The Networked Democratic Spectator

Abstract

In this brief essay, I argue that the idea of “social media” is symbolically powerful in the political domain precisely because political actors conflate it broadly with “social relations” and, even more, “public opinion.” To do so, I draw on two recent empirical studies I conducted that analyze social media and contemporary media events. These studies reveal that social media platforms provide unprecedented opportunities for people to participate in political discourse. I argue that political actors see the discourse on social media that develops around media events as a representation of public opinion (even though this is problematic as an empirical matter). I conclude by suggesting that especially at extraordinary moments, public narratives about social media articulate the normative democratic ideal that these platforms create a collective social space for, and public representation of, the “people.”

As James Carey (2008) famously argued, we live through the concepts we have for understanding the world. “Social media” is an especially in-artful term. As José Van Dijck (2013) argues, all media are social by definition. And yet, the idea of distinctly “social” media conjures images of organic forms of community that elide all the ways social media are many things, including platforms for monetizing social relations (Van Dijck, 2013).

Van Dijck is right about the problematic ways we talk about “social media.” However, in this brief essay, I argue that the idea of “social media” is symbolically powerful in the political domain precisely because political actors conflate it broadly with “social relations” and, even more, “public opinion.” To do so, I draw on two recent empirical studies I conducted that analyze social media and contemporary media events (Kreiss, 2014; Kreiss, Meadows, & Remensperger, 2014). These studies reveal that social media platforms provide unprecedented opportunities for people to participate in political discourse. Political actors see the discourse on social media that develops around media events as a representation of public opinion (even though this is problematic as an empirical matter). I conclude by suggesting that, especially at extraordinary moments, public narratives about social media articulate the normative democratic ideal that these platforms create a collective social space for, and public representation of, the “people.”

In an essay about the history of the idea of “public opinion” and its link to the “people,” John Durham Peters (1995) argues that

“The people” is problematic, since it cannot appear to itself “in person” as it were. The scale of modern social orders prevents assembly of the whole populace: no stadium could contain them all. Symbolic representations of the social whole must therefore be circulated before the dispersed people. If persuasive, these representations can then invite them to act as a unified body. (p. 17)

As Peters argues, the “fiction” of the representation of the public creates the “fact” of its reality. That said, the central question in much democratic and media theory over the past five decades is just how much the “public” should be something citizens participate in, versus something that is only visible and known, what Peters (1995) calls “the social-political” and the “visual-intellectual” senses of the public, respectively (p. 14). While much social activism and democratic theory emphasizes the normative ideal of a participatory citizenry, scholars of media events hold up mass visual–intellectual spectacles as the basis for social solidarity, and argue that citizens are far from the passive dupes of mass media, even though they are not participants in these events (Dayan & Katz, 1992).

Social media alter both the social–political and visual–intellectual aspects of the public. One way to illustrate these changes is to examine contemporary media events. Social media afford “active spectatorship” around media events (Kreiss et al., 2014). People participate and are “active” in voicing critiques or endorsements of media events through social media, or just plain ignore them, but they also remain spectators in terms of directing their course. Active spectatorship is not inconsequential, or simply a scaling of private living room conversations. Social media platforms provide a new socio-technical means of producing and representing public opinion, and it is more dynamic, interactive, and continuously unfolding than other means, such as surveys. And, as my work on the 2012 presidential campaigns and Twitter reveals (Kreiss, 2014), journalists see social media discourse around media events as a form of public opinion and base their evaluations of candidates’ performances in part on the sentiment they perceive on these platforms. Furthermore, the political elites who produce media events cannot ignore these active audiences exercising performative scrutiny. How journalists interpret sentiment on social media around events such as public debates spills over into their coverage and the questions they ask of political actors. Political staffers feel obligated to monitor social media sentiment around events and take it seriously enough to spend weeks planning how to influence it.

While social media do not eliminate problems of scale, platforms such as Twitter afford the gathering of dispersed, and even global, spectators around media events. In doing so, social media create opportunities for new public spaces and afford participation within them. While there is no guaranteed right to be heard, and communicative hierarchies take shape in these spaces, social media provide the means for spectators themselves to shape public discourse. In the process, social media alter the symbolic representations of the public and the actors empowered to create them. What people gathering around media events communicatively do is conducted in public and represented as public opinion by journalists and political elites.

The idea of “social media” is as much a fiction as “public opinion” is. Social media refers to platforms with a particular set of affordances, but everyday discourse conflates social media with public opinion itself. It is a fiction, however, that constitutes the reality political elites have to live in and take account of. At rare but significant moments, social media afford and even make possible collective identification, participation, and social action (Papacharissi, 2014). Meanwhile, a collective narrative emerges around significant events such as the Arab Spring that holds it was the people’s voice that elites could not flee from, regardless of the actual causal relationship between social media and social outcomes. These narratives around the power of social media are meaningful for what they reveal and reify, namely, an abiding democratic faith in the people as sovereign.