Social Media, Radical Democracy, and the Popular Public Sphere: Digital Politics in Contemporary France

Abstract

Most of contemporary scholarship on social media in democratic theory revolves (either implicitly or explicitly) around deliberative ideals. However, deliberative democracy struggles to accommodate social media’s logics—more saloon than salon—and as a result too often leads into a pessimistic impasse. To rethink social media’s democratic potential, this dissertation instead asks: how might we see social media if the public sphere was viewed from a more pluralistic, and normatively open, perspective? Can new democratic promises be gleaned in digital practices that are otherwise incompatible with deliberative norms? What emancipatory perspectives can we retain from social media, and what new shortcomings do we see, when we look at them from a radical-democratic, instead of a deliberative, perspective? To answer these questions, this dissertation first reframes debates around the “new structural transformation of the public sphere” by recovering under-appreciated insights in the thought of Jürgen Habermas and of some of his critics, which together sketch an alternative conceptualization of the public sphere as the site of a struggle between dominant and oppositional publics. Defending the relevance of this reconceptualization to understanding social media’s role in democracy, this dissertation contends that social media have benefited the oppositional public sphere and defends a new vocabulary—that of the “popular public sphere”—as capturing more saliently the democratic potential of oppositional publics in our digital present. Just as liberal norms served as the backdrop to the bourgeois public sphere depicted by Habermas, the dissertation argues that the popular public sphere can be tied back to a radical-democratic normative horizon— one seeking to displace politics from elites to the demos. Combining digital and physical ethnography with qualitative interviews, the study reconstructs radical-democratic potentialities from social media practices in contemporary France by investigating (1) a local movement—#saccageparis—born on Twitter and contesting the urban planning policies of Paris’s mayor; (2) a national debate that occurred in early 2023 over the pension law reform implemented by the French government and; (3) a digital space—Reddit’s r/france forum—on which anonymous users have heated, and sophisticated, political discussions. Anchored in the Frankfurt School’s methodological tradition of immanent critique, the dissertation builds normative theorizing from the ground up by tracing democratic promises in the digital practices of popular publics. Adopting such methodology allows for a novel critique of social media’s place in democracy—one that reclaims their emancipatory potential while remaining a staunch critique of their current logics and uses. The dissertation draws out from the fieldwork five radical-democratic promises—radical inclusion, autonomy, resistance to elite domination, agonism, and a critique of representation— that are in practice frustrated by social media’s political economy, logics, and place in France’s institutional system. In short, the emancipatory potentialities of social media remain today unrealized, clouded by social, economic, and political domination. However, against the pessimism that today prevails among scholars and pundits, these potentialities also point toward a future in which social media might serve to reconcile democracy with one of its buried promises: popular rule.