Skip to content
BY 4.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter Open Access December 31, 2019

Surfing the Public Square: On Worldlessness, Social Media, and the Dissolution of the Polis

  • Sue Spaid EMAIL logo
From the journal Open Philosophy

Abstract

This paper employs Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the social, which lacks location and mandates conformity, to evaluate social media’s: a) challenge to the polis, b) relationship to the social, b) influence on private space, d) impact on public space, and e) virus-like capacity to capture, mimic, and replicate the agonistic polis, where “everything [is] decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence.” Using Arendt’s exact language, this paper begins by discussing how she differentiated the political, private, social, and public realms. After explaining how online activities resemble (or not) her notion of the social, I demonstrate how the rise of the social, which she characterized as dominated by behavior (not action), ruled by nobody and occurring nowhere, continues to eclipse both private and public space at an alarming pace. Finally, I discuss the ramifications of social media’s setting the stage for worldlessness to spin out of control, as the public square becomes an intangible web. Unlike an Arendtian web of worldly human relationships that fosters individuality and enables excellence to be publicly tested, social media feeds a craving for kinship and connection, however remotely. Leaving such needs unfulfilled, social media risks to trump bios politicos.

References

Arendt, Hannah. Peter Baehr (ed.). The Portable Hannah Arendt. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.Search in Google Scholar

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.Search in Google Scholar

Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981.Search in Google Scholar

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.Search in Google Scholar

Benkler, Yochai. The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Trumphs over Self-Interest. New York: Crown Publishing, 2011.Search in Google Scholar

Chang, Kenneth. “Obama Plan Privatizes Astronaut Launchings,” New York Times, January 29, 2010, p. A10.Search in Google Scholar

Frick, Marie-Luisa and Andreas Oberprantacher. “Shared is not yet Sharing, Or: What Makes Social Networking Services Public?” International Review of Information Ethics, Vol. 15 (2011).10.29173/irie220Search in Google Scholar

Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, London: Polity Press, 2007.Search in Google Scholar

Johnson, Steven. Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age, New York: Penguin Books, 2012.Search in Google Scholar

Morozov, Evgeny. “Why Social Movements Should Ignore Social Media,” The New Republic, February 5, 2013. https://newrepublic.com/article/112189/social-media-doesnt-always-help-social-movements Accessed 3 November 2019.Search in Google Scholar

Rothstein, Adam. “Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and Social Media,” December 2015. http://www.poszu.com/hannah-arendt-and-social-media.html Accessed 2 November 2019.Search in Google Scholar

Salikov, Alexey. “Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Rethinking the Public Sphere in the Age of Social Media,” Russian Sociological Review, Vol. 17 (2018), 88-102.Search in Google Scholar

Schwarz, Elke. “@hannah_arendt: An Arendtian Critique of Online Social Networks,” Millennium Journal of International Studies, Vol. 43 (1) (2014), 165-186.10.1177/0305829814541505Search in Google Scholar

“Social Networking Report”. New York: Nielsen, 2009.Search in Google Scholar

Spaid, Sue. “Rewalking the Public Square: Are Social Networking Sites (Just) Social?” Third Hannah Arendt Circle, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, 2009.Search in Google Scholar

Received: 2019-08-20
Accepted: 2019-11-14
Published Online: 2019-12-31

© 2019 Sue Spaid, published by De Gruyter

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Downloaded on 19.3.2024 from https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opphil-2019-0048/html
Scroll to top button