As a shared common communicative space, the digital public sphere is everywhere and nowhere. Adding to this ephemeral quality, a foundational myth was for a while frequently presented, utopian in its dimensions. Digital communication technologies, it was argued, would in their nature expand the scope of public discourse by broadening the participatory possibilities for communicating actors, knowledge, and cultures. The emergence of the internet offered new possibilities in the form if its tools of deliberation and collective decision-making. Would this technology open new modalities of social solidarity? Could new processes of consensus-building emerge? Would this be a harbinger of transformative collective identities? During the early 2000s, this idea of solidarity goes in hand with the liberal democratic model of human development and the promise of neo-liberal equilibrium.
This foundational utopian myth is now in ruins. Rather than broadening, we see more scaling down of political discourse: filter bubbles, discourse silos, and echo chambers. It seems there is not more transparency but less, with disinformation at the core of decision-making processes. At the same time, there has not been a rise in consensus; rather we have witnessed the rise of new agents of division, flamers, and trolls, with mechanized bots intensifying their incivility.
Can the original aspirations for networked humanity be revived? Or were they always fundamentally flawed? The 2020 Special Focus “Solidarity in the Digital Public Sphere: From Extremes or Common Ground?” seeks to address some unresolved questions:
In this year’s conference, we will work on both diagnosis and prognosis. What is solidarity in the digital public sphere today? What might it be?
For each conference, a small number of Emerging Scholar Awards are given to outstanding graduate students and emerging scholars who have an active academic interest in the conference area. The Award, with its accompanying responsibilities provides a strong professional development opportunity for early career academics. The 2020 Emerging Scholar Awardees are listed below.
Virtual Posters present preliminary results of work or projects that lend themselves to visual representations. View the posters below.
Virtual Presentations are grouped by general themes. Each presenter's formal, written paper will be available to participants if accepted to the journal.
