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The way in which the problem is conceived decides what specific suggestions are entertained and which are dismissed; what data are selected and which rejected; it is the criterion for relevancy and irrelevancy of hypothesis and conceptual structures. . . a problem well put is half-solved.
–John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry
In August 2014, Jezebel's comment section was overwhelmed with GIFs of violent pornography.Footnote 1 Ordinarily, stories on Jezebel, a site dedicated to “what contemporary women want to talk about. . . [including] savvy pop culture, fashion truths, progressive advice, female heroes, entertainment realities, cultural criticism, and a healthier take on female aspiration,” are followed by comments that extend, challenge, or joke about the content of the story (“Jezebel” n.d.). That August, however, the regular comments were drowned out with posts featuring GIF after GIF of violent rape, often with the Jezebel logo emblazoned across the image (Staff Reference Staff2014). For a site that largely prides itself on creating and promoting safe space(s) for the discussion of women's issues, these acts of aggressive trolling were particularly effective at disrupting the normal flow of conversation on the site. Confronting users with graphic images where they anticipated casual commentary, the actions of Jezebel's troll violated the expectations of safety and civility that Jezebel's user-base, comprised largely of women, anticipated when visiting the site.
In an open letter to Gawker Media, the site's parent company, Jezebel's staff identified the source of the problem as Kinja, Gawker's company-wide commenting platform:
For months, an individual or individuals has been using anonymous, untraceable burner accounts to post gifs of violent pornography in the discussion section of stories on Jezebel. The images arrive in a barrage, and the only way to get rid of them from the website is if a staffer individually dismisses the comments and manually bans the commenter. But because IP addresses aren't recorded on burner accounts, literally nothing is stopping this individual or individuals from signing up for another, and posting another wave of violent images. . . It's like playing whack-a-mole with a sociopathic Hydra. (Staff Reference Staff2014)
Initially unveiled as a new discussion platform in June 2012, Kinja was quickly rolled out across the Gawker Media empire. By April 2013 all content on Gawker's sites was organized with Kinja. More than a simple redesign, Kinja restructured the very architecture of these sites in order to promote a new era of reader-writer integration.Footnote 2 As one of these changes, Kinja introduced “burner accounts” that would make it “ridiculously easy, almost scary” to comment anonymously on the Gawker sites (Davis Reference Davis2012).Footnote 3 Designed to protect the identity of potential tipsters, these changes also made it easy for trolls to disrupt the normal activity of the site in a particularly aggressive way. Like their readers, who had “the misfortune of starting their day with some excessively violent images,” the Jezebel staff writers were forced into an uncomfortable position, “required to view and interact with violent pornography and gore as part of [their] jobs” (Staff Reference Staff2014). As Gawker gained increasingly bad press for failing to protect its employees, Kinja was left shouldering the blame for Jezebel's serious troll problem and the resulting loss of site traffic (Stoeffel Reference Stoeffel2012).
As a particularly aggressive conflict between dominant community norms and the actions of a dissenting minority, the Jezebel troll episode exemplifies one of the challenges of building democratic communities in a digital environment. Trolling is, in my interpretation, a specific kind of political activity that is marked by a refusal to participate in the kind of productive exchange of ideas that marks democratic politics. Instead of engaging in activity marked by democratic principles of reciprocity, accommodation, and inclusion, trolls actively work to dominate and control the conversations on any given site. Their actions, though ostensibly done “for the lulz,” are clearly intended to disrupt—even end—discussions. While disruption is not always a destructive act, as Sanders (Reference Sanders1997) and Young (Reference Young2001) have shown, it is the hallmark of a troll to refuse to utilize its creative possibilities. Trolls are not simply opponents or critics of a particular position. Instead, trolls work to silence; in so doing, they close off future possibilities for political action instead of opening them. Distinguishing trolls from activists, however, can be difficult; the challenge of preventing the former while remaining open to the latter is one that democratic theorists have yet to adequately address.
As was the case in the Jezebel example, the internet's unchecked anonymity is often blamed for the appalling behavior of trolls (Adams Reference Adams2011; Doig Reference Doig2008). As a result, sites have turned to “real names,” “verified” identities, and “persistent pseudonyms” to address the problem of trolls by stripping away the cloak of anonymity and linking online activity with offline identities. Since no one wants the reputation of being a troll, according to this logic, policies that demand real names or “verified” identities will compel “good behavior” by tapping into individuals’ vested interest in protecting their (single, stable) identity. Naming policies are therefore grounded in an individualistic understanding of public life that presupposes the value of rational discourse, assumes this value is universally shared, and concludes that the problem of trolls is simply one of problematic individuals. By reintroducing “real-life” social consequences and the “discipline of reason” into the otherwise anarchic digital environment, naming policies have become the most popular mechanism for “unmasking” trolls and thereby regulating digital communities.Footnote 4
The reputational considerations behind naming policies are no doubt real—good reputations are often the product of conscious efforts on the part of individuals. But the assumption that naming policies will compel good behavior has two major flaws. First, it ignores the specific conditions under which reputation matters. Individual political actors are not always invested in “playing nice” and maintaining good reputations, but can instead be made to care about how others perceive them through mechanisms like formal institutions, informal social networks, or the processes of democratic deliberation (see Ackerman and Fishkin Reference Ackerman and Fishkin2003; Barber Reference Barber1984; Putnam Reference Putnam1993; Ulbert and Risse Reference Ulbert and Risse2005). Absent this context, there is no reason to think that names alone will produce the same results, or that a lack of names would thwart them (See Boyd Reference Boyd2012).
Second, relying on naming policies—and the corresponding norms of rational discourse—to compel good behavior disincentivizes alternative modes of discourse along the lines of Iris Marion Young's (Reference Young2001) “activist challenges.” Though it may discourage actors like the Jezebel troll from flooding the comment section with offensive GIFs, for example, a real-name requirement on Jezebel would also likely dissuade some commenters (such as the potential tipsters for whom burner accounts were initially intended) from contributing unpopular perspectives that could nevertheless lead to innovative and productive conversations on the site. In order to build communities that incentivize individual investment while also remaining welcoming to activist challenges, I argue, we should study the role of space in generating the kind of democratic sensibilities that would separate anonymous tipsters from anonymous trolls.
