The truth in a bubble the end of ‘audience democracy’ and the rise of ‘bubble democracy’.

Abstract

This article sustains that the so-called ‘post-truth’ phenomenon also depends on the characteristics of the new ‘hybrid’ communicative scenario. The thesis is that this new scenario is substantially different from that of the ‘party democracy’, protagonist of significant part of the twentieth century, and from that of the ‘audience democracy’, defined by Bernard Manin in the mid-nineties. The emergence of new media entails a series of consequences, including the fragmentation of the audience into a plurality of self-referential segments, politically polarized ‘bubbles’, devoid, at least potentially, of a common communicative sphere. Taking into account such developments, the article seeks to construct the ‘ideal type’ of a ‘bubble democracy’, marked by the mistrust of institutions, fragmentation of the audience, disintermediation, homophilic tendencies, and polarization.