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Digital Town Square From Participatory Culture to Free Speech Absolutism
Södertörn University, School of Culture and Education, Media and Communication Studies.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-5879-2130
2024 (English)In: Digital Media Metaphors / [ed] Johan Farkas; Marcus Maloney, London: Routledge, 2024, p. 53-61Chapter in book (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

The digital town square became a prominent metaphor during Elon Musk’s Twitter take over in 2022. In the process, he tweeted “Twitter is the digital town square, where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” The connection to fundamental ideas within media and communication studies especially the notion of the public sphere was impossible to overlook, and media scholars reacted swiftly. Zizi Papacharissi tweeted “Elon has not read Habermas” and Jean Burgess asked what it means when millionaires own our arenas for public deliberation. To develop a conceptual contextualization of the framing of the Twitter take over as part of a re-configuration of public discourse culminating in the metaphor of the digital town square, this chapter draws on the classical conceptualization of the public sphere developed by Jürgen Habermas. In doing so the contribution aims to connect the contemporary landscape of social media platforms with ideas of deliberative democracy and civic participation as well as their discontents. First, the chapter draws a brief recap of the Twitter take over to, second, engage with the question whether Twitter is or is not a public sphere aka a digital town square.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
London: Routledge, 2024. p. 53-61
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Media and Communications
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-55449DOI: 10.4324/9781032674612-6Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85209839242ISBN: 9781032674612 (electronic)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:sh-55449DiVA, id: diva2:1915177
Available from: 2024-11-21 Created: 2024-11-21 Last updated: 2025-10-07Bibliographically approved

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Kaun, Anne

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • harvard-anglia-ruskin-university
  • apa-old-doi-prefix.csl
  • sodertorns-hogskola-harvard.csl
  • sodertorns-hogskola-oxford.csl
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf