Anchors away: exploring the broader, more comprehensive online public sphere
Creators: name: Wiesman, Penina I.
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2020

description: Talk is the axis of a functioning democracy. Our representatives and officials are required to deliberate policy initiatives before acting on them, but citizens are also expected to talk. Talking to one another about issues facing our society, even when we disagree, can cement the civic bonds that are essential for us to hold our government accountable to its people. The critical role played by political conversations among individual citizens is underscored by the centrality of Jurgen Habermas’ public sphere. However, the public sphere has arguably been in decline since the late 20th century. While social media sites would appear to offer the ideal platforms from which to revive the public sphere, research into the online public sphere has suggested that that Americans can’t or won’t or shouldn’t talk about politics on social media. However, existing research on the online public sphere may be incomplete, given its reliance on outdated theoretical conceptions, overly-formal definitions, and limited research contexts that do not correspond to the more complex realities of how and where people talk about politics. Many political conversations develop outside conventionally defined political contexts, and in the absence of most of the traditional indicators of politics, particularly in social media spaces whose tools empower people to autonomously pursue their own passions and interests. While some research has begun to move beyond the more traditional contexts for the public sphere, no one has yet explored the online public sphere as it might manifest in a minimally anchored context, one where neither the setting, nor the media content, nor the communicative form are already linked to the formal expectations of the bourgeois public sphere. This project seeks to challenge the notion that Americans are incapable of using social media to have productive conversations about the issues facing us as a nation and a society. First, I argue for the adoption of a broader model of the public sphere rooted in Habermas’ (1984, 1996) own concept of communicative action. The inclusivity of this model facilitates a move away from what I call political anchors, which explicitly link research contexts to the formal political realm and acknowledges the autonomous and personalized route by which most people come to engage in online political conversation. In light of these ideas, I propose that non-political public Facebook pages offer a useful example of a minimally anchored context from which the public sphere can emerge. Taking advantage of Facebook’s indelibility and ubiquity, this project explores the casual political conversations that emerge from the comments beneath non-political posts on public Facebook pages not explicitly dedicated to politics. Case studies of four specific Facebook pages were performed: George Takei, Humans of New York, Diply, and Larry the Cable Guy. Utilizing qualitative content analysis, the conversations that emerged in the comments sections of posts for each page were evaluated. In addition, in-depth interviews with people who follow these pages were conducted. The combined results suggest that not only are the comments sections of these four minimally anchored Facebook pages fertile ground for the emergence of the broader public sphere, but so are other non-political spaces on Facebook. Results additionally point to a more personalized approach to political conversation, and politics in general. Altogether, this project begins to contest the belief that social media and reasonable political discourse don’t mix, contributes to a broader understanding of the contemporary public sphere and hopes to direct future research similarly outward.