Digital Public Sphere
Jurgen Hambermas discusses the original concept of the public sphere and how it progressed between the 17th and 19th centuries. In the 17th and 18 centuries, there was a private sphere that brought people to have public discussion, creating a powerful counter-weight between the Church and the State. With this new way of communicating more openly, it helped foster scientific and intellectual cultural movements, otherwise known as the Enlightenment. Later on in the 18th and 19th centuries, Habermas sees the public sphere turning into a culture of debate; he believes that because of mass media messages, people are making less decisions on their own and instead turning to political discourse. With the emergence of a new public sphere, Habermas lays out three requirements: Disregard of Status, Domain of Common Concern, and Inclusivity. Michael Soha sums it up by saying, “Social status is disregarded, where discourse is focused on that of ‘common concern’ for all involved and the public at large, and that members of all levels of society are included” (Soha, 2012, pg 34). Hambermas’s ideas may have been accurate for the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, but they are very outdated for the digital public sphere we live with today.
Reddit is the perfect example of what the new digital public sphere looks like. Reddit is a social media platform that allows users to create subreddits (personalized pages for different groups), comment on people’s posts, or simply scroll through and read what people post. I would compare Reddit to Twitter, except on Reddit there are only a few rules you need to follow. The creators of Reddit wanted this platform to be a space where people can say literally anything they want. It is not often that subreddit’s get taken down, but the ones that do usually have a valid reason to be demolished like using hate speech or racism. Reddit functions as a digital public sphere because it is free and easily used, people can speak their minds candidly, and it “challenges the political hegemony of traditional elite media” (Soha, 2012, pg 32). Reddit is one of the only social media platforms that functions as a digital public sphere.
Reddit is more of a social news platform than it is a social media platform. This is because, on Reddit, there are millions of subreddits that share updated news about what is happening around the world. A lot of the content that is posted is funny memes, but the majority of the posts are informative news stories. Whether the news is accurate or not is unknown. When you think about it, Reddit is just random people posting for the hell of it, so you really can not be sure that what you are reading is 100% fact. Reddit is less concerned about whether the news is true or not, and more focused on promoting the aspect of free speech on their platform. What attracts so many people to Reddit is the fact that they are free to say and post almost anything they want. The people who create subreddits are the ones that make up the rules for that specific topic or category. One example of the challenges that come along with Reddit allowing so much freedom of speech is that people could be getting cyber bullied and no one does anything about it. In regards to civil discourse and discussion, it all depends on the topics the subreddit focuses on. If a subreddit makes the focus on people posting funny TikTok videos, then there is going to be little to no civil discourse and discussion. On the other hand, if the subreddit is titled “Go_Vegan,” then there will most likely be civil discourse and discussion about the benefits of being vegan, vegan recipes, and how going vegan helps the environment.
One example of a subreddit that abused its freedom of speech is “The_Donald” or “T_D.” The users on this subreddit broke countless global rules, from harassment to racism and so on. Reddit had no choice but to finally take this subreddit down, but this caused an uproar in the “T_D” community; people were mad because Reddit took away their platform to speak openly. In this situation, people should know that there are some things they simply can not say on the internet, but Reddit promoting freedom of speech can cause them to go down a slippery slope. Also, the fact that people get their information solely from Reddit is also not the best thing because a lot of fake news is posted. I do believe that Reddit is a positive digital sphere where people can find an online community exactly for them, but it is worrisome that false information is spread very fast and people can get cyberbullied with little to no consequence.
