Theorizing the Digital Public Sphere: Data Capitalism and the Limits to Democratic Discourse

Introduction

As social media platforms have expanded in popularity in recent years, our discursive relations have become increasingly digitally mediated. The dominance of online communication channels in our contemporary late capitalist society seems to have catalyzed a transformation of our fundamental democratic associations. This essay investigates the character of the public sphere in our digital age, and its political and discursive implications. I argue that our conceptions of digital platforms as public spheres must go beyond the notion of social media as a neutral space for rational deliberation, and towards an understanding of the ways in which its algorithmic logic, driven by data capitalism, inscribes relations of domination and subordination into our discourses.

I will start by describing the emergence of the digital public sphere from the mass-media public sphere of the twentieth century, and how this transformation was driven by the cultural and economic shift from Fordist production to post-Fordist consumption in broader society. Although this transformation was initially received optimistically, I analyze how the digital public sphere is driven by a new regime of capital accumulation: data capitalism. This regime of data capital inscribes discursive conventions of identity performance and symbolization into interactions within the digital public sphere, which shapes how political positions can be articulated. This focus on identity-oriented content leads to fragmentation and polarization in the public sphere. I argue that although such fragmentation is not inherently damaging for democratic societies, and can even be received in a positive light, the fact that such fragmentation is driven by the data extraction and accumulation limits the potential for liberatory discourses to flourish.

The emergence of the digital public sphere

The public sphere has been a contentious and evolving idea in democratic and political theory. It was initially conceived as an accessible space in which individuals could confer to deliberate on issues of public concern (Habermas, 1974). In the early to mid-twentieth century, the public sphere primarily took the form of mass-broadcasting television and radio media which was “driven by the logic of an industrial economy of scale” (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021). Fordism was the dominant cultural mode of the time, and the logic of scale in media was connected to the logic of capital accumulation: everything was “mass,” and “consumers were subjected to powerful pressures towards homogeneity, with individuality reduced to a choice from products superficially differentiated by aesthetics and accessories” (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021). During this period, there were substantial barriers to entry in the media market, resulting in an oligopolistic landscape. Thus, only a small number of dominant media producers held the power to decide which opinions and discourses were included or excluded from the public sphere. As Tornberg and Uitermark put it, “The media had control over what was part of the sphere of public consensus, what was part of the sphere of legitimate debate – and what was to be considered deviant and outside the realm of the respectable” (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021). The Fordist culture meant media was driven by mass-appeal and cohesion, and control was enacted through homogeneity and exclusion.

In the late 20^th century, the Fordist system of mass production began to crumble into a new regime of post-Fordist consumerism, characterized “by a rise in cultural diversity and fragmentation, [and] a revolt against the assembly-line individuality” (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021). At the same time, changing market dynamics in the media industry facilitated the entrance of smaller competitors, prompting a shift towards appealing to more niche audiences. Digital connection accelerated this trend; now, anyone with Internet access could begin producing content, so counter-cultural alternatives to the mass media of Fordism were able to expand their market share (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021). It is within the context of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism that the digital public sphere started to emerge.

This shift was initially received optimistically, and many saw the decline of mass-broadcasting media empires as liberatory. In the beginning, “the agenda-setting function of the traditional media is partially challenged, as the agenda of the public is no longer necessarily mediated by the agenda of the media” (Enjolras & Steen-Johnsen, 2017). The fall of this corporate media market meant that room opened for different discourses to be taken seriously, and potentially meant an escape from the homogeneity of dominant culture. Control over the narrative became decentralized: “Audiences became more mobile, able to make individual choices and possess capacities enabling them to actively produce or transform information” (Enjolras & Steen-Johnsen, 2017).

The weakening of hegemonic market structures, however, did not last long. The emergence of online platforms, especially social media platforms, quickly re-consolidated these fragmented markets in different forms. Tornberg and Uitermark write: “Social media [emerged as] a generalized solution on the part of oligopolists, to win the competition for the attention of diverse audiences by creating internally competitive environments in which small-scale content production is brought in under the influence of a single media platform” (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021). Thus, the emergence of social media yields something like the “re-oligopolization” of the public sphere. However, although public discourse is once again concentrated under broad corporate control, the exclusionary nature of the Fordist public sphere never returned; the content remained fragmented and decentralized. In the digital public sphere, there is no single hegemonic narrative that can be traced, as could be done with the ideologies of mass-media. Now, there is a muddle of conflicting and competing public narratives, dispersed around the globe; the digital public sphere represents a profound transformation and destabilization of public discourse.

