Reactive democracy

The social media public sphere, political participation and the logic of reaction

Abstract

The diffusion of social media has profoundly transformed the nature and form of the contemporary public sphere, facilitating the rise of new political tactics and movements. In this article, I develop a theory of the social media public sphere as a “plebeian public sphere” whose functioning is markedly different from the one of the traditional public sphere, described by Jürgen Habermas. Differently from Habermas’ rational publics this public sphere is dominated by online crowds, that come together in virtual gatherings made visible by a variety of metrics that measure their presence. Second, it does not correspond to notions of deliberation often adopted by theorists as an alternative to representative democracy and its shortcomings. To the contrary its model of democracy is a plebiscitary one I describe as reactive democracy, because of the importance of social media reactions and the way a logic of reaction as immediate response structures online conversations.