Does Habermas Understand the Internet? The Algorithmic Construction of the Blogo/Public Sphere

Abstract

Is computer-mediated discourse leading to collective political action in the public sphere, or simply more fragmentation? This question has been asked by social and political theorists ever since the Internet entered academia in the early 90s. However, this debate has been recently rekindled by Jurgen Habermas – one of the leading theorists of the public sphere – who recently broke a longstanding silence and spoke out against the Internet as a potentially democratizing medium. Instead of directly intervening in this debate, I interrogate the technoepistemic conditions of possibility for 'the blogosphere‘ to exist as a sociopolitical entity. Specifically, I analyze social aggregation sites like Technorati, Delicious, Digg, and even Google, which make it possible for collective action to precipitate out of the Internet. I find that Habermasians should not fear fragmentation, but instead integration: the blogosphere as a public sphere is constructed and unified not by ideal discourse, but algorithms.

Keywords: public sphere, algorithms, collective action, habermas, aggregation, filter bubble, networked public, politics of algorithms, critical theory, critical algorithms studies, technoepistemology