The data regime of capital accumulation

In her 1990 article Rethinking the Public Sphere, Nancy Fraser argues that even when one is included in the public sphere, they can still be subject to subtle forms of control. The public sphere imposes conventions and norms upon its participants, to which they must conform if they are to be included in deliberation. She sees the public sphere as being a central arena for the enactment of relations of power and domination between social groups. She writes: “the official public sphere, then, was – indeed is – the prime institutional site for the construction of the consent that defines the new hegemonic mode of domination” (Fraser, 1990). In an oligopolistic yet fragmented public sphere of social media, that has no observable unitary narrative of discourse, what might be the “hegemonic mode of domination,” and how might it be enacted?

I argue that what drives domination in the digital public sphere is a new regime of capital accumulation, in which data is capital. There are a number of terms that demark this new regime of capital accumulation, including “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2019), “platform capitalism” (Srnicek, 2017), “techno-feudalism” (Varoufakis, 2023), and more. In this essay, I draw on Jathan Sadowski’s article (Sadowski, 2019), which synthesizes and expands upon the above terms to examine the hegemonic mode of domination of the digital public sphere.

Data is behind the success of the world’s largest corporations today, such as Google, Apple, and Meta. Large datasets, which are incredibly accurate in predicting the likes and dislikes of consumers, facilitate targeted and precise advertising campaigns. Thus, acquiring increasingly expansive datasets has become of the highest imperative for such organizations. Sadowski writes: “Just as we expect corporations to be profit-driven, we should now expect organizations to be data-driven; that is, the drive to accumulate data now propels new ways of doing business and governance” (Sadowski, 2019). Sadowski further argues that we should see data not just as a new commodity that can be traded in a market, but as the pre-eminent form of capital in an emerging market; data capital has become the defining feature of late capitalism, the central driver of its logic of accumulation. As Sadowski puts it, “there is a feedback loop: many control systems rely on the constant gathering and processing of data, and in turn those control systems enable more data to be generated. (…) [The] rhetoric of universality reframes everything as within the domain of surveillance/platform/digital capitalism” (Sadowski, 2019).

Digital platforms thus emerge not as neutral mediators of a public discourse, but as mechanisms of data accumulation; this feature is not an unfortunate side-effect of digital platforms, but rather a constitutive element of their existence. For social media platforms, the drive to encourage the continual use of their platforms at all costs, and ensure that users stay engaged and clicking, is built into their business models: “For businesses, much of the value produced by “smart” technologies does not necessarily come from you buying the good, but rather from you using it. Interacting with smart technologies – especially ones integrated into your everyday, personal life – generates reams of data that would otherwise be out of reach to companies that want it” (Sadowski, 2019). Social media platforms are actively built to expand user engagement and keep users interacting as much as possible. The more a consumer expresses their likes, dislikes, and interests on social media, the more a corporation’s stock of data capital increases.

Further, algorithms are not merely passive collectors of user data; they also create data. That is, they encourage communicative practices which can be algorithmically translated as data, through a process known as “datafication.” As Tornberg and Uitermark observe, “which messages are selected to be shown and highlighted, and which are hidden and left out of sight, is decided through the fundamental mechanism of whether they are shared, starred, or liked by users, functioning as a way of determining which messages are most engaging. This mechanism is presented as enabling a social experience, while figuring into an automated ‘like economy,’ employed to gather quantified data about the lifestyles, preferences and interests of individual users” (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021). In this process, complex social functions are reduced to “likes” or “shares” on a post, and this transformation of communicative practices has effects on the kind of discourses that are exchanged in the digital public sphere. The public sphere has become datafied; public deliberation is channeled through algorithms and processes that turn discourse into data capital, and which encourage perpetual user engagement at all costs.

The public sphere as self-representation and identity performance

As interaction in the digital public sphere is limited to such features that can be quantified and extracted as data, performance becomes prioritized above the rationality of discourse. Tornberg and Uitermark demonstrate how the economy of likes and comments encourages self-presentation as the main determinant of virtue. They write: “Social media do not reward decency, reason, or virtue but their appearances and expressions – whether the performance is genuine of not, the challenge remains to convincingly act it out so that others believe it is” (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021). The datafied public sphere, in other words, encourages the self-representation of our political opinions over the actual enactment of these positions. In place of political deliberation, we submit our self-represented political identities to a commodified and quantified “like” economy for evaluation and affirmation. Thus, “as the language of social media is identity, political discourse is couched in the language of self-presentation, meaning that we engage with politics through the expression of personal identity” (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021).

