Since the 1990s, it has been discussed whether the Internet creates new opportunities for democracy. It is certain that the Internet provides a large network of communication. But does it create democratic communities? Or is the Internet a breeding ground for radicalization? The questions can hardly be answered unambiguously. However, they are basic analysis tools with which you can get closer to the complex and changing internet that permeates large parts of our society.
Since the turn of the millennium, it has been widely debated whether the Internet is democracy's friend or foe. However, the Internet is so vast and hosts countless arenas, each with its own way of functioning. Some spaces are democratic while others are not. You can compare the Internet to the Palace of Versailles: it is constantly being rebuilt, which means that conclusions about the Internet can change rapidly as its structures – the algorithms or the market conditions – change.
In this article you will get an insight into the development of the internet with a focus on the formation of communities. From thinking that the Internet was the new paradise of open and democratic communities to being understood as polarizing and divisive. The development puts our own understanding at stake, and invites us to ask the almost impossible question: What does the Internet do to our communities and thereby also to society today?
The popular internet
When the Internet was popularized in the early 1990s, it was mostly used for writing e-mails and finding information. [1] The Internet was one large dynamic archive of various websites, news portals and search engines that offered to sort the mass of information, for example American Yahoo! (1994), Danish Jubii (1995) or American Google (1998).
It was only later, in the mid-00s, that social platforms became the Internet's distinguishing feature. Most people know MySpace (2003), Skype (2003), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005) or Twitter (2006). These platforms enabled people to communicate with each other through different types of media and content (music, video, audio, text).
This development led researchers and social actors to describe the Internet in hopeful terms as a new and free place. Here you could connect with other people with whom you shared interests, even if you did not live in the same neighbourhood. The platforms were open to everyone, and communities could be formed across both geographical and social divides.
New conditions for communities
In The Wealth of Networks (2006), Harvard professor Yochai Benkler describes how the internet, with the rise of social media, broke with the well-established and well-consolidated media landscape of the 20th century. The Internet was then radically different from the newspaper. In the early 2000s, the Internet created some completely unique and, according to Benkler, fundamentally better conditions for people's communal desire to share information, knowledge and political visions with each other.
According to Benkler, two aspects in particular were new: the production and distribution of information. The Internet was, firstly, characterized by bypassing the production apparatus of newspapers. And therefore also bypassing the newspapers' procedures for quality assurance. Now you no longer had to go through an editor to publish your writings. Instead, they could appear on one's personal blog, on Twitter or on one's YouTube channel. Because if you had an internet connection, it was up to you to share your thoughts with your readers. On the Internet, the costs of publishing were thus significantly reduced compared to the regular reader's letter.
Secondly, the Internet removed the "gatekeeper function" of the established media. In other words, the function that the established media together were the only access to news, analysis and so on. The Internet was characterized by having a different structure, which meant that information was spread or distributed over many networks from which it could also be accessed. Therefore, it was extremely difficult, if not almost impossible, to control access to information. As soon as something was published in one place, it could be shared and appear elsewhere on the Internet. If you were interested in deleting something from the Internet, you had to check not only the source, but also all its copies.
Against this background, Benkler also argues that the Internet is democratizing in 2006. Benkler analyzes various cases that show that the Internet makes it possible for people to organize themselves politically. He points out that network-based communities have an influence on the political agenda and even on legislation. This is also confirmed later, in 2015, when Benkler's research team maps how democratic online demonstrations in the USA actually seem to outperform professional or strategic lobbyists, thereby acquiring real influence on the political system (Benkler et al. 2015; Faris et al. 2015).
The fragmentation of public space: Is the internet polarizing?
In contrast to Benkler, Cass Sunstein (2007) describes a more bleak picture of the flourishing communities in the Internet's social arenas. The Internet is not democratic, but polarizing because people orient themselves towards like-minded people. Sunstein (2009) cites experiments that show that when people meet with others of the same political persuasion, the group's overall stance becomes radicalized. So, when two groups (for example a right-wing and a left-wing group) do not talk to each other across the board, but only discuss a matter internally within the group, then the two groups distance themselves more from each other . The two political communities are polarizing.
Polarization has become a huge field of research within the last ten years. Several experiments have been carried out and have given rise to many different, nuanced conclusions. But the Internet is not one thing, as said above. It is large and always under renovation. Therefore, claims that the Internet is polarizing or vice versa; generally democratic at best very context dependent. Let's look at two forms of polarization.
Echo chambers and filter bubbles: Two myths?
In line with the polarization debates, people have also often talked about echo chambers and filter bubbles.
Echo chambers occur when you find yourself in a forum where like-minded people repeat the same claims and assumptions that you carry yourself (you hear your "echo"). You therefore do not hear claims that challenge your own political position. Echo chambers have especially been linked to Twitter (Colleoni, Rozza, and Arvidsson 2014), but even the existence of echo chambers is debated. For example, Elizabeth Dubois and Grant Blank (2018) have shown that the probability of ending up in an echo chamber is small for a politically interested person when the person has the opportunity to choose between many different platforms, which is often the case on the internet today. It has also been shown that echo chambers are not as frequent as one would think (Barberá et al. 2015).
With the concept of filter bubbles , Eli Pariser (2011) emphasized that search engines' algorithmic filtering of information gave rise to the fact that each Internet user was closed in his own isolated mini-world: You only received search results that suited your needs, because the Internet only gave more of the same. In this way, it can be argued that algorithms narrow and reinforce one's worldview (see also Gillespie 2014). However, most recently Axel Bruns (2019) has warned that Pariser's filter bubble phenomenon is exaggerated. He argues that the greatest danger to political disagreements is people's, not search engines', own bias and favoritism of sources.
These polarizing phenomena have probably brought with them a certain dramatic sensationalism, both in the media and in the research world. This does not mean that they should be dismissed as myths, but rather that we should be careful not to exaggerate them. At the same time, we can also use them to think about how we can imagine arranging ourselves in new digital communities. And here filter bubbles and echo chambers are helpful ideal images of how democratic communities should preferably not function.
The Internet has guests
Today, the public of the Internet runs on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and countless other communication platforms. In recent years, some researchers have focused on so-called social bots , often abbreviated bots . It is a type of algorithm that is programmed to mimic human behavior on the Internet. Bots can therefore deceive a real person by expressing an opinion, and you can thus come to believe that you are surrounded by like-minded people without being so. Thereby, bots can create changes in the opinion environment, so that they "ultimately influence the ideas, news and opinions to which we are exposed" (Varol et al. 2017, 280; see also Bessi and Ferrara 2016; Ferrara et al. 2016) (my translation).
Bots are important instruments in creating a notion of the emergence of political communities where there are mainly no communities at all. For example, you can buy Twitter bots or more Instagram followers, which confirm an image that many people like an organization or a politician. Hacker Andrés Sepulveda has claimed that he used bots to “create false flows of enthusiasm and derision” during the 2012 Mexican election campaign (Robertson, Riley, and Willis 2016). Here he worked for the presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto - who won. Sepulveda's testimony was scientifically confirmed by Samantha Bradshaw and Philip Howard (2017).
Outlook
The social arenas of the Internet permeate our society today. When we talk about the internet in general, polarization and other radicalizing dynamics live side by side with democratizing communities. The Internet is an infrastructure that is constantly being rebuilt. That's why we have to look at it. Discuss it. And put words behind our thoughts about what the internet could become if we could choose.
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