Constructing Digital Democracies: Facebook, Arendt, and the Politics of Design

Abstract

Deliberative democracy requires both equality and difference, with structures that organize a cohesive public while still accommodating the unique perspectives of each participant. While institutions like laws and norms can help to provide this balance, the built environment also plays a role supporting democratic politics—both on- and off-line. In this article, I use the work of Hannah Arendt to articulate two characteristics the built environment needs to support democratic politics: it must (1) serves as a common world, drawing users together and emphasizing their common interests and must also (2) preserve spaces of appearance, accommodating diverse perspectives and inviting disagreement. I, then, turn to the example of Facebook to show how these characteristics can be used as criteria for evaluating how well a particular digital platform supports democratic politics and providing alternative mechanisms these sites might use to fulfill their role as a public realm.

Online democracy: Applying Hannah Arendt's model of democracy to the internet

“…12 Forestal (2021) discusses how to establish a common world specifically on Facebook. She argues that the way to do this is through Facebook Groups,comments,and GIFs (p. 39).…”

Political Theory of the Digital Constellation

“…Approaches inspired by the sociology of technology in movement research or the sociology of work conceptualise the relationship as a contested field in which the concrete design of the technical structuring of social and political orders is fought over (Kurban et al 2017;Milan and Gutierrez 2018;Schaupp 2021). It is precisely this politicisation of the design of digital infrastructures that is increasingly echoed in political theory (see, for example, Berg and Staemmler 2020;Forestal 2021).…”

The Right to Have Digital Rights in Smart Cities

“…Recently, a range of literature about digital rights has appeared in different disciplinary perspectives [37,39,41,44,51,59,81,88] alongside a large corpus encompassing high-profile reports, institutional declarations in different supranational [56], national, regional, and global contexts as well as empirical datasets such as atlases [89] and rankings [90]. On the one hand, for several authors, algorithmic disruption has raised the question of how citizenship can be redefined through the incorporation of new digital rights related to the status of a citizen in cyberspace-access, openness, net-neutrality, digital privacy, data encryption, protection and control, digital/data/technological sovereignty [75,85,91].…”

“…This quotation may resemble the current post-COVID-19 algorithmic times, when, in the age of digitisation and datafication, dealing responsibly with citizens' rights and data poses a dilemma: on the one hand, there is the tangible added value of processing citizens' personal data by private sector organisations, but on the other hand, there is the claim that individuals should retain control over these data and consequently derived civilian rights [38][39][40][41][42]. Amid surveillance capitalism and beyond a human rights-based approach of Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance [43,44], state-based dataveillance mechanisms like biometrics [45], vaccine passports [46][47][48][49], biobanks, and the Internet within the context of citizenship inevitably force us to reclaim 'the right to have digital rights' [49][50][51][52][53].…”