Constructing Digital Democracies: Facebook, Arendt, and the Politics of Design
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719890807 |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719890807
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(1) 26 –44
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719890807
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Constructing Digital
Democracies: Facebook,
Arendt, and the Politics of
Design
Jennifer Forestal
Abstract
Deliberative democracy requires both equality and difference, with structures that organize a
cohesive public while still accommodating the unique perspectives of each participant. While
institutions like laws and norms can help to provide this balance, the built environment also
plays a role supporting democratic politics—both on- and off-line. In this article, I use the work
of Hannah Arendt to articulate two characteristics the built environment needs to support
democratic politics: it must (1) serves as a common world, drawing users together and emphasizing
their common interests and must also (2) preserve spaces of appearance, accommodating diverse
perspectives and inviting disagreement. I, then, turn to the example of Facebook to show how
these characteristics can be used as criteria for evaluating how well a particular digital platform
supports democratic politics and providing alternative mechanisms these sites might use to fulfill
their role as a public realm.
Keywords
software design, Hannah Arendt, Facebook, social media, democratic theory, deliberative
democracy
Accepted: 26 August 2019
In early 2016, Facebook unveiled a new design feature, the result of a year-long project
to revise the platform’s “Like” function. Symbolized by a thumbs-up icon that has become
synonymous with Facebook itself, the “Like” button is one of the most common ways
that users respond to content on Facebook. But for years, Facebook users have requested
ways to signal more complex responses—not all content is likable, for example, though
it may nevertheless still be important, interesting, or engaging. In order to meet this per-
ceived need for more varied means of interacting with site content beyond simply
Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Corresponding author:
Jennifer Forestal, Loyola University Chicago, 1032 W. Sheridan Rd., 328 Coffey Hall, Chicago, IL 60660, USA.
Email: jforestal@luc.edu
890807PSX0010.1177/0032321719890807Political StudiesForestal
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
Forestal 27
“liking” it, Facebook sought an alternative “way to leave feedback that was quick, easy,
and gesture-based” (Stinson, 2016). The solution was “Reactions,” a set of six emoji that
represented the most common sentiments that users expressed on the site: “Love,”
“Haha,” “Wow,” “Sad,” and “Angry”—in addition to “Like.”
The introduction of Reactions into users’ Facebook experience may at first appear to
be a relatively mundane design tweak. Yet seemingly small changes to the design of digi-
tal platforms can have enormous implications for how, and how well, we collectively
practice democratic politics. Indeed, as recent discussions regarding the democratic con-
sequences of digital technologies have noted, it is the structural features of platforms like
Facebook that contribute to their role in, for example, spreading misinformation, fueling
inter-group conflict, or mobilizing social movements (Tufekci, 2017; Vaidhyanathan,
2018).1 The design of the built environment, in other words, whether physical or digital,
profoundly shapes the ways we engage—or not—in democratic activity. In order to
develop digital platforms that support democratic deliberation and discussion, then, we
must be as attentive to the design of platforms like Facebook as we currently are to the
activity that occurs within them.
In the case of Reactions, for example, the Facebook design team intended to expand
the number of ways Facebook users could engage with one another while providing a
kind of universal visual language that everyone using the platform would understand
(Teehan, 2016). Their challenge, then, was how to introduce a new mechanism that would
register a wider array of users’ responses to content without alienating those same users
by deviating from existing (and familiar) patterns of behavior on the site. Yet, while the
Reactions team, by all accounts, succeeded in negotiating this tension, the overall effect
of this design change did little to improve the platform’s ability to host robust democratic
engagements between users. Despite offering users more options than just “Like,”
Reactions, in combination with the News Feed, nevertheless continued to homogenize
and isolate site users, rather than drawing them into a self-consciously diverse delibera-
tive community—and the effect was to undermine the platform’s democratic potential.
In attempting to strike a balance between accommodating diverse responses while still
providing a familiar experience that would appeal to the platform’s 2.2 billion users,
Facebook engineers faced a dilemma familiar to democratic politics. Democratic delib-
eration requires agreed-upon standards that govern public discourse and ensure that all
participants recognize themselves as part of a shared public (Chambers, 2003). At the
same time, however, these standards impose uniformity on an inherently diverse body of
citizens, with the effect of excluding certain potential participants (Benhabib, 1996).
Recognizing this tension, the challenge for deliberative democrats—as well as for plat-
forms like Facebook which are influential spaces in our contemporary deliberative sys-
tem (Parkinson and Mansbridge, 2012)—lies in balancing these two competing interests:
generating consensus while also leaving room for active participation and disagreement
among participants.
Seeking to manage this tension, those interested in digital deliberation have tended to
focus attention on the rules that govern our behavior online, investigating how well dis-
course in digital spaces conforms to deliberative norms of, for example, civility, rele-
vance, and authenticity (Han et al., 2018; Molina and Jennings, 2018; Oz et al., 2017;
Papacharissi, 2004; Stroud et al., 2015). Approaches such as these, focusing on the organ-
izing principles found within the activity of democratic politics, are certainly valuable.
But they tend to minimize or overlook the ways that the design of the built environment
shapes activity within the digital public realm. In this article, then, I turn to the twentieth
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