To achieve affirmation on social media, we appeal to group identities by self-representing the values of these groups in order to earn social inclusion. Tornberg and Uitermark argue that in such a context, political performance becomes commodified, used as a means to signify belonging rather than for any political ends in itself. Politics becomes just another way to symbolize one’s identity, reduced to a lifestyle choice with the same moral salience as the clothes one wears or the music one listens to. Consequently, the border between consumerist and political self-representation begins to disappear, as they are both used primarily to signify social identity and to earn inclusion in a social group. “As political expressions are treated as a form of symbolic consumer goods, the segmentation and fragmentation of consumer groups (…) enters also into political life. As political messages are conveyed in the commodified and symbolic language of these platforms, political opinions become part of lifestyle assemblages, functioning as expressions of distinction and group belonging” (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021). The kind of discourse and deliberation enabled in the digital public sphere is thus beholden to the logic of group inclusion and identity expression, driven by the corporate imperative of data extraction and accumulation.

It is from this economy of identity, in which political self-representation is primarily about signifying group belonging, that political polarization emerges. The appeal to group identities on platforms result in “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles,” which are online spaces in which users are only exposed to alternative viewpoints in ways that will strengthen or reaffirm their pre-determined political and group identities: “messages from the opposing side are among the most common way to affirm and activate common identities on social media: that a public person that your group commonly dislikes says something bad serves to confirm prejudice and creates a spiral of collective outrage that focuses attention, generates emotional energy and strengthens the group’s identity” (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021). As identity-oriented discourse becomes the central language of the digital public sphere, social identities become strengthened and more opposed to conflicting ones. As users are increasingly embedded in their identity groups, scholars have linked digital identity performance to a rise in political polarization, wherein communities are more opposed and react more negatively to opposing political views and social groups (Kubin & Sikorski, 2021). Politics on social media becomes a form of inter-group identity conflict, marked less by political deliberation than by competition in a commodified attention economy (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021).

Polarization and counter-publics

However, we should not be too quick to understand polarization as an inherent threat to democracy. As Kreiss and McGregor argue, polarization might “in fact be a necessary outgrowth of effects to achieve democracy” (Kreiss & McGregor, 2023). The authors point out that groups struggling for equality, such as Black Lives Matter, may cause polarization by threatening the status quo and socially embedded systems of power. Often, echo-chambers on social media are deliberate spaces created by activists to facilitate discourses of resistance to societal injustices. Overall, Kreiss and McGregor argue that “as a concept, polarization does not provide a normative or even conceptual way of distinguishing between White supremacists and racial justice activists, despite their asymmetrical relationship to liberal democracy” (Kreiss & McGregor, 2023). In this light, the identity-based discourse of social media might be perceived as a positive and liberatory development in the public sphere, especially when compared to the homogeneity of the preceding Fordist regime of mass-media. Despite the extraction of data continually exercised by the corporations that run such platforms, the digital public sphere can be seen as making possible the creation of identity-based discourses for marginalized communities.

A similar analysis of political fragmentation is made by Nancy Fraser. She argues that public spheres exercise control over subordinated groups, and that such control will only be exacerbated if there is a unitary public sphere with a “cohesive” discourse. She writes: “Members of subordinated groups would have no arenas for deliberation among themselves about their needs, objectives, and strategies” (Fraser, 1990). When framed as such, a “cohesive discourse” emerges as a “controlling discourse,” which polices how subordinated groups can deliberate within the public sphere; they are unable to communicate except for under the supervision of dominant groups. In contrast to a unitary public sphere, Fraser develops the notion of “counter-publics,” which are “discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser, 1990). For Fraser, a multitude of competing publics is preferable to a hegemonic public. Such discursive conflict in a society might be a motor towards more just and equal ways of living together because it facilitates space for critiques of the unjust status quo.

The digital public sphere comes into view as a space in which a multitude of counter-publics can exchange and develop discourses. As Fraser notes, these counter-publics are not always virtuous, and they can easily be anti-democratic or anti-egalitarian. This is especially the case on social media platforms, where far-right hate groups, who frequently position themselves (at least rhetorically) against the status quo, have been able to grow in popularity and expand in influence around the world (Yang & Fang, 2021). However, if we are to follow Fraser’s and Kreiss and McGregor’s arguments, such a space of competing counter-publics, that can be egalitarian or anti-egalitarian, might still represent an improvement to the homogeneity of mass media in terms of facilitating justice and democracy. Thus, in the twenty first century, we find that social media platforms play a dual role in the democratic theory of public spheres. On one hand, they act as a universalizing and homogenizing public sphere, which filters discourse through its hegemonic languages of datafication and identity self-representation, driven by the logic of data capital accumulation. On the other hand, they facilitate the fragmentation of the Fordist mass-media public sphere and create the conditions for both egalitarian and anti-egalitarian counter-publics to form and expand, which can be viewed as a liberatory and pro-democratic process.

