A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of participating in a roundtable on "Margins in Motion: Platformization, Polarization, and the New Public Sphere", as part of the CORIT: Countering Online Radicalization and Incivility in Italy research project at the University of Urbino, led by the great Giovanni Boccia Artieri.
The full recording of the roundtable — which also involved Katarina Bader, Raquel Recuero, Eugenia Siapera, and Augusto Valeriani — should soon be available online (and I'll add the link to the video then), but I thought I'd also share the text of my opening statement here, which reflected on the possible configurations and dynamics of polarisation.
Centres and Margins: Understanding the Configurations of Polarisation
Hi all, and many thanks to Giovanni for the invitation to contribute to this roundtable discussion. So yes, I’m Axel Bruns, from the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and I currently lead a five-year Australian Laureate Fellowship project investigating the dynamics of polarisation and partisanship in online political debate.
I applied for this in 2021 and we started the project in 2022 — and we couldn’t have foreseen at the time how much and how quickly this whole space would change over the years both in Australia and the world, and both politically and in terms of the platforms and their role in all this. Let me start with that first point, and pick up on Giovanni’s question about the centre and the margins. One thing we’ve realised in our work on polarisation is that there’s no one single pattern for polarisation, regardless of whether we think of polarisation as a current state or an ongoing process. That may be a very simple point to make, but I think it needs to be made, and repeatedly, since so much of the polarisation research especially in political science comes out of the US, and their configuration of polarised factions is quite distinct and doesn’t translate well to any other context.
So perhaps when people think of polarisation what comes to mind first is the American situation: left vs. right, liberals vs. conservatives, Democrats vs. Republicans, and by now also democracy vs. fascism, apparently with both sides fairly evenly matched and a clear division that runs right through the middle of society, and — with blue states and red states, or blue neighbourhoods and red neighbourhoods — can even be shown geographically. That’s … well … terrible, and a sign of a deep political dysfunction that may well turn out to be terminal.
But that is clearly not the configuration of polarisation that we can observe in many other countries. Here in Australia, for example, last year we saw a federal election that delivered a landslide win to a party that calls itself Labor but is in fact thoroughly centrist in its policies, to the detriment both of the Liberal/National Coalition to its right and the Greens to its left. And with the previously dominant conservatives running out of policy ideas as well as credible personnel, it is now the far-right One Nation party that has re-emerged as a growing political force. So here, polarisation is much more between the centre and the margins — but let me not claim a false equivalence between the left and right margins: actually the most fundamental political faultline runs between the centre and the far right.
Something like that is perhaps also true for my other home country, Germany: again, while some media and some politicians seek to draw a false equivalence between the populist BSW on the left and the neo-fascist AfD on the far right, it is the far right which is clearly the much greater danger to democracy — and has of course been formally classified by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a right-wing extremist organisation, which would warrant its exclusion from politics. But because of concerns in the conservative CDU/CSU about working too closely with the left, there are indeed two polarised faultlines in German politics: they divide the established parties SPD, CDU/CSU, and Greens in the centre from the more radical parties to their left, and from the fascists to their right. This is why we’ve seen a run of grand coalitions between centre-right and centre-left parties for many years: not because they’re particularly popular, but because at least federally these are the only options acceptable. But of course that unpopularity also emboldens the fringe parties, and so the so-called ‘firewall’ or ‘Brandmauer’ between the centrist establishment and its fringe competitors is beginning to crack.
So at a political level, what I’m trying to say is that there are many configurations of polarisation: from a central faultline right through the middle of society to stronger or weaker divisions between the democratic centre and its opponents on the left or right fringe; and these divisions are often but not always highly asymmetrical: the balance of strength between left and right, or between centre and peripheries, may vary considerably from case to case, as well as over time. We’re vastly oversimplifying things if we take the overanalysed situation in the US as our model case for polarisation, as political science has tended to do.
And in fact, if we think about polarisation as a process rather than a state, the key question is how those faultlines move over time: for instance, whether the centre shrinks and the fringe grows — as has been the case in Germany, for example — and whether there is a danger that the balance of power might even flip completely and the fringe or fringes grow bigger (in terms of electoral success, influence on public debate, societal acceptance, or economic power) than the centre itself.
And that, of course, is where we come to the question of media in general and platforms in particular: polarisation is about people’s stances towards issues, ideologies, and identities, but those stances are formed especially also through their encounters with and participation in public debate. The current structure of ‘the’ public sphere — or perhaps more appropriately, the current network of publics, existing across a broad range and complex combination of legacy and new platforms and spaces — provides many opportunities for partisans of any kind to express themselves, share information (and disinformation), and form, maintain, and defend their opinions within environments that are supportive of their interests, but also to encounter, argue with, attack, and troll those they see as their opponents.
But much as the established centre in politics has declined in favour of the fringes in many countries, so has the role of legacy media as a central space for public debate, and instead of the idealised ‘public arena’ of orthodox Habermasian public sphere theory we now have this more fractured network of intersecting and interacting publics through which each citizen must pick their own way. As I’ve said elsewhere in my work, the problem here isn’t actually the isolation of groups into echo chambers or filter bubbles that some scholars have claimed, but quite to the contrary the information overload and overwhelm that is caused by our present state of hyperconnectivity. The COVID-19 infodemic and its subsequent mutations demonstrate this: overwhelmed by the complex and difficult information about what caused COVID and how societies had to protect themselves from it, many people chose to ‘do their own research’ and found comforting disinformation about how COVID had been caused by vaccines, 5G, Bill Gates, or the Antichrist instead.
To put it simply, the modern world is too complex for most people (and I wouldn’t exclude myself here either), especially when educators and journalists fail to adequately prepare them for it or inform them about it, and it’s easier to believe in the simple and comforting explanations offered by populists and propagandists, whether that’s Q, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or a sycophantic AI chatbot. And of course that also means that there’s influence, power, and money in offering those simple answers, both for the individuals who provide them and the media, platforms, and other companies that support and amplify these populist voices.
But I don’t want to end this on a completely negative or defeatist note, because at the same time these spaces and platforms are also still available — some more so than others — to those who seek to fight for democracy, and against its enemies, and especially at the present moment of transition it also remains possible to establish new, alternative spaces where propaganda and disinformation are not yet rife. There are ways to organise, and to push back, available to us all, and they are being used more effectively at least in some countries and some contexts — those interventions must be recognised and nurtured.
I’ll leave it there for now.