Space is an under-studied dimension of political activity, not only in democratic theory but also in empirical studies of social media. Scholars have shown that social media sites are increasingly where members of the public get their information (Messing and Westwood Reference Messing and Westwood2014; Mitchell, Gottfried, and Matsa Reference Mitchell, Gottfried and Matsa2015) and where they engage in new forms of political activism (Carlisle and Patton Reference Carlisle and Patton2013; Cohen et al. Reference Cohen, Kahne, Bowyer, Middaugh and Rogowski2012). They tell us that social media sites help to shape public opinion (Mutz and Young Reference Mutz and Young2011) and that social pressures exerted on Facebook can significantly alter voter turnout (Bond et al. Reference Bond, Fariss, Jones, Kramer, Marlow, Settle and Fowler2012). They show how social media are used in revolutions and political campaigns (Bimber Reference Bimber2014; Tufekci and Wilson Reference Tufekci and Wilson2012; Zhang et al. Reference Zhang, Johnson, Seltzer and Bichard2010), as well as their effect on traditional forms of political activism (Bode Reference Bode2012; Karpf Reference Karpf2012). But despite their diversity, all of these scholars approach social media primarily as a tool with which users transmit ideas; we have yet to fully engage with the political dynamics of the communities they form and to study how site architectures might invite or prevent certain kinds of political activity by creating different spaces.
And the spatial dynamics of social media are politically important, not just because they serve as means of communication for activists and political elites. If, following John Dewey, we think of democracy as “primarily a mode of associated living,” then the spaces in which we gather together and associate with one another deserve more attention from political scientists (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston1916, 93). Sites like Jezebel, though they are self-ascribed entertainment and lifestyle sites, are an increasingly visible part of our everyday lives; they have political consequences because they are spaces in which individuals create, share, and talk about content related to issues of public concern.Footnote 5 As a result, they function as new sites of what Jane Mansbridge calls “everyday talk,” the informal discussions through which individuals “test new and old ideas against their daily realities, make small moves. . . and talk the ideas over with friends” (Mansbridge Reference Mansbridge and Macedo1999, 214). Social media are our new living rooms and neighborhoods. As such, we need to consider how to build these sites in ways that foster reciprocity and protect actors from trollish assaults while still remaining open to Young's activist challenges and other calls to expand democratic politics beyond the constraints of formal deliberation and rational discourse (Young Reference Young2001; See also Sanders Reference Sanders1997). The traditional emphasis on actors, institutions, and behaviors is insufficient. Instead, we need to consider how democratic actors operate within spaces, how these the spaces are themselves constructed and, more specifically, how the software architectures of social media sites structure different avenues for political activity. We need a theory of democratic space.
In what follows, I outline a theory of democratic politics that does take space as a central element in shaping democratic interactions, both on- and off-line. Building on the literature in democratic theory, I turn primarily to the work of John Dewey in order to find resources that can help us rethink the relationship between architecture and democracy. Unlike contemporary social media executives and software designers, however, I do not take Dewey's democratic ideal of the “neighborly community” as one to be duplicated in the digital environment. Instead, in the spirit of Deweyan pragmatism, I revise and redeploy this concept—emphasizing two key characteristics: boundedness and flexibility—and examine how it might be altered to suit the novel conditions presented by social media.
With clearly demarcated and relatively circumscribed boundaries, we are more likely to encounter one another repeatedly, forming long-term relationships that are marked by reciprocity, mutual trust, and accommodation. And with flexible spaces that encourage us to seek out new experiences and encounters, individuals are more likely to develop the inclusive and creative habits of Deweyan democrats. Using these two characteristics of democratic space, I can better explain why we would expect to see naming policies effectively disarm trolls, why sometimes they fail to do so, and why—as with Kinja—some non-naming strategies may still work to create spaces of robust democratic politics.
The argument proceeds as follows: in the next section, I examine the spatial imagery in Dewey's work, particularly the spaces of the frontier, neighborhood, and classroom. From these discussions, I show how the categories of boundedness and flexibility—though not Dewey's vocabulary—are the key democratic characteristics of these spaces. In the third section, I return to Kinja and use these criteria to evaluate that space both before and after the Jezebel troll attack. I find that in altering their boundaries to successfully disarm the troll, Kinja turned the site into a kind of gated community that introduced a new problem: a lack of flexibility that will continue to affect the possibility for creative Deweyan discourse on the site. Finally, in the conclusion, I suggest how this theory of democratic space might shape future research on social media's political effects.
SPACE AND POLITICS
Democratic theorists have long identified the importance of grounding democratic politics in norms of reciprocity, accommodation, and inclusion (see Gutmann and Thompson Reference Gutmann and Thompson1996; Young Reference Young2000). Likewise, the importance of repeated interactions and mutual recognition in building social capital and facilitating collective action is well-documented (see Gutmann and Thompson Reference Gutmann and Thompson2012; Ostrom and Ahn Reference Ostrom and Ahn2003; Putnam Reference Putnam1993; Warren and Mansbridge Reference Warren, Mansbridge, Mansbridge and Martin2013). Much of this literature rightly focuses on the role of networks and institutions in creating conditions in which actors develop trust, reputation, and other elements of social capital that help them work together effectively (see Andersson Reference Andersson2004; Ulbert and Risse Reference Ulbert and Risse2005). But despite excellent scholarship on the relationship between democracy and public space (see Hénaff and Strong Reference Hénaff and Strong2001; Parkinson Reference Parkinson2012) and a growing literature on the importance of proximity in creating social ties (see Latané et al. Reference Latané, Liu, Nowak, Bonevento and Zheng1995; Pettigrew Reference Pettigrew1998; Zajonc Reference Zajonc2001), the role of the physical environment in structuring democratic action is often referenced obliquely in much of the literature in democratic theory.
But spaces do help individuals to act in ways that are consistent with certain norms and values and not others. In this section, I draw on the work of John Dewey in order to explicate this connection between democratic communities and the spaces that house them. Virtually all of Dewey's work demonstrates a long-running commitment to a larger democratic project. As a way of life, both social and individual, Deweyan democracy requires thoughtful consideration and active participation on the part of both individuals and the communities to which they belong (see Dewey Reference Dewey1946, especially 147). In much of his work, moreover, Dewey shows a preoccupation with the challenges of securing a democratic public amidst the vastly different social realities of the modern industrial age. The role of communication and technology in this democratic project is the subject of much secondary scholarship on Dewey's thought (see Asen Reference Asen2003; Asen and Brouwer Reference Asen and Brouwer2003; Crick Reference Crick2009). But Dewey was also quite attentive to the role of space in facilitating democratic action.
