A polarizing multiverse? Assessing Habermas’ digital update of his public sphere theory

Asked whether he stands to his rather optimistic reassessment of the public sphere from 30 years earlier, Jürgen Habermas hinted in an interview in 2020 that he himself would not undertake an attempt to renew his seminal theory of the democratic public sphere. Fortunately for us political theorists, he reversed course shortly thereafter. Although just as a reaction to the edited volume by Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani, the essay Habermas wrote presents his most elaborate explanation of how he thinks about the digital transformation and the way it affects the democratic public sphere (Habermas, 2022a, in English: 2022b).

In what follows, I want to zoom in on the question of how Habermas approaches digital communication and its societal effects. Like others in this symposium, I have read Habermas’ new essay mostly as a re-assessment of his normative outlook on the overall trajectory of the public sphere in Western liberal democracies. In this respect, the essay represents a break with the trend toward an increasingly positive assessment of the resilience and self-healing powers of democratic publics. To some extent, Habermas returns to the original story of decay of the public sphere which characterized his original work in 1962. Without questioning Habermas’ diagnosis as a whole, I differentiate the effects of the digital constellation on democracy and the public sphere, pointing out counterforces, opportunities for regulation, and a more optimistic conclusion.¹

I will proceed in three steps. First, I will reconstruct how Habermas’ thinking on digital communication has developed in comparison to earlier statements on the matter. Second, I will discuss how the analysis can be challenged and extended by placing it in the context of the wider debate on democracy and digitalization. Third, I will comment on the conclusions that Habermas draws at the end of the essay.

For a long time, Habermas’ 2006 article “Does Democracy still have an epistemic dimension?” (Habermas, 2006) had been the most elaborate reassessment of his public sphere theory. In this piece, Habermas updated his two central writings on the public sphere from the 1990s: the foreword to the re-issue of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas, 1990) and the respective chapters in Between Facts and Norms (Habermas, 1992). Both can themselves be read as updates of Habermas 1962 classic The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

In these texts, Habermas not only elaborated on his views about the public sphere and the institutions of democracy; his outlook on the development of the mass media public sphere also brightened significantly. While The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere tells a story of decay, his newer writings take their cue from the workings of an established and self-reflexive German democracy, where critical media and even TV play a vital role in upholding democratic standards. Habermas, therefore, elaborated a theory of democracy and the public sphere that stresses the importance of the embeddedness of the public sphere in formal and informal political institutions. He highlighted the self-correcting capacities that can be derived from journalism and civil society and acknowledged that he underestimated the capacity of audiences to shape, interpret, and change their media environments (Habermas, 1990, pp. 30–31).

While these writings from the 1990s could not take into account the rise of the Internet, Habermas’ 2006 article at least spent some time on digital communication as a potentially transformative force, with a longer footnote in the original version (Habermas, 2006, p. 423) and about two pages in the extended German version (Habermas, 2008, pp. 161–163). In those paragraphs, Habermas set the tone for his general assessment of digital communication that is still valid today. He argued that, compared to traditional mass media, digital communication channels provide an opportunity for interactive and therefore deliberative exchange, but at the same time they increase the centrifugal forces of the public sphere. With this assessment, Habermas was very much in line with other influential accounts in deliberative democracy (Buchstein, 2002; Sunstein, 2001), even though the general mood was still more buoyant towards the emerging web 2.0. Habermas rightly anticipated the disillusionment with the effects of the technically mediated extension of the public sphere.

Writing at a time when social media was still more centered on networking and the mobile Internet was still in its nascent form, Habermas was not yet ready to make digital communication the central focus of his analysis. Therefore, after the brief detour into digital communications, the argument in his 2006/2008 essay focusses once more on “traditional” challenges to the public sphere: the pressure on journalistic independence and the shallowness of public discourse through the personalization of politics. The digital transformation was seen as complementary and reinforcing these trends, but the overall assessment was still combative.

Fifteen years later, digital communication and social media take center stage, and the mood has darkened significantly. In the new essay, Habermas emphasizes that digital communication constitutes a deep shift in the infrastructure of the public sphere and transforms social and political integration in many ways. The normative yardstick with which he evaluates these developments remains however explicitly unchanged: “What is constitutive of the public sphere is not the disparity between active and passive participation in discourse, but rather the topics that deserve shared interest and the respective professionally examined form and rationality of the contributions that promote mutual understanding about common and different interests” (Habermas, 2022b, p. 165).

