By Hipolito Rodriguez on August 26, 2024
Elon Musk, source: Ted
German philosopher Jürgen Habermas showed, 60 years ago, how the public sphere or sphere of public opinion was constructed. His analysis played an important role when Germany was debating the possibilities of having a critical press in the face of a polarization that paralyzed or disoriented reflection in public spaces. Thanks to Habermas’ work, today we realize how the printed press played a fundamental role in the construction of a reflexive and critical citizenship in the Cold War era.
From that time to the present day, it is clear that the proliferation of digital media has severely disrupted the future of the printed press: its readers have moved to digital screens. Thus, a sphere of capital accumulation was opened that seriously shook the economics and technology of the world’s leading newspapers.
Those who understood the importance of this new communication channel -the networks- were able to move into the new information scenario and survived the collapse of the print media. The amounts of capital in this new technological field allowed a new stage of centralization and economic concentration.
For this reason, the blessed social networks have an ambiguous role. They are a surface where all kinds of messages circulate, but their owner can inhibit or enhance the messages that best suit his business. If in Habermas’ time it was valid to recover the message of the Enlightenment – “dare to think for yourself”-, in the 21st century we are witnessing a regression with consequences that are still unclear.
By this I mean that digital media, unlike print media, play on a different scale: they are by their nature potentially global and, therefore, their messages move over a more powerful strategic field. Whoever controls the network can, in short, direct the flow of communication and set limits to opinions and global collective reflection. Public opinion experiences in this sense an ambivalent situation: it can count on a freer territory, but also a more controllable or manipulable one.
Edward Snowden showed that screen readers are also, in turn, read. That the user of a cell phone is being watched and his tastes and inclinations are the subject of an inventory that companies take advantage of to better sell their products. In this context, it is not difficult to understand why Elon Musk finally decided to take over Twitter. His ability to do business in the new field opened up by digital communications was evident from very early on: he was among the first to install mechanisms to make payments via the Internet (PayPal).
Now he continues with this logic: subsuming communication networks to the logic of capital communication. However, he is now crossing a frontier and openly going beyond the economy: by taking over the network he baptized as X, he is appropriating an instrument to promote his business and those entities of power that are favorable to his business projects. This is what is happening right now: by extending its influence to the political field, it promotes Trump, sabotages Kamala Harris, bans pro-Palestinian messages, and panders to Milei, just to mention some of its more colorful messages.
The fact that the European Union has reminded him that there are codes of conduct in the field of communications, regulations that he would have to abide by in the old continent, and that he has responded to the emissaries with a mocking tone, only shows us how sympathetic this kind of digital authoritarianism can be. If he can censor, will there be anyone who can set a limit? Isn’t democracy at risk with these kinds of millionaires are openly manipulating the channels where political messages flow?
Hipolito Rodriguez has a doctorate in social sciences
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English