Does Greater Media Choice Actually Fragment the Public Sphere?

The second day at ECREA 2024 starts with yet another panel on polarisation, with begins with a paper by Diógenes Lycarião. His interest is in testing the hypothesis that digitalisation and platformisation are fragmenting the public sphere. This is critical since much of the scholarly discussion on this public sphere fragmentation hypothesis to date builds on unverified assumptions. This has two elements: the idea that the expansion of the mediasphere fragments the public sphere, and the suggestion that this then causes phenomena such as ‘echo chambers’ or polarisation.

First, then, is an expansion in media choice actually fragmenting the public sphere? Such claims actually predate the emergence of digital and social media, yet evidence is scant: indeed, an expansion in media choices can be seen as a net positive for democratic societies – it can enable a better and more diversely informed citizenry.

A secondary concern, however, is the erosion of a shared public agenda. Here we need to define what we mean by a functional public sphere – considering public agendas, media agendas, and political agendas. Types of fragmentation that scholars are concerned about include a fragmentation of the public agenda along partisan or ideological lines, which provides less room for civic conversation and concentrates public attention to a handful of key issues – this might be measured through surveys of public attention and attitudes towards such issues; a decrease in agenda convergence, where there is diminishing overlap between political, media, and public agendas and political actors thus act on a skewed perception of public priorities – this may be measured through an assessment of intermedia convergence; or an erosion of concentrated public attention to politics, where political actors realise that only their own hyperpartisan followers still pay attention to politics and therefore shape agendas specifically to their interests – this might be assessed through cross-referencing politicians’ activities with news habits.

Although digitalisation and platformisation are a global phenomenon, there is little evidence that they themselves disrupt the public sphere in the same way around the world. Specific domestic factors are usually considerably more powerful.