Habermas’ overall assessment is reminiscent of the diagnosis from 2006/2008. His main worry is that what gets damaged is a democratic system's ability “to direct the citizens’ attention to the relevant issues that need to be decided and, moreover, ensure the formation of competing public opinions—and that means qualitatively filtered opinions” (Habermas, 2022b, p. 167). But he now qualifies what kind of fragmentation undermines democracy and why it has become entrenched: It is not the proliferation of self-organized issue publics as such but that digital communication gives rise to the “stubborn internal logic of these islands of communication,” which in turn create “competing public spheres” (Habermas, 2022b, p. 162). Fragmentation becomes problematic because it diminishes the chances that differing perspectives can ever be bridged.

All four developments solidify a certain dynamic: the rise of competing and often irreconcilable publics. While this diagnosis might not be novel— neither regarding Habermas’ own writings nor the broader debate on the topic (see William E. Scheuermans contribution)— Habermas once more does a great job of synthesizing debates and tethering them to his broader normative democratic theory. In this way, he creates an analytical depth that is missing from many approaches that use a rather simplistic chances-and-opportunities framework.

However, the essay strikes a new tone regarding the prospects for democratic self-preservation. Habermas seems to lose hope that the forces that mitigated the structural transformation toward a mass media public— the consolidation of democratic values, the development of journalistic standards, and the appropriation of media logics by diverse audiences— still hold. He argues that the digital transformation dissolves the protective barriers that insulated democracy from the capitalist imperatives of mass media. The new gatekeepers have even more power and agonistic politicization has regained momentum.

I have outlined how Habermas’ essay relates to his older writings and emphasized what has been added to his portrayal of the digital public sphere. Next, I probe some of his arguments to see how justified his updated assessment is. Since Habermas is explicit about this not being a grand theory of the digital public sphere, the aim here is not to criticize him for not being up to date with the sprawling interdisciplinary literature on digitalization. Instead, I try to nuance the mechanisms that Habermas himself focuses on and to highlight tendencies that run counter to his overall stance.

In one of the articles in the edited volume that Habermas responds to, Philipp Staab and I have argued that what would be needed to adapt Habermas approach to our digital present would be a resumption of the tripartite analytical structure of his seminal 1962 analysis (Staab & Thiel, 2021, for an English version of the argument: 2022). According to our reconstruction, the strength of Habermas’ original perspective lies in the combination of three analytical foci: the functional logic of specific forms (e.g., literary criticism or mass-media entertainment), the subjectivity of the public (e.g., the bourgeois self-consciousness or consumerism), and the surrounding structures of accumulation (e.g., bourgeois entrepreneurship or Fordism). We argued that in his later work in democratic theory, Habermas had begun to neglect these sociological and economic insights (see also Pinzani, 2022), and suggested that, therefore, when he turned to the digital transformation of the public sphere, he focused exclusively on changes that affected the communicative balance of societies. This made echo chambers and fragmentation the mainstay of his diagnosis. But by doing so, he missed a larger and systemic development: namely, how social media created new incentives for people to express themselves and become active in the public sphere, while at the same time commodifying all this activity. We concluded that, as a result, the “identification of preferences comes to occupy the place once occupied by political contestation and there is an emergence of structural power mechanisms that—geared towards the operations of proprietary markets—seek to monopolise access to social life: representation without the public sphere” (Staab & Thiel, 2022, p. 140).

In the new essay, Habermas has explicitly taken up this criticism (Habermas, 2022b, p. 155) and has found ways to incorporate most of it into his diagnosis. He acknowledges the value and importance of his former approach, and his reformulation is explicitly an attempt to be more precise about the driving forces of the digital transformation. By exploring the rise of the semi-publics, he focusses on a development that is closely related to what Philipp Staab and I had in mind when we portrayed platform societies (Staab & Thiel, 2022). Habermas has produced a rich description that moves back and forth between micro and macro aspects, and is keenly aware of how processes intertwine. By addressing social, economic, and technological drivers of development simultaneously, he manages a much more convincing diagnosis of the digital constellation (Berg et al., 2020, 2022).

Nevertheless, I would argue that his description and analysis of the current situation have certain weaknesses that spring from a one-sided analysis of communicative effects. To illustrate this point, I want to look at: how he understands the role of data and algorithms and their relationship to digital capitalism (a), how he thinks about semi-publics and ties them to the emergence of competing publics (b), and how he discounts the changes to participatory possibilities in digitally mediated environments (c).

(a) When Habermas turns to platform capitalism, it is not just the greed and the power or the oligopolistic structures that he problematizes. What he instead is aiming for is to specify what is new and special about digital capitalism and how it contributes and accelerates the decline of the public sphere. He does so by drawing heavily from Shoshana Zuboff's analysis of surveillance capitalism, which he uses not only to depict the all-conquering logic of social media and the economic incentive for platform companies to manipulate their users, but which is also his main source for understanding what data and algorithm do to societal discourse.

