A new study suggests that the use of digital platforms poses both risks and democratic possibilities for counterpublics in an era marked by the threat of movements around the world that repudiate liberal democracy.

The findings by Nathan Carpenter, director of the Atlas Social Media Listening Lab at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, and Illinois State University Assistant Professors Byron Craig and Stephen Rahko are featured in “Reconstituting Digital Counterpublics in Times of Crisis: The Case of the United States and the Republic of Georgia” published in Communication and the Public on Dec. 8.

The authors conducted a comparative case study of the way citizens leverage platforms for counterpublic formation in the Republic of Georgia and the U.S. Counterpublics are a subset of publics that stand in conscientious opposition to a dominant ideology and strategically subvert that ideology’s construction in public discourse. “In the digital era, counterpublics have been adapted to the digital realms of the Internet, which has enabled them to build connectivity across time and space in new and unprecedented ways,” according to the study.

The authors explain that “the respective cases of the U.S. and the Republic of Georgia each provide a rich account of the complexities, uncertainties, threats, and possibilities of our current digital era. The U.S. offers an example of an advanced liberal democracy that has integrated the digital tools of Web 2.0 into everyday life. Georgia, by contrast, offers an example of an emerging liberal democracy that has not yet fully integrated these tools.”

They add, “Our findings emphasize that digital counterpublics are fragile and precarious. The cases of the U.S. and Georgia illustrate how the digital means by which counterpublics can form can also be a source of their potential dissolution and undoing. In an era of uncertainty and risk, scholars should continue to study how citizens engage in platform experimentation that digital tools make possible.”

Posted: December 13, 2023
Category: College News
Tagged as: Atlas Social Media Listening Lab, Communication and the Public, Counterpublics, Nathan Carpenter