Spatial imagery is a recurring motif in Dewey's work; the (disappearing) frontier features heavily in his discussions of changing social ideals and political realities; he clearly understands the spaces of the neighborhood and school as sites of democratic possibility in the modern world. From his discussion of the frontier, we can see how Dewey understands space as shaping the habits, attitudes, and possibilities of the pioneers—as well as his anxieties about how new technologies were changing those spaces. And in seeking new means and methods for pursuing his democratic project in the modern context, Dewey begins by considering how everyday spaces like the neighborhood and school might be reinvigorated and redesigned to better foster democratic habits, attitudes, and interactions among their inhabitants. With his fixation on the “neighborly community” in Public and Its Problems, Dewey attempts to recapture the political intimacy of the small-town locale while remaining wary of the negative effects of this smallness. And the school is Dewey's attempt to deliberately build a space that shapes democratic interactions and cultivates democratic relationships between students. From these discussions, I identify the two characteristics that democratic spaces require: boundaries and flexibility. It is only in balancing both of these characteristics, I argue, that we can succeed in building democratic spaces both on- and off-line.
The Frontier
As Dewey understands it, the unique struggles of “our pioneer forefathers”—of “subduing a continent; of pushing onward the frontier that separated what was at least a rudimentary civilization from untamed and often savage nature” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston2008b, 230)—also provided the “direct experiences” that made participation in public life second nature for the pioneers (Dewey Reference Dewey1939, 41). Because of the “immense amount of land” and “scattered localities that communicated with one another only by stage-coach,” the spatial arrangements of the pioneer age meant that the defining social relationships were largely between small communities and individuals and the “savage nature” that surrounded them (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston2008a, 168). Pioneers, in other words, had to be creative and cooperative if they were to survive and thrive in the untamed wilderness of the frontier. Democracy, as both a way of life and a political enterprise, was therefore all but automatic “as long as there was plenty of land and people could keep moving on to the frontiers” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston2008c, 160). The frontier functioned as an organizing principle. Its spatial conditions not only cultivated certain habits within the individual, but also arranged social relationships such that Deweyan democracy was all but inevitable.
But whereas the pioneers were personally involved with almost all aspects of production and management of their daily lives, says Dewey, modern politics and industry are distanced from the lives of individuals. Eschewing innovative and productive participation in social and political life, modern individuals are all too happy to be diverted by the numerous amusements made readily available by technology (see Dewey Reference Dewey1946, especially 138–9). Furthermore, the inventions of the telegraph, radio, and railroad not only introduced new means of communication and transit. These networked technologies also changed the political geographies of the nation, introducing “constant and intricate interactions beyond the limits of face-to-face communities,” eliminating the distance between communities, and consolidating the population, both literally and figuratively (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 114). While these interactions made possible a Great Community that extends beyond the homogenous and often static localities of the pioneers, Dewey also warns that these technologies have the effect of obscuring the role of individuals’ actions and unmooring human associations from the spaces in which they traditionally took root.
The constant flux of technology—one we still witness today—forces Dewey to pose the problem of the modern public in spatial terms: “How can a public be organized, we may ask, when literally it does not stay in place?” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 140, emphasis mine). His answer is to formulate attachments “bred in tranquil stability [and] nourished in constant relationships” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 141). Like modern website developers who turn to naming policies to regulate online behaviors, in pushing for new “means and methods” throughout his career Dewey was searching for mechanisms through which to balance the need for intimate local attachments with the need for growth, innovation, and change.
The Neighborhood
The neighborhood, or local “neighborly community,” is one such mechanism. Through it, Dewey thought to recapture the “old democratic ideals” that were obscured by the industrial revolution and to recover a democratic public in the altered context of networked modern life. Echoing the frontier conditions he discussed elsewhere, Dewey notes how the spatial limitations of close, geographic locales help to facilitate sustained engagement with others. Living side by side and sharing in the mundane encounters of daily life, neighbors develop a sharper sense of their similarities and differences, leading to the kind of “insight and understanding” which grounds political action (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 212–3). Despite the unparalleled means of communication available through modern technology, Dewey maintains that there is something uniquely valuable about the relationship between neighbors. Living in close quarters, and sharing the experiences that fall out of that fact, neighbors develop ties of “vitality and depth” based on their “close and direct intercourse and attachment” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 213). This is why, says Dewey, “[d]emocracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 213).
Elsewhere, Dewey is more clear about in what this directness consists. “In its deepest and richest sense,” he tells us, “a community must always remain a matter of face-to-face intercourse” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 211). Deliberately reconstructing aspects of the frontier condition—by retreating into one's local enclaves and using these as the foundation of the “Great Community”—Dewey maintains that the experience of face-to-face encounters is irreplaceable, as have many since. As I argue, however, we might pull out and redeploy an alternative lesson from these discussions of the frontier and neighborhood while remaining true to the spirit of Dewey's work. Rather than focus on the physicality of face-to-face interactions, I argue that Dewey grounds their importance in the kind of intimacy they create, the political intimacy of neighbors that is bred through repeated encounters and that conditions interactions governed by principles of reciprocity and accommodation.
The Classroom
Of course, not all neighbors act neighborly. We easily recognize when neighbors fail to cooperate. We can, and often do, evaluate individuals’ actions in order to judge “good” neighbors from “bad” ones. Neighborhoods, despite their geographic proximity, do not necessarily help to generate reciprocity and facilitate collective action. Furthermore, even tightly knit and mutually supportive neighbors may not be welcoming to outsiders, as is the case with many gated communities. Within their boundaries, neighbors may exchange ideas and develop common interests while at the same time attempting as much as possible to separate themselves from the world around them. This exclusivity threatens Deweyan democracy no less than does a scattered and unfocused public.
It is for these reasons that simply erecting barriers and retreating into one's local enclaves is insufficient. Though Dewey values the neighborly community as a site for democratic development, he also acknowledges its limitations. The Great Community presented in The Public and Its Problems is one means by which Dewey sought to mitigate these dangers of provincialism. As a network of “full and free communication,” the Great Community creates local communities that are “stable, without being static” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 212). But the “full and free communication” of the Great Community is not the only mechanism through which Dewey sought to capture this sense of responsiveness. It is in his remarks on the school building that we can begin to see how Dewey envisions using space to deliberately cultivate the habits of openness and creativity that are also necessary to prevent stagnation and instead forward more inclusive democratic ends.
