And we end Day One of the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen with another keynote, by the great Cristian Vaccari and his reflections on political participation in the digital age. He begins by looking back on digital media and democracy over the past twenty years: against the backdrop of the emergence and gradual adoption of what was then called ‘new media’, and subsequently social media, accessed now predominantly via mobile devices, we have seen considerable shifts in how we understand these communicative spaces.
In 2006, Time’s famous ‘you’ cover highlighted user-generated content and user agency over their own participation; the Obama election and the Arab Spring seemed to validate these perceptions of a democratisation of public participation. But this rapidly soured, as exemplified for instance by the election(s) of Donald Trump and the capture of leading social media platforms by illiberal actors like Elon Musk. Indeed, the share of the world population living in democracies has substantially declined over these past twenty years, too.
From one perspective, then, we might say that the Internet was a mistake – but democracy is and always has been a hard, Sisyphean effort. Democracy exists in a tension between ideals and reality; this is not a bug but a feature, and is inherent and inevitable in complex, pluralistic, and in some cases very large societies that seek to reconcile the values and interests of multiple interdependent actors.
The digital environment has brought new challenges to this. During the broadcast era, fairly monocultural media elites constrained political elites through their gatekeeping, agenda-setting, framing, and sanctioning practices; this controlled what we now often call the Overton window of what is fit to say and to publish in public debate. But platform power has redistributed media power, and professional media elites have weakened considerably; instead, the rise of tech and platform companies and the alternative media outlets and influencers that rely on them has substantially reduced incentives to perform in democratically responsible ways.
Political elites are thus less constrained by democratic norms in their public communication; strategic communication practices that used to be wholly unacceptable have become the new normal: insulting, scapegoating, attacking minorities, outright racism, and other forms of hate speech are now commonplace, as Donald Trump amply demonstrates. Such politicians only know the new rules of the game, and will attack the media and spread conspiracy theories when political decisions do not go their way.
These unconstrained elite behaviours contribute to a culture of indeterminacy: they weaken the democratic myth of the attentive public, and undermine the assumption of good faith behaviour by elites and activists. Indeed, they also enable elites to dismiss any public criticism of their actions as misinformation.
In digital contexts, citizens may respond to such developments in a variety of ways that are not mutually exclusive. One vision of digital citizens is as empowered citizens: engaging in political learning, expression, networking, and mobilisation; it remains somewhat unclear, though, whether this just reinforces existing tendencies amongst citizens, or mobilises new groups of citizens to become empowered by encountering politics in digital and social media spaces.
There is also a vision of citizens hobbyists: people who are well-informed, express themselves a lot, are morally enraged by current circumstances, and follows the drama and gamesmanship of politics closely; here, there is considerable engagement, but excessive energy is placed on self-expression and low-stakes political interactions rather than on local connections, community, and trust-building.
The vision of the quantified citizen sees people who engage in low-threshold actions tracked and metrified by political elites and digital platforms for profiling, targeting, and popularity assessments; this helps elites optimise communication and persuasion, but a lack of platform data transparency also means that there is suspicion about their reliability.
The subversive citizen, meanwhile, represents individuals and groups who exploit digital media to deceive, divide, and attack others by spreading disinformation, trolling, hate speech, and other forms of dark participation; these practices and the values they represent are democratically problematic, and exploits a perceived lack of accountability for problematic online behaviour.
Conversely, there is the vision of the manipulated citizen who is microtargeted and algorithmically manipulated by political elites and platforms; however, contrary to commonsense beliefs it is often the more political aware and engaged groups who are most susceptible to such targeting, believing in outright falsehoods as long as they align with their pre-existing viewpoints.
Then there are accidental citizens who only serendipitously encounter political content online, and engage with politics only in personalised and ad hoc ways, based on the actors and processes that shape the curated flows of information they engage with. This can still mobilise them to political action, of course.
The counter-model is the distracted citizen, who actively filters out news and political content to limit their engagement with politics. These may prefer entertainment, believe important news will find them, are overloaded by information, and seek to safeguard their wellbeing by disconnecting from news flows. Research has generally neglected to study such citizens who avoid politics in digital spaces, in favour of activists and other hyperparticipants.
A finale vision is of the heroic citizen: the idea of a citizen who pursues empowerment while resisting distraction, manipulation, and toxicity. These citizens are increasingly burdened by the lack of accountability and oversight amongst platforms, the weakening of professional news organisations, and the prevalence of democratically dysfunctional elite communication practices that results from these factors. For citizens to consistently take this heroic positioning is exhausting and therefore highly unlikely.
But this last model also represents what is often the outcome of scholarly work: we see few other solutions than to hope that citizens themselves will adopt such heroic roles. But democracy needs better participation, not simply more of it; more engaged citizens can also be more biased, democratically subversive, and harmful to public debate.
This then manifests in political polarisation, not just horizontally between different ideological groups but also vertically between those who are deeply engaged in and those who systematically avoid political news and debate – this pits political junkies against apathetic citizens, and can lead to a kind of democratic stagflation that hollows out the public. The central question then becomes how we combat this hollowing-out.
