1 Furthermore, attainment of that target is no guarantee of a legislative change given that Congress retains absolute discretion as to whether it considers acting on the particular demand. Arguably, the campaign compelled Congress to address this measure by not only collecting the required 1.3 million physical signatures by April 2010 (Breuer & Farooq 2012, 4) but by bolstering the legitimacy of its mandate with a further 2 million electronic signatories collected in conjunction with the international advocacy group Avaaz (Avaaz 2013); an achievement based on an unprecedented social media mobilization.

Social media in Brazil has witnessed a vertiginous rate of adoption with a total Facebook user population of over 65 million (Socialbakers 2013), second only to the United States and equivalent to nearly one third of the entire population. Orkut meanwhile, a Google-owned network largely unknown in North America, was only surpassed in unique visitors by Facebook two years ago (Geromel 2011) while Twitter boasts over 30 million accounts (Semiocast 2012). By establishing a presence on various SNS, the campaign managed to create an online community estimated at more than 3 million people (Breuer & Farooq 2011, 4). Harnessing this communicative architecture allowed the MBCC to tap into a large and very well connected community that could simultaneously debate the issues involved, make a contribution to the campaign and draw new participants into the fold. Indeed, the final result of this mobilization is that the ‘Ficha Limpa’ or ‘clean slate’ proposal was passed into law by Lula da Silva’s government in 2010 (Economist “A Healthier Menu”) and now constitutes a near impervious barrier to the numerous convicted criminals previously entrenched in the country’s Congress.

India

2012 was heralded by the Times of India “as the year social media came of age” in that country, prompted by numerous incidents where SNS were central to some of the nation’s major political stories (Anwer & Shrinivasan 2012). The most recent example is the use of social media as a channel to amplify the outrage generated by the now infamous December 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman in the nation’s capital, although it is to an earlier example of popular protest politics that we now turn.

As a piece of proposed legislation to establish an independent corruption ombudsman to monitor Indian politics at the highest level, the Jan Lokpal bill has existed in various iterations for around 40 years but has never been passed into law. Given the scale of some of the corruption scandals in Indian politics in recent years, such as the 2010 Commonwealth games in Delhi and between US$8-20bn squandered in improperly tendered 3G spectrum licences (Economist “Megahurts”), a push for the bill was given renewed impetus in 2010 and a broad coalition of civil society activists led by a fasting 75-year-old rural community organizer, Anna Hazare, launched India Against Corruption. The campaign quickly attracted the support of young urbanites who established the campaign on social networks, gathering an online community estimated at 1.5 million on several different platforms (Bong, Chung, Parkinson Peppard, Rabbach, Thiher 2012, 4). Manu Joseph, editor of Indian newsweekly, Open, depicted the scene thus: “Across the nation, the middle class responded to Mr. Hazare’s fast in unprecedented ways. Thousands marched on the streets bearing English-language placards, which was unusual. Among them were fashionable urbanites who had never walked for a common cause, especially in April heat. Mr. Hazare trended on Twitter. Film stars came out in support” (Joseph 2011). The combination of mass scale protest methods, both physical and online, inspired conflicting reactions from the government of Manmohan Singh, ranging from

1 Based on population of 199,321,413 (July 2012 estimate) (CIA 2012).


dismissal to repression to a partial openness to meeting the demands of the movement, culminating in the establishment of a Joint Drafting Committee of government and civil society representatives in April 2011 (NDTV 2011). Indeed, at the time of writing the Jan Lokpal Bill is still the subject of fevered revisions and debate within the Indian polity (Times of India 2013).

Internet penetration in India, while growing apace, languishes behind many other middle income countries at 11% (Internet World Stats “Internet Penetration in Asia”). Owing to the country’s population, however, it can still claim a formidable number of online social network users with, for example, 61 million Facebook accounts in 2013, placing it only behind the US and Brazil (Socialbakers 2013). Discussion and organization around political and social issues appears very much a mainstream activity amongst India’s online population as political stories commonly feature as Twitter’s top trends as well as the most frequent Facebook status updates. This scenario is born out by a recent Pew Research Centre report on social networking behaviours worldwide which revealed that India almost matched those societies of the Middle East as a country where SNS are used prominently for political activities (Pew Research Centre 2012).