Simply drawing boundaries and restricting spaces is insufficient in forming a democratic public; their presence alone isn't enough to generate the progressive solidarity Dewey was seeking to develop in democratic citizens. Instead, as is evident in Dewey's remarks on the design of the classroom in School and Society, as well as his active involvement with the building of the University of Chicago's Blaine Hall—home of the Laboratory (Lab) School— it is through the conscious design of spaces that we might not only (1) develop the reciprocity and accommodation that characterize neighborly relationships, but also (2) encourage inclusivity based on the influx of new ideas and people that is required for progress, both individual and collective.
On January 10, 1902, Dewey wrote to University of Chicago's President Harper in reference to the building plans for the Lab School. In his letter, Dewey emphasizes the importance of how students are arranged within the classroom: he begins by briefly indicating his objection to the idea that the Lab School's pupils would be “distributed ‘by seating the pupils as they are seated in the Chicago Public Schools’” (University of Chicago). While the details of Harper's proposal remain unclear, we can already begin to see Dewey's attentiveness to the implications of space beyond mere boundaries. Simply having a building for the Lab School was insufficient. Instead, Dewey was intimately involved in the specific arrangements of desks, chairs, and bodies in the classroom. As he clearly implies here, the way we move through space has a profound effect on how we approach and understand the world and others in it.
That Dewey should have been so concerned over the Lab School's classroom arrangements is unsurprising. In School and Society, Dewey gives perhaps his clearest discussion of the ways in which spaces can be—and, according to Dewey, should be—manipulated to encourage democratic engagements. The traditional classroom, says Dewey, is built for standardized education. With “rows of ugly desks placed in geometric order, crowded together so that there shall be as little moving room as possible,” the “ordinary classroom” is “made for listening” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston2008d, 21). Treating students uniformly, as undifferentiated units of a single mass educational system, the traditional classroom is, says Dewey, built to ensure that students remain passive. Students are penned in by a regimented seating arrangement, unable to act as individuals; instead, they are made to sit quietly at their own individual desks and tasked with reading or listening to lectures. Far from the active, mobile, and exploratory process of inquiry that forms the basis of both Dewey's pedagogical and political projects, the traditional school is built for a single mode of behavior: the mass transmission of information from one “expert”—whether teacher or book—to “as large numbers of children as possible” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston2008d, 22).
By contrast, the general school design Dewey presents in School and Society encourages students to engage in individual explorations even as it fosters an acknowledgement of their embeddedness in a larger project of collective inquiry. No uniform set of classrooms, Dewey's representation of the school building consists of a central library connected at each of its four corners with rooms dedicated to practical experiences: the workshops, dining room, kitchen, and textile room. “If the four corners represent practice,” says Dewey, “the interior represents the theory of the practical activities” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston2008d, 48–9). In his excellent study of these plans, Kosnoski (Reference Kosnoski2005) notes that the spatial arrangement of Dewey's school provides cues for both teacher and students. As they move through the different spaces of the school building, students work through problems both individually and collectively. In so doing, students gain individual experiences in technical skills like cooking and woodworking in the kitchen and workshop. Armed with these experiences, the students then reconvene in the central library, surrounded by the wealth of human knowledge, drawing from—and adding to—the results of social inquiry that the library represents. The students are encouraged by the very structure of the school to investigate, share, and adapt to newly discovered ideas and perspectives even as they work together in a project of collective inquiry.
Boundaries and Flexibility
Despite his embrace of new technologies, Dewey at times seems hesitant to move too far from the face-to-face interactions he thinks are the foundation of the “deepest and richest” communities. The Great Community is, after all, a loose network comprised of local neighborhoods; it is clear that Dewey sees most of the hard work of democratic politics taking place at the local, face-to-face level of the neighborly community. Yet in remaining true to the spirit of Deweyan democracy we need not be similarly restrained. What Dewey is seeking, in his discussions of the neighborhood and school in particular, is a kind of political intimacy that is bred in “close and direct intercourse and attachment” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 213). And we can foster this attachment, I argue, by building spaces that share the neighborly community's boundedness and the school's flexibility, if not their face-to-face physicality.
In this sense, it is not necessarily the unmediated face-to-face interactions that make the neighborhood politically valuable. Instead, the “restricted range” of the neighborhood makes it easier to identify other members of the community and understand how our actions might affect them. In spaces that are clearly delimited with boundaries, we come to understand our relationships more clearly. If I can hear my upstairs neighbor playing music at a party, for example, it may force me to reconsider how my own actions might be audible to others and I might be more wary of vacuuming late at night. Likewise, noticing that the communal recycling bin fills up quickly, I might make a conscious effort to break down my boxes so as to ensure there is room for others. Having a clear sense of the limits of one's community—whether building, complex, or neighborhood—can help to identify those in one's circle of influence. Once identified, it becomes much easier to recognize, anticipate, and react to the ways that the consequences of one's actions may unintentionally impact surrounding others (see Dewey Reference Dewey1946).
But boundaries do more than just help us to identify those in our immediate vicinity. By limiting the amount of space, boundaries of physical spaces like neighborhoods also restrict the number of possible encounters one experiences at any given time. Here, then, we can see the relationship between the boundaries that are important characteristics of Dewey's neighborly community and the repeated interactions that democratic theorists have identified as reducing the likelihood of deceit and manipulation between actors (see Gutmann and Thompson Reference Gutmann and Thompson2012; Warren and Mansbridge Reference Warren, Mansbridge, Mansbridge and Martin2013). Dewey gives us a model of understanding the role of space in developing reciprocity. Encountering others is more likely in small spaces—the Senate chamber, an apartment building, or a neighborhood, for example—than it is in a large or indeterminate one like the state of Ohio or “the internet.” And when inhabitants are tied to a particular space, like that of a home or office, it increases the likelihood of repeated interactions. Over time, this possibility alters the behavior of those involved as they adjust in anticipation of future encounters.
Neighbors, in other words, do not immediately understand their mutual entanglements simply by virtue of living close by. Instead, neighbors gradually figure out how to live together over time. Because neighbors share space—often a clearly bounded space of a subdivision, or building, or street—they find themselves encountering one another regularly. With time, recognizing the longevity of such relationships, the incentives for compromise and cooperation become clear. Neighbors often develop habits and institutions to negotiate mundane conflicts over sound, over shared lawns and walls and sidewalks, over the aesthetics of houses and gardens. And we can clearly see the effect of boundaries and repeated encounters in these negotiations. While residents of a given city, for example, learn and (mostly) follow unspoken norms of public space—how to negotiate sidewalk use or the rules of train etiquette—visitors to the same city routinely (albeit often unintentionally) disregard these implicit rules and are often censured, however informally, for precisely these disruptions. Unlike residents, however, visitors are under no obligation to ensure that future encounters run smoothly. It is instead the recognition of the ongoing nature of their relationships that incentivizes neighbors to make slight adjustments—whether in attitude, habit, or behavior—in the spirit of reciprocity and accommodation.
