As we all know, viral is the way to go if you want to spread information nowadays (including in China, where it’s the hot new tactic for PR campaigns). But I still got a shock when a friend’s status message linked to JHabermas on Twitter. That’s right — Jürgen Habermas, the preeminent German social theorist, is on Twitter. At first I thought this must be someone posing as Habermas — it was just too surreal to imagine that someone whose works we read in college alongside Marx and Foucault now has a Twitter account. And for anyone who struggled through his two-volume, 922-page opus “The Theory of Communicative Action”, the idea that Habermas would be able to write in 140 character instalments seems ludicrous. But the account seems to be legit, and even the sparse twitterings so far exude Habermasian brilliance (although the 140-character limit does seem to be a challenge).
His most recent post, from January 29th, seems particularly relevant (this was originally four consecutive posts, which I’ve ordered to make the statement easier to read):
It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers. It also counterbalances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes. But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics.
This observation seems important and true for public discussion on the internet in general — we tend to visit websites and read blogs that fit in with our interests and confirm our views, rather than exposing ourselves to opinions that push our thinking and challenge us to find common ground. A particularly poignant example of this is political blogging, where people tend to read and link to blogs that share their own political leanings, creating online bubbles that never really have to touch. Even when certain platforms (like facebook) are widely used, they allow us to stay confined to our own circle of friends. So far, the internet has not proven to be the democratizing force or arena for public discourse that many hoped it would be.
From what I’ve seen, this seems to hold true in China as well. Sometimes topics gain wide exposure online, but more often than not, those topics fall into the category of new, exciting but basically unimportant gossip, and quickly prove to be fads. Any real and potentially threatening discussion is undermined by the 50 cent party and by censorship. The censors can’t be everywhere all the time, but maybe they don’t need to be — small bubbles are not threatening, and when something does expand beyond a small bubble, then they swoop in and block that content.
I don’t know what the solution to this problem is. Having real-name registration seems like it would at least encourage people to be more civil online (a first step towards constructive discussion), but also probably risks stifling debate. Either way, it’s helpful for observers of the online world (like me) to keep in mind that very few online fora represent a “cross-section” of the population, and online comments, debates and surveys should almost always be taken with a grain of salt. The more we try to push ourselves to not just read content that doesn’t fit in with our bias, but also to comment thoughtfully and maybe allow our own positions to be moved, the better it has to be for building a strong society.