Social Media and the Digital Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Abstract

This article explores the question of how to understand social media following the Habermasian theory of the structural transformation of the public sphere. We argue for a return to political-economic fundamentals as the basis for analysing the public sphere and seek to establish a characteristic connection between digital-behavioural control and singularised audiences in the context of proprietary markets. In the digital constellation, it is less a matter of immobilising the citizen as a consumer but rather of their political activation – albeit in conditions under which commercial interests have primacy: privatisation without privatism.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 86 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.