Boundaries reduce the number of possible interlocutors in any given space; in so doing, they help foster reciprocity and accommodation through repeated interactions. Yet while clearly bounded spaces are a necessary element of building a democratic community they are, of course, insufficient. As Dewey was well aware, there is a real danger that boundaries can cause more harm than good, reinforcing mutual interests at the expense of inclusivity, novelty, and change. As we saw from Dewey's discussion of the school, spaces do more than simply contain individuals; spaces are not value-neutral. Instead, spaces often give us cues as to how to behave; they can focus our attention on certain kinds of activities and organize our relationships in certain ways. The design of spaces—their architecture—can therefore influence our habits and attitudes in ways that can work to support or negate the kind of principles that organize democratic engagements. Walls, even as they might encourage reciprocity by facilitating repeat interactions, for example, work also to separate us from one another; gated communities serve to focus residents’ attention on the multiple common interests they may have with one another, but they also signal to nonresidents that their presence is unwanted.
Truly democratic communities must therefore also be flexible, housed in spaces which foster an openness to respond and adapt to new ideas and information. Just as spaces can signal to inhabitants that they are equal participants in a common endeavor, by highlighting shared interests, aims, and goals, so too can spaces project openness and inclusion, cultivating a sense of curiosity, responsiveness, and flexibility in their inhabitants. This is why, following the model of Dewey's school, we must deliberately build spaces that facilitate this mutual readjustment. More than simply bringing students into close quarters, the architecture of the school specifically organizes activity in order to promote collective action that is responsive to change. But this need not be limited to the school. Like the boundaries of the neighborhood, it is the school's flexibility of space that is crucial in encouraging individuals to seek out new experiences and encounters and to develop the creative habits of Deweyan democrats. “Organization,” Dewey tells us, “is nothing but getting things into connection with one another, so that they work easily, flexibly, and fully” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston2008d, 39). In organizing them to emphasize flexibility, spaces can remind us of our shared background and common goals even as we work separately on individual tasks that may highlight our differences.
Like the placement of desks, classrooms, libraries, and laboratories in Dewey's school, spaces can be designed to orient us, both literally and figuratively, in a manner that makes it easier to draw connections between individual and shared experiences. Space, in other words, can do more than limit the number of interactions we have; spaces can encourage action, movement, and collaboration, priming actors to understand their experiences in light of community goals as well as to revise those goals in light of the new experiences they gain as individuals. Spaces can also structure our encounters, directing us to act in ways that reflect democratic principles of reciprocity, accommodation, and inclusion while also cultivating the open, flexible, and full interactions between individual and community life that turn idle chatter into creative social inquiry.
Responding to the new social and technological realities he witnessed unfolding throughout his life, Dewey famously envisioned the Great Community—a collection of networked publics—as the best way to reinvigorate democratic publics. Presented with the once again altered circumstances of social media, it remains to be seen how best to build democratic spaces in the digital environment. Keeping in mind the role of space in facilitating democratic action, we can turn once again to the problem of trolls and the example of Kinja in order to see how the spatial characteristics of boundedness and flexibility might help us to understand the dynamics of this online community both before and after the Jezebel troll GIF debacle.
DIGITAL DEMOCRACIES
Like Dewey before them, social media site designers are very much concerned with how best to build spaces that are likely to foster interactions in which individuals will feel invested. As the ranks of internet users continue to expand and the internet becomes an increasingly visible part of public life, however, this task becomes even more daunting. Just as political scientists have grappled with how to conceptualize and maintain robust offline communities in light of an expanding and increasingly diverse electorate, so too have social media sites started to more forcefully introduce mechanisms with which to “solve” the problem of trolls and build vibrant communities in the face of an ever-growing and diversifying user base (Rose Reference Rose2014). Tactics vary widely, from applying real-world consequences like prosecution, to finding technology-mediated solutions like the use of moderators and “verified identities,” to modifying the behavior of trolls’ targets (this is the logic behind the omnipresent dictum “don't feed the trolls”).Footnote 6 For the most part, however, all of these approaches—including, most prominently, naming policies—start from the assumption that the problem of trolls is one of problematic individuals (Schwartz Reference Schwartz2008).
As one of the most popular approaches to regulating online behavior, naming policies can take many different forms. For sites like Facebook, with “real-name” policies, accounts must be created with users’ legal names (“What Names Are Allowed on Facebook?” n.d., “Your Name Field” n.d.). More common, however, at least in the United States, are sites that require “persistent pseudonyms”—stable identities that users continue to use on a specific site (Schwartz Reference Schwartz2008). On sites that use persistent pseudonyms, users register a specific handle, or nickname, with which they are then identified in all future interactions on the site. While site administrators may be aware of users’ email addresses and other identifying information, users do not necessarily reveal these personal details to one another. Used on sites like Reddit, as well as platforms like Kinja and Disqus, a persistent pseudonym “establishes a local identity [because] you build up a history and reputation under that name” (Donath Reference Donath2014).
What both real-name and pseudonymous policies have in common, however, is their faith in the power of naming to prevent bad behavior. In this sense, “[w]hat Disqus and Facebook Comments angled to do when they debuted in October 2007 and March 2011, respectively, was curtail unsavory discourse with a blend of incentivization and good ol’ shaming” (Davis Reference Davis2012). Trolls, it is argued, do not want to tarnish their reputations; as Jimmy Orr, managing editor of the Los Angeles Times explains, “trolls don't like their friends to know they are trolls” (quoted in Kaste Reference Kaste2011). If users want their contributions to be taken seriously, they will conform to norms of rational discourse rather than face the censure that comes from violating these universalized expectations. The use of pseudonyms is therefore premised on the idea that users will be invested in maintaining the reputation of their handle; both real names and pseudonyms tie one's digital self to a stable offline identity. In so doing, however, these platforms take on the challenge of “inspir[ing] people to care about the impression they are making on others” by turning to reputation without considering the spatial configurations that give reputation context and meaning (Donath Reference Donath2014).
