12.01.2014 The new battleground of ideas
Is Facebook a realm of political propaganda for the various societal actors or is it a space which will lead to the renewal of an utterly needed social contract?
By Raheem Ul Haque
Public sphere is a concept articulating a sphere for dialogue and discussion open to all citizens that could lead to the formation of public opinion after all perspectives had been deliberated upon.
The two main conceptual assumptions that have been critiqued by scholars over the years and can be considered an evaluatory mechanism in assessing the public sphere and thus deliberative democratic potential are: one, the extent of citizen participation in dialogue and discussion on matters political; and two, the quality of dialogue.
Facebook, a social networking site which began in 2004, became popular in Pakistan later in the decade. Currently, 11.4 million users residing in Pakistan have an account on Facebook and bandwidth usage shows that Facebook is one of the most active sites in Pakistan.
However, these users constitute 80-85 per cent of those who interact on pages and groups related to Pakistan, thus suggesting a vibrant involvement of also the expatriate Pakistani population living in Saudi Arabia, Britain, USA, UAE and other countries. Thus, Facebook can be accepted as greatly broadening the participation of citizens in the public arena.
In terms of demography, it is dominated by the youth (13-30 years) who make up 80 per cent of total Pakistani users as against 67 per cent of the population under the age of 30. Similarly, Facebook also lacks representative qualities based on gender or class as only 30 per cent of the youth (age 13-29) are females while the rural, illiterate and under-privileged sections are heavily under-represented. However, with increased access to the internet through mobile phones in Pakistan, this proportion is changing fast, especially as Smart Phones become cheaper owing to technological innovation and competition.
For political actors, Facebook thus becomes an effective tool for political propaganda and the most important youth public space to be captured while for researchers, it is an effective medium to assess the extent of polarisation of society through content analysis of youth interactions.
Thus, overall Facebook fulfills the participatory criteria of the public sphere, specifically of youth public sphere as it bypasses the gate-keeping and sanctions involved in the old media (newspapers, TV, radio) while facilitating many to many (M-M) interaction among anonymous participants and broadening interaction.
However, it is not just because Facebook has created a market place for the commons that political actors increasingly see it as the new battleground of ideas but because of its association with other features: one, that it has become the main source of information for the millennium generation, two, that it empowers a single person to engage many arenas and targets of power with their messages having viral acceptance through reproduction (sharing) and attestation (like) across communities.
As research suggests, Facebook politics, a form of personalised politics, has succeeded more than other forms in occupying contemporary political discourse, and that Facebook engagement can spur political participation. I can attest to Facebook’s influence on youth’s political comprehension as more than 80 per cent of the youth with access to Facebook thought that Malala was not shot as against the marginalised youth with access only to mainstream media who thought otherwise.
While the above makes a great case for Facebook being a contested realm for the formation of public opinion, it needs to be noted that in the theoretical parlance of public sphere, there is a difference between “opinion” which is personalised and “public opinion” which is only formed after due deliberation among participants. Thus the question remains: What is the quality of dialogue on Facebook and does interaction on Facebook enhance deliberative aspects among participants? To put it simply, is Facebook a realm of political propaganda for the various societal actors or is it a space which will lead to the renewal of an utterly needed social contract.
Scholars are quite pessimistic about Facebook’s role in strengthening the deliberative aspect of public sphere. Instead, they argue, that while broadening communication, it has also led to increased fragmentation. Some argue that Facebook can further erode collective life through dangerous balkanisation with extremism as the potential outcome.
Preliminary results of my unfinished research are closer to the pessimists but then Facebook is but a continuation of the polarisation that exists offline in Pakistan. We live in an era of fragmentation where multitudes of publics (where individuals interact) exist, and each person or people of a particular ideology, class etc. want to capture the public. Thus, the purpose is not to engage in reason based argumentation in the spirit of dialogue leading to a consensus based “public opinion” but instead to forcefully articulate their opinion in the spirit of propaganda to capture public space.
For political actors, Facebook thus becomes an effective tool for political propaganda and the most important youth public space to be captured while for researchers, it is an effective medium to assess the extent of polarisation of society through content analysis of youth interactions.