The problem with that reference is that Zuboff in many ways reproduces the very narratives of the technology elites she seeks to expose. While problematizing algorithmic control, Zuboff assumes that the technologies of the firms work as advertised (Doctorow, 2021). She emphasizes the manipulability of individuals, who appear devoid of agency and as pawns in the practices of corporations. For Zuboff, and subsequently for Habermas, little can be done once the platform companies have a sufficiently large treasure trove of data. Both the analysis of behavior and its manipulation are seen as possibilities that can be prohibited, but whose enormous power is beyond question. It is not that we should underestimate the data practices of platform corporations, but there are reasons to doubt their omnipotence, and also to doubt a critique based on their structural position in the capitalist system itself rather than on their current ability to manipulate users (Morozov, 2019).

Furthermore, Habermas has a narrow view of the object of digital capitalism. For him, digitalization continues to be primarily digital communication, that is, networked individuals and their speech acts. But the digital public is not only networking on steroids; digital technologies also affect the digital public sphere in many other direct and indirect ways. The datafication of social life means that nowadays no longer consists only of individual acts of expression and deliberate political action (Cheney-Lippold, 2017). Observing, classifying and archiving behavioral data have become equally important as all signs of activity and behavior can be algorithmically interpreted and made addressable (Burrell & Fourcade, 2021).

From the perspective of a critical theory of the democratic public sphere, at least two things need to be addressed here: the growing and often rather subtle possibilities of controlling access to public space, which are further intensified by the privatization of infrastructure (Gillespie, 2014), and the reconfiguration of the understanding and measurement of public opinion that comes from accessing the public through new forms of data analytics. The possibilities to analyze and predict behavior by collecting and combining all digitally available traces in order to “read” the public have begun to compete with participatory modes of will formation that are traditionally identified with the democratic process. Although these advancements in demoscopic techniques in their current form mostly produce “technocratic surveillance capitalism and an aesthetically pleasing materialization of simulative democracy” (Ulbricht, 2020, p. 435), their promise of comprehensive and neutral representation is appealing to decision makers and can change expectations and structures over time (Anderson & Kreiss, 2013; Dormal, 2021). Adding these developments to Habermas’ analysis would add a systemic dimension to his mostly actor-centered analysis.

(b) A second aspect where I think that Habermas’ analysis falls a bit short is with his description of the reasons for and consequences of the blurring of the public and the private sphere (Habermas, 2022b, p. 165). He describes this blurring as an effect of the plebiscitary infrastructure of social media. According to him, this infrastructure gives rise to freely accessible media spaces where users “can in principle address an anonymous public and solicit its approval” (Habermas, 2022b, p. 166). For Habermas, these semi-publics have an inherent tendency to close themselves off from counterarguments and at the same time to be as loud and overwhelming as possible. Therein, he sees the cause of the erosion of social norms about public and private behavior and as a result the undermining of democracy.

This is problematic in two ways. On the one hand, Habermas’ description stresses two rather specific affordances that seem to him obvious elements of digital communication: anonymity and amplification. But those affordances are not as all-encompassing in today's social media landscape as his description suggests. Among the most important trends in digital communication has been the rise of messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram, which are more group-focused, and as such anonymity is de facto more elusive than at any other point in history. Also, content moderation has become much more widespread and nuanced. While unquestionably many problems continue to exist, and some may have become more acute, semi-publics are a much more complex development that neither always implies a loss of privacy nor always creates the polarizing effects Habermas fears. Ulrike Klinger has, therefore, recommended to use the rise of semi-publics in the digital constellation as an opportunity to develop public sphere research in a more relational perspective (Klinger, 2018), something that Habermas’ approach, with its focus on the big picture of social integration, easily loses sight of.

The centrality that Habermas grants to competing publics is also something to be questioned. While it is undisputed that digital communication brings about a pluralization of communication contexts and, therefore, carries the potential for fragmentation and polarization, it is much harder to show that this is the effect that is dominant in all democratic societies or for most of the citizens (for an extensive literature review on the sociological and psychological effects of social media on social cohesion, see González-Bailón & Lelkes, 2022). Habermas can once again be reproached here for the fact that the layout of his theory promotes a very strong criterion of society-wide integration capacity, which tends to underestimate both the self-stabilizing forces and the normative value of a highly dynamic and complex arrangement of interlocking “sphericules” (Bruns & Highfield, 2016). Apart from the strongly polarized American democracy, empirical work has often shown that the effects of filter bubbles and disinformation are much more specific than assumed in common discourse. Shared spaces and perceptions continue to exist for most people in Western democracies, and the tribalization and radicalization effects are often specific to certain groups and individuals (Bruns, 2019; Jungherr & Schroeder, 2021). Furthermore, platforms might often have an economic interest in confronting persons with unfamiliar views, and being confronted with different views can even contribute to polarization as experimental research has shown (Bail et al., 2018).

(c) Lastly, I also want to point out that there is one aspect that is conspicuously absent from Habermas’ updated considerations: the changing relationship between institutional politics and the wider public sphere. To the extent that this issue is touched on at all, it is in the phrase about the disappointed emancipatory expectations originally associated with the Internet. But the shortcoming of this very schematic critique is that it naively assumes that more direct participation would be an effective measure of democratization.

The effects of digital media, however, have been much more diverse. Digital communication has transformed the ways citizens interact between themselves as well as how citizens observe and approach political institutions. The emergence of new forms of connective action and the accompanying change in the organization of protest and participation has been one signature development in this (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). Also worth noting are innovations in civic tech that attempt to reconfigure the power circuit between the public and politics (Berg et al., 2021). Also deliberate changes, often advocated for by deliberative democratic theorists, deserve more empirical attention than Habermas grants in the essay (Dommett & Verovšek, 2021; Ercan et al., 2019; Landemore, 2021—and see Lafont in this issue). Since Habermas himself has emphasized how much he underestimated the creative appropriation and the many forms of participation in a seemingly deterministic media environment, he should also be more attentive to potential or emerging forms of digital engagement.

Taking the three points together, it becomes clear that Habermas’ essay could be more nuanced. His analysis of the public sphere in the digital constellation focuses almost exclusively on communicative phenomena and exaggerates the consequences of digitalization, primarily due to his overemphasis on technological and economic determinants. There are hardly any developments to complicate the picture, and there is no awareness of alternative trajectories and political scope for action. As a result, not only is his overall assessment overly negative, but the two remedies proposed in the essay—strengthening media literacy and a more active media regulation—seem helpless in the face of his diagnosis.

The first line of argument is admittedly rather implicit but has received much attention due to the two sentences that have been picked up in nearly every review essay on the book: “Just as printing made everyone a potential reader, today digitalization is making everyone into a potential author. But how long did it take until everyone was able to read?” (Habermas, 2022b, p. 160). Here, Habermas seems to suggest that we must find ways to gain society-wide individual competences to deal with the many possibilities that digitalization has brought about. But while catchy, this suggestion falls short of the analytical quality of Habermas’ own analysis. After all, the central point of his update was to elaborate the structural factors that produced a certain form of social fragmentation. A solution along the lines of individual or collective media competence does not do justice to the dynamics and strength of development. As a structural transformation, solutions for the digital constellation must be sought mainly at the systemic level.

Habermas himself also recognizes this and therefore immediately changes track after this rhetorical exacerbation. the last two pages of the essay, he points out that solutions can only be sought in an active political re-regulation of the digital public sphere. He specifies this by emphasizing that regulation must not only address the economic problem of competition regulation but must also ensure that platforms become more responsible for the content they deliver and the communications they afford. Here, Habermas aims to revive the normative standards guaranteed by journalistic gatekeepers now undermined by the business models of platform corporations.

Holding platform companies accountable for their impact on the democratic public sphere has certainly been a rallying cry, at least since 2016. Especially in Europe, the idea of digital sovereignty has taken hold and nowadays explicitly encompasses a wide-ranging re-regulation of the public sphere for democratic reasons. This has borne fruit to the extent that with the recent adoption of the Digital Service Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) Habermas’ claims seem to have been fulfilled to a large degree. Digital constitutionalism is clearly on the rise and in this respect would provide a reason for a much more optimistic outlook (De Gregorio, 2022).

Therefore, Habermas’ rather modest demands at the end of the essay stand in rather stark contrast to his elaborate skepticism in the rest of the article. And it is precisely for this reason that it is worth asking further whether more far-reaching efforts to politically shape the digital public sphere might not be indicated. In line with the differentiations made above, this would mean that a re-regulation of the digital public sphere would not primarily refer to the moderation of content and communications, but take a broader look at how structures of power and domination are perpetuated in networked public spheres (Bennett, 2021; van Dijck et al., 2019). Building on this, changes in the area of public data governance should be considered (Morozov & Bria, 2018), as should the provision of digital public infrastructures as such (Zuckerman, 2020). From a democratic theory perspective, it will also be decisive to upgrade and enhance the powers and possibilities of organized civil society in shaping the dynamics of the digital public sphere (Rieder & Hofmann, 2020). By empowering actors that stand further apart from commercial or political pressures, one could ensure that countervailing powers can operate at eye level and allow for a broader inclusion of interests and perspectives in the design of public spaces that cannot be achieved by governmental oversight alone.