Guest Post: Jennifer Forestal writes about her new book Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments

The internet, it seems, is broken beyond repair. Over the past few years, it has become increasingly clear that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are helping to exacerbate racial biases, spread disinformation, amplify hate, and radicalize ideological thinking. Social media are, in other words, “undermining democracy.”

Often forgotten, it seems, is that social media are also here to stay. Facebook has almost 3 billion monthly active users—a population larger than China and India combined. And public officials often take to platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram  to voice their opinions, make announcements, and otherwise interact with their constituents. These technologies are, as the US Supreme Court noted in 2017, our new “public squares.” So, how do we design digital platforms that facilitate democratic habits, attitudes, and relationships, rather than destroy them?

My new book, Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments, provides an answer.

In this book, I make the case that to support democratic politics, digital platforms must provide three distinctive democratic affordances—fundamental civic practices necessary for democratic politics. First, there is recognition: citizens recognize themselves as members of communities. Second, there is attachment: citizens must be able to form meaningful attachments to those communities. The third practice is experimentalism: citizens must be able to work collaboratively to experiment with and improve their communities. And, in order to facilitate these practices of recognition, attachment, and experimentalism the digital spaces created by social media platforms must have three characteristics: they must be clearly bounded, durable, and flexible.

Instead of starting with individual problems associated with digital technologies, or taking democracy for granted and assuming it requires no explanation, the theoretical framework I outline in this book—that of democratic space—begins with the question of what democracy requires and evaluates digital platforms accordingly. As such, it provides a more comprehensive account of not just the challenges these technologies pose for democratic politics, but also their promise and possibilities.

While many commenters have pointed to the ways that the algorithms powering Twitter and Facebook have contributed to the spread of disinformation, hate speech, and extremism, for example, my analysis of these platforms in Designing for Democracy reveals additional—and perhaps more fundamental—democratic challenges.

By utilizing the personalized News Feed to structure users’ experiences on the platform, for example, Facebook largely fails to facilitate the democratic affordance of recognition; the never-ending scroll of individual ‘status updates’ works to keep users isolated from one another and decreases the likelihood that users will acknowledge they share interests with others on the site. Similarly, Twitter fails to afford attachment; though hashtags work to gather users in temporary communities by highlighting shared interests, these same hashtags are often also quite fleeting, preventing users from forming deep affective ties to the communities they host.  In both cases, these platforms fail to facilitate the kind of community ties upon which democracy—as a form of collective action—depends.

But this need not be the case. Just as the theory of democratic space can help us identify new challenges posed by digital platforms, so too can it help us understand—and potentially replicate—platforms’ successes. Wikipedia, for example, is a two-decade-long success story of collective decision-making and collaborative experimentation. And Reddit’s subreddits host thriving communities of interest whose members not only demonstrate longstanding attachments, but who also regularly engage in collective action to make demands against Reddit’s administrators.

These successes are, I argue, due at least in part to the structure of the platforms in question. Subreddits, for example, are clearly bounded, durable, and flexible spaces; it is clear when you enter into a new subreddit, and subreddits persist through time. Subreddits are, moreover, under the control of the users themselves—who often move between subreddits with ease. As a result, redditors can easily recognize the communities they are joining, form attachments to those communities, and work collaboratively to improve them—all of which are integral to supporting and sustaining the collective action of democratic politics.

With this in mind, Designing for Democracy also provides suggestions on how we might redesign existing platforms to meet the needs of democracy. Building more spaces, similar in structure to subreddits, Facebook Groups, or the proposed Twitter “Rooms”, is one step we might take to create a more democratic internet.

As digital platforms continue to (re)structure our interpersonal relationships and patterns of collective behavior—not just in offline political arenas, but in online communities as well—it becomes even more critical for us to ensure they are designed and built to support the work of democratic politics, with the affordances that requires. Designing for Democracy provides a shared vocabulary with which we can begin to identify, explain, and critically evaluate the ways that the design of digital platforms structures our behavior and thus facilitates or undermines democratic practices. With it, we can begin to build a more democratic internet—together.

Designing for Democracy is published by Oxford University Press, as part of the Studies in Digital Politics series.