Chile

The final example to examine here is that of the Chilean movement for education reform, a raucous and yet highly organized demand for an end to dictatorship-era education policy in Chile. In April 2011, the Federation of Chilean Students (CONFECH) organized a major rally in Santiago in order to pressure the Chilean government, in the build-up to an annual Presidential address, to implement major education reform that would massively increase public funding and equitable access to the system. School occupations, further marches and widespread public support met with government intransigence and a dynamic and obdurate movement was born (Guzman-Concha 2012). Dissatisfaction with the status quo stems from the fact that approximately 80% of the funding for Chilean universities is derived from student fees which at the most prestigious institutions can amount to US$1000 per month, while state-backed student loans are offered at a punitive interest rate of 5.8% (Economist “Progress and its Discontents”).

In many respects this appears to be the most traditional and least innovative of the three cases of popular protest politics highlighted in this paper. The university and public school systems have long been a hotbed of social agitation in Chile (Guzman-Concha 2012), the enduring presence of the Chilean Communist Party has played a prominent role in the mobilization (New York Times “Camila Vallejo”) while familiar elements such as charismatic leaders and multitudinous street protests have been a mainstay of this movement. Social media however has also played a key role in drawing in new support, organizing media-friendly events such as flashmobs and building a sense of collective identity online. As Barahona et al’s (2012) research demonstrates, Twitter has been widely used within the movement to disseminate information, debate the issues and mobilize supporters for offline protests.

Chile’s is a highly ‘wired’ society with Internet penetration at nearly 60% of the population (Internet World Stats “Internet Penetration in the Americas”), the fourth highest per-capita population of Twitter users in the world and 8 out of 10 under 30s on Facebook (Economist “Progress and its Discontents”), rendering any attempt at political mobilization without recourse to social media a highly perverse endeavour. The Facebook page of CONFECH has more than 34,000 ‘likes’, for example, while Camila Vallejo, the best-known of the student leaders, has more than 600,000 followers on Twitter.

While major concessions have been offered by the Chilean government (Valenzuela, Arriagada, Scherman 2012, 301), the demands of the student movement for a robustly funded and universally accessible higher education system have not yet been met and the continuing mobilizations have played a major role in the precipitate decline of President Piñera’s popularity (Cabalin, 2011).


Charting the Formation of New Public Spheres

While paying due heed to the particularities in each of these episodes, and wary of the danger of obfuscating them in the service of a ‘tidier’ analysis, it is now necessary to identify and examine those elements that are constitutive of public sphere formation that can be discerned in these cases; identifying parallels with the original Habermasian model where relevant, as well as the crucial points of divergence. Within those diverse accounts surveyed at the outset of this paper, the elements widely agreed upon as integral to a public sphere are: communication fora; matters of public concern; public access; a conduit to the state.

Communication Fora

A common thread that runs through all of the above accounts is the centrality of social media platforms to either mobilizing corporeal, offline protest or hosting their online equivalents. Although it is beyond the extremely limited remit of this paper to research this assertion more deeply, as argued earlier, it is reasonable to presume that those mobilizations were discursively primed by the communicative affordances of social media, especially Facebook, in the form of a social media-enabled public sphere. As Gerbaudo argues in his examination of the role of social media in recent protest movements:

Social media can be used to construct a sense of solidarity within a diverse constituency, sharing a common sense of indignation, anger, frustration and perception of victimhood in the face of a corrupt system. Social media become the pole of aggregation or concentration of these individual sentiments, turning them into political passions within a narrative of ‘popular reunion’ (2012, 161).

As argued here, online social networks present massive potential as a means to fulfill the requirement of ‘publicity’ demanded by a public sphere. The dissemination of information through an email list, for example, in order to coordinate an action or to publicize a cause would not in itself be constitutive of a public sphere – though it might help to circulate some of the content matter that flowed within one. According to James Bohman’s efforts to theorise a transnational public sphere, communication is properly ‘public’ when “it is directed at an indefinite audience with the expectation of a response” (2010, 60). This serves arguably as a neat encapsulation of the type of communicative activity that occurs on social media as the affordances are such that every action is made with the possibility of a response from an indefinite audience – whether from within one’s own network or beyond as individual nodes act as segues between them. The entire architecture of Facebook is indeed premised on the ease of sharing multimedia content already in the public realm, as well as highly personal information and opinions. As Zizi Papacharissi proposes in A Private Sphere, her exploration of democracy in the digital age, “SNSs potentially collapse front and backstage into a single space” by simultaneously permitting the broadcast of public information to personal networks and intimate views to multiple unknown audiences (2010, 142). This disintegration of boundaries between the private and public with social media use is significant as it is suggestive of a profound departure from the Habermasian model as well as signaling the opportunities that inhere for networked citizens to widely disseminate information both amongst and beyond personal connections. It would appear almost churlish to explore the communicative possibilities offered by SNSs without referring to Clay Shirky, and his appraisal of Facebook’s imbricating nature is also worthy of mention: “Facebook doesn’t have a single centre, as CNN.com does, nor a set of sharply drawn edges, as mailing lists do. Instead it has overlapping social horizons.” (2010, 201) The essential point to be made here by drawing from all these accounts is that the affordances of social media permit information to be relayed widely and discussed openly by members within its networks.


The enthusiastic adoption of social media by the middle classes in the societies examined in this paper can also be interpreted as a reaction to the various deficiencies of the commercial, traditional media, rendering it unfit for the task of facilitating a public sphere. In Brazil and Chile, the military dictatorships from which these societies have only relatively recently emerged have left an enduring imprint upon their media ecologies. The broadcasting behemoth of Globo in Brazil and the press duopoly of El Mercurio and Copesa in Chile all owe their current extraordinary dominance to the calculations of their former military patrons (Lugo-Ocando 2008). While the yoke of tyranny has since been lifted it was swiftly replaced by the tight embrace of neo-liberal privatization and re-regulation leading to a highly commercial, sensationalist and depoliticized media sphere (Ferreira 2006; Fox and Waisbord 2002). While India can boast a vibrant media scene deemed the freest in South Asia, theirs is still a media system facing increasing concentration of ownership, salacious content and the growing scandal of ‘paid news’ – the subject of a recent Indian Press Council report which revealed the extent of politicians and businesspeople paying journalists for favourable stories (Biswas 2012). Furthermore, the independent research organization Freedom House, in its iconic annual Freedom of the Press report, classified all of these systems as only ‘partly free’ in 2012 (Freedom House 2012). It is plausible, therefore, that citizens in these emerging democracies have migrated to social media to consume and debate information in a forum independent of a widely discredited and mistrusted traditional media.

Matters of Public Concern

A central assumption of the Habermasian reckoning is that issues pertaining to the national economy were the central matters of concern circulating in the bourgeois public sphere of 17th and 18th century Europe (Habermas 1991). By freely debating such matters, a current of public opinion could be formed that would then be channeled back to the state rendering it (partially) accountable to (swathes of) the citizenry. While the state of the economy will always remain a matter of quotidian concern, much research has been conducted since by social scientists on the subject of societal values, with a strong consensus that as sectors of society attain a certain level of affluence and development, post-material values become transcendent (Inglehart 1997). The Pew Global Attitudes Project, for instance, released analysis in 2009 showing how rising prosperity in 13 middle-income countries led to the adoption of social values proximate to those that predominate amongst “the publics of advanced nations” (Pew Research Centre 2009). Furthermore, it becomes almost commonsensical that through self-interest alone the middle classes would be preoccupied with issues that threaten their present standard of living. So it is that proper governance, education standards and environmental protection both correspond to the values of postmaterialism and represent matters of public concern, thus forming legitimate subject matter for a public sphere in these societies.

It would be fanciful to presume, of course, that the primary focus of social media interactions in these - or any other - societies centre on the issues identified above. According to Habermas’ normative ideal of the public sphere, however, “merely private interests were to be inadmissible” (Fraser 1990, 59) while the nature of the communication demands exacting standards of rationality (Habermas 1986). There appears then a yawning gap between this rigid view of the public sphere and a pervasive understanding of social media as providing platforms principally for superficial and frivolous diversion (Morozov 2011). A promising way out of this conceptual stalemate is offered by the idea of the ‘protopolitical’, the idea that conversation, communication, in any sense and on any forum, demonstrates the possibility of democratic value. As the Swedish sociologist Peter Dahlgren explains, “unconstrained, meandering, and unpredictable talk always contains the potential of becoming civic, of generating the political, and establishing links between the personal and the societal” (2009, 88). Benkler also steers us away from the strictures of the Habermasian reckoning by underscoring the contextual


importance of the public sphere; it “does not relate to a particular form of public discourse that is normatively attractive from some perspective or another. It defines a particular set of social practices that are necessary for the functioning of any complex social system that includes elements of governing human beings” (2006, 181). Shirky, finally, reiterates that discursive fora do not have to be a specifically political environment for them to become political as “they are shaped by their participants, taking on the characters that their participants want them to have” (2010, 34). It is precisely this transformative potential of social networking sites - of free discussion to political action - that the middle classes in these countries are exploiting to great effect.