But in relying solely on naming policies without considering the spatial contexts that give weight and meaning to names and reputations, software designers—like many political scientists—are operating under the incomplete assumption that democratic politics consists solely in interactions between actors with stable identities and shared norms (Boyd Reference Boyd2012). The lack of engagement with space in the debates over how best to build robust democratic communities is, as I have shown, a crucial omission. And it is all the more striking when one looks at the rhetoric surrounding the implementation of naming policies. Software executives involved in these discussions often invoke the image of the “small town” or local neighborhood as justification for imposing a real-name requirement on social media sites. In the debate over Google+’s controversial real-name policy, for example, then-CEO Eric Schmidt claimed that “200 years ago, in a small town, you couldn't sneak around if people didn't know who you were” (quoted in Kaste Reference Kaste2011).
The assumption behind this, and similar, comments are clear: the “small town” and local neighborhood are uncritically invoked as images of what community life should look like and are used as models through which to achieve those ends. But, when pressed, the analogy only serves to highlight the incongruities between naming policies’ goals and their implementation. Naming policies ignore a fundamental characteristic of small towns: neighbors, indeed by definition, share space with one another. Neighbors often do cooperate in productive ways, even in the absence of legal incentives to do so (see Ellickson Reference Ellickson1994). But as we saw in the previous section, this kind of long-term investment derives from something other than knowing one another's names; neighbors are in this respect different from both friends of friends and passing acquaintances. Instead, the willingness to compromise, negotiate, and cooperate with one another—to “play nice”—is in no small part a function of spatial constraints. Faced with the inevitability of repeated interactions that arises from living in clearly bounded and close quarters, neighbors are more likely to form persistent, long-standing relationships; neighbors are more likely to care about and to want to act in a manner that protects their reputations once they recognize the shared consequences and responsibilities that fall out of their shared geography. But if naming policies are not necessarily the answer, then the question remains: how do we build digital democracies? In this section, I discuss how well Kinja embodied the characteristics of democratic spaces both before and after the Jezebel troll attack and, in the conclusion, offer further elaboration on how the characteristics of boundedness and flexibility might be adapted and redeployed within the larger context of digital democracies more generally.
Lessons from Kinja
Unlike many more prominent sites, Kinja has from the beginning eschewed naming policies as a primary means of establishing order on the platform. While most users do have persistent pseudonyms, burner accounts are always readily available. Anonymity was built into Kinja as one of its core values. Instead of relying on naming policies to regulate behavior, Gawker CEO Nick Denton deliberately turned to Kinja's software architecture in order to create spaces within which conversations would thrive. Spatial imagery is scattered throughout Denton's descriptions of Gawker Media's comment sections; individual comment threads are variously referred to as “VIP rooms,” “salons,” and “parties.” And Gawker has long recognized the importance of setting boundaries, thereby limiting interactions, in facilitating productive discussions. Kinja was, in fact, built to firm those boundaries and build spaces to host more vibrant conversations in Gawker Media's comment sections.
Recall that for Dewey the kind of “insight and understanding of neighbors,” those attachments that form the foundation of public life, can only be developed in the “close neighborhood experience” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 213). It is the repeated interactions that characterize life in close quarters that ultimately help to develop the norms of reciprocity and accommodation that govern democratic publics. Echoing this sentiment, Kinja was designed with the idea that “conversation requires intimacy and trust and carefully managed participation—even if the result of the conversation is open to the wider public” (Denton Reference Denton2014). The platform's architecture reflects that vision; it is predicated on setting boundaries that limit the number of participants in any given conversation.
Kinja's comment threads were therefore initially “limited to the author, those readers with whom the author has interacted, and one degree of separation beyond that” (Denton Reference Denton2014). Each user who commented directly on an article therefore became the ensuing thread's moderator: every response in the unfolding discussion had to be approved or dismissed by the thread's creator (Daulerio Reference Daulerio2012b; Phelps Reference Phelps2012). The result was to break up the discussions on each site into disconnected conversations taking place in different “rooms.” “Each of these discussions,” said Denton, “should feel as if between friends—with friends of friends chiming in too” (Denton Reference Denton2014). Kinja, in other words, deliberately separated discussions into small groups in order to facilitate the more intimate kinds of interactions that Dewey tells us are a necessary component of robust democratic life. In keeping the number of interlocutors low, so the logic went, those who were included would feel a stronger inclination to participate.
In this initial iteration, however, Kinja's boundaries were drawn too narrowly; they functioned like the walls of individual houses or classrooms and separated users from one another instead of gathering them together as a single neighborhood or school. Instead of encouraging users to recognize one another as equal participants in a collective enterprise, Kinja treated each discussion thread as a unique and exclusive event centered around each thread's founder; it did little to tie discussions—or users—together across the site (see Benton Reference Benton2015; Daulerio Reference Daulerio2012a). Far from incentivizing users to cultivate shared norms of reciprocity and accommodation, moreover, users were encouraged to think of their threads as “a party, to which invitees can bring a plus-one; if you're not invited you can start your own” (Denton Reference Denton2014). The platform, in other words, treated the “rooms” it created as temporary and discrete events, thereby ignoring the value of boundaries as that of facilitating reciprocity through repeated actions over time.
It was in this context that the Jezebel troll was able to strike. This overemphasis on individual discussion threads meant that there were no means for collective accountability on the site—no way to evaluate users’ behavior across discussions. Users were discouraged from acknowledging their shared stake in one another's activity; they were told to “start their own” parties rather than to be inclusive. Absent this recognition that users belonged to a single community, moreover, Kinja's sorting mechanism had no way of distinguishing good neighbors from bad. Because it understood each conversation as the creation of a new “party,” to be judged on its own merits, Kinja's algorithm removed each thread from its context within a larger site-wide community and promoted it based solely its individual level of engagement. As a result, Kinja left space for the Jezebel troll, and other “bad neighbors,” to run rampant. By multiplying the number of “parties” on its sites, in other words, Kinja's architecture made it possible for the Jezebel troll to flood the comment section with offensive GIFs—each post was treated as a novel event instead of an addition to an ongoing, site-wide discussion. Far from encouraging reciprocity, accommodation, and inclusion across the site, Kinja's boundaries were constructed in a way that fostered a spirit of individualism and isolation.