Although social media platforms create a context in which counter-publics can come to fruition and break free from the hegemony of mass media, I argue that the logic of digitized platforms still impose conventions of deliberation on users, which limits the potential for liberatory discourses to achieve political salience. Counter-public spheres, as Fraser notes, are still inherently public; they are not enclaves in which groups can retreat, but discourses which are always trying to expand and exert influence. “To interact discursively as a member of a public – [counter-public] or otherwise – is to disseminate one’s discourses into ever widening arenas… its members understand themselves as a part of a potentially wider public, that indeterminate, empirically counterfactual body we call the public-at-large…” (Fraser, 1990). It is within this abstract “public-at-large,” the “macro-public” sphere of social media, that relations of power and subordination are imposed upon liberatory counter-publics.

Drawing on their theory of identity self-representation being the driving discourse of digital platforms, Tornberg and Uitermark argue that digital platforms represent a shift in the “discursive power” in the public sphere. Platforms prioritize and promote content that triggers engagement, so they can grow their stock of data capital. In an identity-inundated discursive climate, the most engaging content, which provokes the most likes, dislikes, and shares, is that which “produces emotional reactions, that activates us, and resonates with us… the sharing mechanism tends to promote political discourse that is more evocative, colorful, and confrontational” (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021). Whereas the “discursive power” in the Fordist public sphere gave exposure to discourses that agreed with and shored up the hegemonic “public opinion,” the digital public sphere uplifts content that promotes any strong emotional response, good or bad. “This produces a political discourse that highlights outrage and content that most effectively activates – and particularly threatens – our social identities, thus further driving the strengthening of perceived difference” (Tornberg & Uitermark, 2021).

Thus, counter-publics are still subject to the hegemonic conventions of the digital public sphere. Now, anyone can be included in the “public-at-large,” but the degree of inclusion is mediated by the extent to which counter-publics peddle inflammatory and identity-activating content. The digital public sphere thus makes no guarantee that counter-public discourses are rationally considered in any process of public deliberation; to have one’s voice heard requires one to evocatively trigger other’s identities. Therefore, though the fragmentation of the Fordist public sphere is to be viewed as liberatory, counter-publics still have not been able to escape from subjugation to hegemonic modes of domination and capital regimes of accumulation. As these counter-publics try to envision themselves as constituting a larger public, they inevitably must resort to the provocative identity-oriented language of social media, limiting the kind of discourses they can espouse. In addition, this kind of identity-presentation is largely performative; while they might be able to get more users to symbolize agreement with their cause, the extent to which this can be translated to liberatory action is limited by online platforms, which prioritize symbolic actions such as “liking” and “sharing” that can be easily datafied, extracted, and commodified over authentic political action.

Conclusion

This essay has argued that the democratic deliberation in the digital public sphere of the 21^st century is marked by the influence of data capitalism. While the inclusion made possible by the digital public sphere was initially celebrated as a radical break from the homogeneous control of Fordist mass-media, the emergence of corporate social media platforms quickly “re-oligopolized” the public sphere. The algorithmic logic of social media platforms, driven by data capitalism, promotes identity self-representation and performance over authentic democratic discourse, which has led to fragmentation and political polarization. While such political fragmentation represents the emergence and strengthening of counter-publics, which, by allowing subjugated communities to create discourses and strategies of liberation, is to be received as a positive force in the advancement of democracy, social media simultaneously imposes limits on how these communities can expand and imagine themselves as part of a broader public. The task at hand now is to imagine forms of democratic deliberation that break free of the data regime of accumulation that defines the digital public sphere, while not returning to the Fordist mass-media of homogeneity and exclusionary control. Not only is the digital public sphere marked by subtle and restrictive conventions of discourse, but because it is more expansive and accessible than ever, an unprecedented number of publics are now subject to its hegemonic mode of domination. So even though the digital public sphere is more inclusive than ever before, inclusion means subordination to the pressures and conventions of the data regime of capital accumulation. We must envision new public spheres that allow a multitude of counter-publics to flourish, free from the restrictive discursive conventions of ever-evolving modes of capital accumulation.

Works Cited

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Read more at By Zachary Gan.