Access

The European bourgeois public sphere was, according to Habermas, notionally fully inclusive, with inequalities of status bracketed out. Even he acknowledged, however, that such a utopian vision was never fully achieved and that the Liberal public sphere enacted sweeping exclusions (1991). In that important respect the public spheres depicted here are reminiscent of Habermas’ controversial account. While SNS possess significant democratic virtues in terms of their communicative affordances, for those that remain outside of such networks, of course, it represents a highly exclusionary public sphere. Delimitations imposed by basic literacy, and economic and educational restrictions on Internet access are particularly acute in the societies that are highlighted in this paper. Lest we forget, despite the millions that are connected, in countries with such stark inequalities as Brazil and India, fully 55% and 89% of the population respectively are presumed to have no access to the Internet (Internet World Stats “The Americas”; “Asia”). Although the rise of a middle class block within the emerging economic powers has been the cause of much celebratory rhetoric amongst western economists and political pundits (Economist “The New Middle Classes”), the income disparities present in these societies is invariably egregious (OECD 2012). Political corruption and education reform meanwhile represent quintessentially middle class preoccupations, and can appear almost luxurious concerns when compared to the more visceral demands of the poor. With all these caveats accounted for, the fora sketched here therefore fall well short of any ideal of a unitary national public sphere—arguably a chimerical vision in any case—but for their social significance, they are no less worthy of scrutiny.

A Conduit to Power

We must now draw the state into the equation because without a conduit to power, a public sphere is effectively nullified as a political arena. This axiom is complicated by the weakness, or perceived illegitimacy, of representative institutions in many emerging democracies, meaning that official channels of communication between citizens and their representatives often lie dormant. The annual social values survey of Latin America, the Latinobarómetro, revealed in its latest data that in Chile only 34% and in Brazil 39% of the population exhibit trust in their government, for example (Corporación Latinobarómetro 2011). One can suppose that this lack of faith is especially acute amongst the middle classes as the poorest sectors of society are often the subject of clientelism in South America, with their perceptions of the political class dominated by the instrumental concerns of welfare politics (Matos 2012, 181). In India, meanwhile, it has become a received wisdom that politicians are despised by the middle classes, who feel marginalized by a system that uses the rural poor as its electoral base and the tycoon class as its source of power (Yardley 2011). According to Hanna Pitkin’s widely-cited theory of political representation, for it to function properly it requires long-term institutional arrangements that “ensure the free articulation and expression of wishes by the represented and the systematic responsiveness of their representatives” (cited in Porto 2012, 25) (Emphasis added). It seems probable that this is not an accurate description of many of these societies’ democratic


arrangements, leading disillusioned citizens to seek ex-institutional channels to make their grievances visible. As to the responsiveness of government to these aberrant articulations, this then becomes a massively important question.

Papacharissi here strikes a gloomy note in reference to mature democracies: “Within the dominant representative democratic models of later modernity, direct digital democracy features are not expected, cannot be formally absorbed, and thus their occasional integration into mainstream political processes, while successful, is either of a makeshift nature or accidental” (2010, 107). For emerging democracies, as these cases suggest, the political class also appear ill-equipped to process public opinion mobilized in this way, although there could be a key distinction. According to political communication research, when compared with older democracies, in transitional societies politicians place even greater belief in the power of the media to influence and accurately express the opinion of the public because political institutions are viewed as weak and media concentration is invariably high (Porto 2012, 102). It is plausible, then, that this phenomenon, called ‘reciprocal effects’, could extend to the channeling of political sentiment from a social media-enabled public sphere, a scenario that could lead to three distinct outcomes.

One has played out in India and that is ‘threat repression’: in 2011 the government reacted by instituting new legislation called the Information Technology Rules, “which require intermediaries—including search engines and social-networking sites—to remove content within 36 hours if an individual complains that it is offensive” (Freedom House “India”) a move widely seen as government muzzling. This corresponds also to the Indian government’s frantic manouevres in response to the campaign as well as its attempts to discredit the objectives of the campaign.

A further possibility is ‘polity absorption’ and this is best demonstrated in the example of Brazil. There Congress opted to accept the Citizens’ Initiative as an online project even though the drafters of the constitution in 1985 clearly did not foresee that possibility. Furthermore, the goals of the anti-corruption campaign were antithetical to the political careers of many of its members and yet the chamber passed the legislation. Whilst one must not discount the influence of conventional political machinations (such as Lula da Silva’s government seeking a PR boost in the face of numerous corruption scandals (Porto 2012, 96) this episode does suggest an extraordinary openness to accepting online articulations of public opinion by the Brazilian polity. Indeed, it is worth noting that Greenpeace Brazil is currently half way to the 1% of the Brazilian electorate required to table a Zero Deforestation bill using an online mobilization (Greenpeace Brasil 2013).

A final prospect is ‘elite tokenism’ wherein the political class present only the impression that they are receptive to online public sentiment; a contemporary iteration of a classic political strategy. That is the situation that has manifested itself in Chile where in 2011 President Piñera directed his entire Cabinet to open Twitter accounts to better connect with their wired populace as well as to make a concerted attempt to track public opinion via social media in order ‘‘to listen to what citizens have to say’’ (Matamoros, 2011 cited in Valenzuela et al, 301). In contrast to such apparent openness, the government has remained largely antagonistic to the public sentiment expressed through social media as well as enacting strong repression against the street protests organized through such channels.

Conclusion

While public spheres, classified as weak, strong, liberal or subaltern, form, expand and sometimes collapse at a dizzying rate, I believe that those sketched here are of particular significance and demand our scrutiny as they develop. Not only are they populated by an economic class that has historically been a motor of social transformation but they are doing so


in highly fluid societies using a pioneering media technology that may have a strong influence on the way that politics in these countries is done.

The parallels between the episodes of public sphere formation sketched in this paper and Habermas’ landmark treatise are numerous and consequential. In all cases a politically assertive and economically confident social group is petitioning a newly democratic state from a notionally inclusive communicative arena in order to advance its class interests. Beyond a matter of mere historical curiosity these correlations are significant precisely because they alert us to the emergence of a new iteration of a previously transformative social episode. As has been made clear, however, the bourgeois public sphere of eighteenth century Europe was a social construction contingent on many singular factors. Accordingly, in charting the possible rise of social media-enabled public spheres in emerging democratic environments, we may note that while the forms of communication and association – notably the fluid interplay of private and public expression and the legitimacy of the protopolitical – differ markedly from prior interpretations, this does not render them any less deserving of categorization as public spheres.

While addressing them all falls beyond the limited scope of this exploratory paper, many questions remain as to the significance of these developments that would make for compelling future studies. What concretely are the differences between the receptiveness of governments to online public opinion in established and new democracies? Are there prospects for less-privileged strata of society to use such tools to join these public spheres or to create their own overlapping fora? What, if any, are the implications of the commercial and foreign-owned nature of these SNS for these polities?

A worthy contender for the final word here is the Indian civil rights lawyer, Prashant Brushan, who sat on the joint committee of government and civil society representatives debating the Jan Lokpal bill and declared recently: “Our democracy is based on the technology that was available in the ’40s. Now that we have more powerful technologies, the scope of democracy, too, must expand” (Joseph 2011).


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Guy Thurston Hoskins: As a doctoral student in the Communication & Culture program at York University, a fluent speaker of Spanish and Portuguese and with years of amassed experiences in settings as diverse as Chile, Brazil, Pakistan and Spain, Guy Hoskins is well equipped to study the many intersections of communication technologies and democratic forms around the world. His current research centres on the emergence of public spheres in immature democracies while his last major project sought to evaluate the legitimacy and efficacy of an online forum as a means to mitigate the worst democratic deficiencies of global governance institutions. Guy is a current holder of a Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders' Fellowship as well as the previous recipient of a Joseph Armand Bombardier Graduate Scholarship and presently sits on the Organizing Committee of the International Diaspora Film Festival in Toronto as well as serving as an in-school mentor for the Big Brothers & Sisters Organization of Canada.

The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society explores innovative theories and practices relating technology to society. The journal is cross-disciplinary in its scope, offering a meeting point for technologists with a concern for the social and social scientists with a concern for the technological. The focus is primarily, but not exclusively, on information and communications technologies.

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Documents

Meet the Habermasses: Charting the Emergence of a Social Media-Enabled Public Sphere in New Democracies