Redrawing Boundaries: Kinja after the troll
A week after the Jezebel staff brought attention to the then company-wide GIF problem, Gawker Media introduced changes to Kinja that reinstated a “pending comment” system reminiscent of the pre-Kinja commenting platform.Footnote 7 The post-GIF Kinja divided comments into two sections: pending and approved. “Approved replies are written by a member of the blog where the post is written, users who are followed by the blog, or the replies that either of those two groups have replied to” (Bertolini Reference Bertolini2014). Replies could also be approved by a recommendation from either of those two groups. “Pending replies” are everything else; they are hidden by default, appearing in grayed-out text with a red “pending approval” tag in the corner (Bertolini Reference Bertolini2014).
In reintroducing tiered comments—approved vs. pending—Kinja, in effect, “redrew” its boundaries. Instead of simply restricting participation to the post's author, those “invited” into the conversation, and their plus-ones, Kinja slightly expanded the number of participants to include a site's ranks of “approved” commenters. The process of approval added a layer of accountability to users’ actions on the Gawker sites. Approved commenters are those who are “followed” by a particular site (e.g., Jezebel, Deadspin)—a status which requires a long history of demonstrated good work (Read Reference Read2014). Much like building one's reputation as a good neighbor in a physical neighborhood, “approval” on the Gawker sites is developed only through repeated interactions with the same users in a circumscribed space. By including these approved commenters as participants in each new comment thread, Kinja's new rules implicitly acknowledged that comments were embedded in a larger, site-wide community and that these “good neighbors” had a stake in the ensuing discussions, whether they had directly commented on a particular post or not.
And Kinja's new boundaries have been largely successful in preventing the kind of trolling that beset Jezebel. The pending comments system means that current users must recognize and approve new users and comments as sharing the community's ethos before they are allowed into the discussion. Like erecting a gate around a collection of homes to deter external threats, Kinja's redrawn boundaries explicitly work to encourage reciprocity by facilitating repeat interactions and focusing users’ attention on the community values they hold in common; in so doing, Kinja drastically reduced the likelihood of another similar troll attack.
Balancing Boundaries and Flexibility
While Kinja's post-GIF changes may have reinforced its boundaries to prevent the incursion of trolls, they nevertheless fail to fully develop the kind of creative flexibility that, for Dewey, fosters the diversity of opinion and interest that was the goal of spaces like the school and neighborly community. Democracy, says Dewey, consists in each individual “having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups to which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values which the groups sustain” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 147). To some degree, approved commenters are responsible for directing the membership of Gawker sites. And yet, their responsibilities—mainly approving new commenters and flagging undesirable comments—largely amount to policing the boundaries of the site; they are focused on the exclusion of other potential comments and commenters. In the same way that a gated community orients residents towards exclusionary attitudes and actions, Gawker's engagement of commenters in a policing role does little to encourage the kind of self-reflection, adaptation, and innovation that mark inclusive democratic actors. The result is closer to embodying the “older publics” that Dewey tells us were “static” because they were “largely homogenous with one another” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 139). A retreat into one's local enclave, while effective at preventing attack, is not effective for building a robust modern democratic public.
In shoring up its boundaries, in other words, particularly after the Jezebel troll attack, Kinja emphasized stability and control at the expense of the flexibility and agency that are also critical for democratic politics. In keeping membership to the “VIP rooms” of approved commenters site-specific and tasking users with policing boundaries but not with introducing new voices or engaging in self-criticism, Kinja's architecture disincentivizes the possibility of cross-conversation movement and cross-site exchange. Commenters are encouraged to play to each site's unique ethos in order to gain and keep their approval; in challenging it, or in pushing the envelope, users risk censure, expulsion, or obscurity. In this sense, Kinja's current architecture is built like the Chicago Public Schools that Dewey railed against, where students were required to sit still, listen, and recite lessons; it does not reflect the flexibility of Dewey's ideal school, where students are encouraged to experiment, develop unique perspectives, and share them with others.
While finding this balance between the stability of boundaries and the novelty of flexibility is difficult, it needs doing. If commenters are only recognized and allowed access if the editors like them or decide they fit a specific “type,” Gawker sites will continue to fail to capture the distinctive character of Deweyan democracy—where members are encouraged to push themselves and constantly reach for new experiences, both as individuals as well as collectively.
There are a number of different tactics that site designers might take in building spaces that exhibit this balance of boundedness and flexibility. Sites could design sorting algorithms that highlight new or less popular content. Site moderators could promote discussions and users that stand out as unusual. The most powerful strategy, however, would be to build sites where users themselves are incentivized to reach and exchange across groups. A site like Reddit, for example, is premised on the idea that users will have multiple, overlapping interests (“About Reddit” 2014; Lamont Reference Lamont2014). The site is divided into “subreddits”—individual communities dedicated to a specific topic—with stable URLs, rules, and moderators that enforce them.Footnote 8 At the same time, however, each subreddit is consciously part of the larger Reddit community—popular posts from each particular subreddit (as judged by users) are aggregated into a “front page” on which they sit side by side with one another. Furthermore, the site-wide system of “karma” and “gold” gives users a mechanism with which to reward good behavior and signal “good neighbors;” these reputational markers then travel with users across subreddits (see Silverman Reference Silverman2013). Just as Dewey's ideal school combined individual interests within a larger collective endeavor, the result of Reddit's architecture is a site that hosts a wide variety of perspectives but that still retains the single identity of “Reddit” (see Lamont Reference Lamont2014).
For Gawker Media to create a space that more clearly reflects a balance between boundaries and flexibility, the company might follow a similar strategy. Altering the boundaries between Gawker sites to make them more flexible would transform the site from a collection of local enclaves to a more flexible and interactive network, along the lines of Dewey's Great Community. Currently, approved commenters are site-specific—users approved on Jezebel, for example, are not automatically approved on Gizmodo or Deadspin. But approvals should be transferrable: users who are recognized as having cultivated a good reputation on a site such as Jezebel should be empowered as approved users on sister sites like Deadspin. As approved commenters, their contributions would be featured and they would have the ability to approve pending comments. Knowing their contributions would therefore have an impact on the tone and direction of conversations on other sites, users would be incentivized to participate in cross-site discussions while still remaining accountable to the reputational standards of their “home base.” The fact that Gawker Media has not implemented this kind of change, however—and, in fact, Denton's comments about “starting your own party” reflect an antipathy towards this very idea—indicates that Kinja will likely fail to meet these democratic standards for the foreseeable future.
