Challenges for an SNS-based public sphere in 2016
| Pages | 1106-1123 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-12-2017-0352 |
| Published date | 12 November 2018 |
| Date | 12 November 2018 |
| Author | Kyle John Lorenzano,Miles Sari,Colin Harrell Storm,Samuel Rhodes,Porismita Borah |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management |
Challenges for an SNS-based
public sphere in 2016
Kyle John Lorenzano, Miles Sari and Colin Harrell Storm
Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, Washington State University,
Pullman, Washington, USA
Samuel Rhodes
Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs,
Washington State University College of Arts and Sciences,
Pullman, Washington, USA, and
Porismita Borah
Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, Washington State University,
Pullman, Washington, USA
Abstract
Purpose –Political polarization and incivility manifested itself online throughout the 2016 US presidential
election. The purpose of this paper is to understand how features of social media platforms (e.g. reacting,
sharing) impacted the online public sphere during the 2016 election.
Design/methodology/approach –After conducting in-depth interviews with politically interested young
people and applying deductive coding procedures to transcripts of the interviews, Dahlberg’s (2004) six
normative conditions for the public sphere were used to empirically examine this interview data.
Findings –While some participants described strategies for productive political discussion on Social
Networking Sites (SNS) and a willingness to use them to discuss politics, many users’experiences largely fall
short of Dahlberg’s (2004) normative criteria for the public sphere.
Research limitations/implications –The period in which these interviews were conducted in could have
contributed to a more pessimistic view of political discussion in general.
Practical implications –Scholars and the public should recognize that the affordances of SNS for political
discussion are not distributed evenly between different platforms, both for the sake of empirical studies of
SNS moving forward and the state of democratic deliberation.
Originality/value –Although previous research has examined online and SNS-based political
discussion as it relate s to the public sphere, few a ttempts have been made un derstand how specific
communicative practic es or platform-specific f eatures of SNS have contribut ed to or detracted from a
healthy public sphere.
Keywords Political communication, Social media, Public sphere, 2016 US presidential election,
Qualitative research methods
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Increasing partisanship in the USA made the 2016 presidential election one of the most
polarized in recent history (Doherty et al., 2016; Soergel, 2016). While free political
expression is nothing new, the platforms to voice these opinions are changing. In 2016,
nearly one-third of Social Networking Site (SNS) users sometimes or frequently commented,
discussed or posted about politics. Additionally, the election coincided with the first time
most Americans received their news from social media (Gottfried and Shearer, 2016), which
is most pronounced among young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 (Mitchell et al.,
2015). While SNS are often perceived as close-minded spaces for discussion and some areas
of the web provide safe haven for hate groups (Duggan and Smith, 2016; Feldman, 2015;
Southern Poverty Law Center, 2016), some are optimistic about their democratic potential
(Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2012). Scholars like Bennett et al. (2011) reject narrow definitions of
“political participation”in favor of less formal SNS-based participation they say is the future
Online Information Review
Vol. 42 No. 7, 2018
pp. 1106-1123
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-12-2017-0352
Received 10 December 2017
Revised 23 March 2018
Accepted 23 May 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
1106
OIR
42,7
of political involvement. These outcomes point to the greater potential of SNS to serve as
online public spheres that foster productive political discussion.
Jürgen Habermas’s (1996) idea of the public sphere –a place to share opinions and news
in an open environment –has transitioned from solely having implications for traditional
media and face-to-face conversations, to impacting computer-mediated communication. SNS
are evolving in their functionality and information sharing capabilities, with some existing
as ideological “echo chambers”(Sunstein, 2001). While social media can be used to facilitate
exposure to cross-cutting viewpoints (Messing and Westwood, 2012), they can also be used
as tools for spreading misinformation to impressionable audiences of likeminded people
(Bessi et al., 2015). These empirical findings call into question the quality of democratic
engagement in the online public sphere.
Amongst all research on SNS-based political discussion, there is a gap in the literature
regarding a specific evaluation of young adults’communication practices on SNS and their
relation to Habermas’s conception of a healthy public sphere. Scholars like Weller (2016)
have called for more investigation into platform-specific features of SNS like “favorting,”
hashtags, or unfollowing, which has been explored previously (Boyd, 2010; Marwick and
Boyd, 2011), but not in the context of a Habermasian public sphere. Prior qualitative
research has also established that young people engage in sophisticated political talk, as
Jahromi (2011) found in her qualitative work on how teenagers constructed their American
identities. From a normative and empirical perspective, it is crucial that both scholars and
the public better understand the underlying mechanisms of online deliberation that can
make or break the quality of political discussion. With Dahlberg’s (2004) six normative
conditions for the public sphere serving as a theoretical framework, this study aims to
evaluate the democratic quality of everyday political communication among young adults
on SNS during the 2016 US presidential election. Using in-depth qualitative interviews and
deductive coding procedures as the primary means of analysis (Glesne, 2011; Miles et al.,
2014; Saldaña, 2009), we find that some conditional aspects of SNS allowed for practices like
ideal role taking and critiquing validity claims, but that ultimately participants’discussions
on SNS did not meet Dahlberg’s (2004) criteria for a Habermasian public sphere.
Habermas’s public sphere
With respect to democratic deliberation, no researcher’s influence has been more widespread
than that of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas’s idea of a “public sphere”was initially conceived
as a direct democracy-style space where citizens could engage in dialogue, which would
then produce a coherent “public opinion”toward an issue(s) and influence decision-making
practices (Habermas, 1989a, b). As Lunt and Livingstone (2013) argue, this conception of the
public sphere was rooted in aspects of German and European bourgeoisie society –a feature
of Habermas’s initial conception of the public sphere that would invite criticism from other
scholars who alleged that members of the public could be excluded from this space based on
race, sex, nationality and citizenship (Fraser, 2007; Dahlberg, 2004). Although Dahlberg
(2014) provides a defense of Habermas’s original thesis, Habermas himself also addressed
these criticisms (Habermas, 1996, 2006). This new work by Habermas moved away from a
bourgeoisie conception of the public sphere to something more fluid and conceded that
multiple forms/sites of deliberation were legitimate (Lunt and Livingston, 2013).
Habermas’s (1996) Between Facts and Norms outlines a new clarification of the public
sphere that functions with the same working definition, where it is “[…] best described as a
network for communicating information and points of view […] [which are then] filtered and
synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified public
opinions”(p. 360). Habermas further clarifies his theory with a discussion of civil society,
referring to all non-governmental and non-economic associations between people that allow
for underlying communicative structures within a public sphere. The importance here of
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in 2016
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