CONCLUSION
Deweyan democracy is a way of life. It requires individuals to take part in directing group activity; this means not only recognizing and communicating those interests one shares with others, but also continuously expanding, revising, and working with others to meet new challenges and incorporate new information. Reflecting on his own historical context, faced with the development of networked mass communication and industrialization, Dewey himself offered the model of the Great Community, a series of networked localities, as one way to achieve this democratic project in the modern world. Ever attentive to the spatial requirements of democratic engagement, however, his discussions of democracy as the “comingling” of different groups all tend to center on locally-scaled spaces like the neighborhood and the school. Within these spaces, Dewey saw the possibility of “mixing people up with each other; bringing them together under wholesome influences, and under conditions which will promote their getting acquainted with the best side of each other” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston2008e, 91). The more intimate setting provided by local spaces, in other words, meant that these spaces could host exchanges that were “not merely in the arena of formal discussion. . . but in ways where ideas are incarnated in human forms and clothed with the winning grace of personal life” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston2008e, 91). This political intimacy—the ability to see one's interlocutor as a whole person, as more than their opinions, arguments, and justifications—is crucial to Dewey's project and is what we should therefore focus on as we attempt to build, understand, and evaluate digital democracies and the spaces that house them.
There are, of course, challenges to this project; the most notable of these are the related problems of digital spaces’ ease of exit and their intangibility. The “close and direct intercourse and attachment” that Dewey values in the local spaces of the neighborhood and school is derived from, in part, their sense of permanence. Neighbors only adopt the principle of reciprocity because moving is time intensive and expensive. Moreover, the selection of one's home often involves a variety of factors beyond the neighbors—proximity to work or family, for example, or the property's size and features. Such obstacles are much less prominent on social media sites. Though calls to simply “turn off” the computer or refuse to visit sites like Facebook fail to take seriously the role of these sites, and the internet more generally, in our social lives, there can be no doubt that it is much easier to avoid conflicts on digital media than it is in physical spaces. In an attempt to keep users on their sites—to avoid precisely the kinds of conflicts that neighbors must work through—sites like Facebook and Twitter make it easy to “block” or “hide” undesirable content or annoying users. While there are certainly benefits to these tools, they have the effect of creating spaces in which people may “live together” without ever encountering one another. This is undoubtedly a situation that is much different than that of physical neighbors and which can serve to undermine the political importance of the neighborhood as a site of democratic exchange and engagement.
In addition to this relative ease of exit, the intangibility of software architecture makes it both harder for users to see and easier for developers to manipulate. Unlike the neighborhood or the school, the “walls” and “sidewalks” of digital spaces are not so easily identified by users. As a result, shifts in software architectures can go unnoticed until the changes are already in place and users’ behaviors are already altered. These subtle changes can have a profound impact on the shape of democratic discourse by obscuring some ideas and individuals and portraying others in specific ways. Unable to see precisely those mechanisms which, like walls, work to sort and separate us online, users of digital technologies are often unable to criticize or challenge these changes in the same way they might in the physical world.
There is no doubt that our interactions with the spaces of digital technologies are quite different from our interactions with, and within, their physical counterparts. But, as Dewey himself would likely have been the first to acknowledge, quite different does not mean incommensurable. Instead, the discussion above shows how we might think with Dewey in order to “take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it” (Dewey Reference Dewey1946, 184). Though the digital context poses challenges, they need not be insurmountable. Like Dewey before us, we can and should consider how to rebuild democratic spaces in this new digital environment.
As I have shown in this article, spaces can help to shape the habits, attitudes, and behaviors of both individuals and communities. Boundaries, like those of the local neighborly community, can help to foster the recognition of mutual interests and direct activity towards managing these interests. Boundaries facilitate the repeated interactions that generate a spirit of reciprocity and accommodation among inhabitants. But boundaries alone are insufficient. Democratic spaces must also be flexible, cultivating an intergroup dynamic that is inclusive, that welcomes novel ideas and individuals, and that pushes participants to respond and adapt to new challenges in light of these varied experiences. The new opportunities presented by digital technologies should therefore give us pause to reflect, revise, and redeploy our old understandings of political life in order to build democratic spaces within these novel circumstances. In this vein, I draw out two conclusions for the study of democratic politics in a digital age.
First, political scientists interested in social media should take seriously the role of software architectures in structuring users’ activity. Approaching social media through the lens of space affords researchers a more nuanced understanding of the internal political dynamics of these sites. There is no lack of scholarship on social media's political effects, but these studies largely focus on the types of participants, the tools they use to communicate, and the kinds of offline activities they engage in using social media. What a theory of democratic space adds to these debates is an explanation of why certain sites host certain actors and activities, as well as insights into how these digital spaces might be constructed in new and different ways to better achieve democratic outcomes. Boundedness and flexibility are, after all, broad characteristics that can be realized any number of ways; it remains an open question for future research as to which manifestations of these characteristics are more likely to achieve democratic goals.
Second, an emphasis on the role of space in democratic politics highlights the continuities between the physical and digital environments, even as it clarifies differences between the two. Too often, discussions of social media are framed in terms of a radical break with traditional, physical sites of politics. Supporters of digital technologies too easily dismiss challenges, like the ease of exit and intangibility discussed above; critics are often too quick to consider them intractable. But a theory of democratic space provides a way to navigate this impasse by offering a vocabulary that can more precisely point to exactly how physical and digital sites differ, as well as what remains comparable across both. Digital spaces will be built in different configurations and with different materials than physical spaces. They will look and feel different to inhabitants. But they might also display the same characteristics of boundedness and flexibility that facilitate democratic politics in physical spaces. In turning our attention to spatial characteristics rather than specific forms of engagement, we can unseat our expectations of where politics take place and widen our scope to include previously overlooked sites; in so doing, the lens of democratic space provides a way of thinking more deeply about a democratic politics that is “rowdy, disorderly, and decentered” but no less meaningful, even as it moves into digital spaces (Young Reference Young2001, 688).
It will be no easy project to build democratic spaces in the digital environment. It will, perhaps, be an even more difficult undertaking than the same project in the physical environment. But democracy, as Dewey tells us, is “primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (Dewey Reference Dewey and Boydston1916, 93). As increasingly common sites of association and experience, the spaces of social media are our new sites of “everyday talk;” they have political consequences and political significance. While these spaces may not have the same permanence and physicality as traditional sites of politics, they nevertheless deserve sustained critical engagement if they are to reach their potential as spaces for robust democratic practices; engaging with these spaces is the first step towards rebuilding them.
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