Reflections after Axel Bruns’ Visit
When Axel Bruns visited the Centre for Internet Research for our 25th anniversary, his lecture challenged some of the most commonly repeated metaphors in contemporary media discourse: “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles.” Since then, I have been reflecting on his intervention and discussing it with students in my MKVT course, particularly in connection with our sessions on Habermas and the public sphere. These conversations have pushed me to reconsider some widespread assumptions about social media, polarisation, and democratic communication. Through this process, I have arrived at a reading of Bruns’ argument that situates it within a broader media-sociological and historical perspective — one that connects his observations to those of Meyrowitz and Habermas, and to contemporary struggles over public discourse and legitimacy.
Bruns’ core argument was that these metaphors have become convenient explanatory shortcuts, but the empirical evidence for them is surprisingly weak. Research consistently shows that users often encounter a plurality of perspectives online; the problem is not isolation from opposing views, but exposure to them under new social and communicative conditions. According to Bruns, polarisation is therefore not caused by technology sealing individuals off in ideological bubbles, but emerges because social media make existing differences visible, immediate and emotionally charged. Rather than a walling-off effect, digital media produce a condition of confrontational exposure, where users continually observe and judge each other’s identities, values and perceived legitimacy. Bruns’ intervention invites us to reconsider not only what social media do, but what they reveal. The conflict does not arise from absence of dissenting voices, but from their hyper-presence in environments with few shared norms for discourse, civility or mutual recognition. In this sense, social media do not generate polarisation ex nihilo; they amplify social and political antagonisms by exposing them and accelerating their performative expression.
This perspective resonates strongly with Joshua Meyrowitz’ classic analysis in No Sense of Place (1985). Meyrowitz argued that television fundamentally transformed the organisation of social roles by dissolving the boundary between on-stage and off-stage behaviour. When citizens could see into spaces that were previously reserved for political elites, gendered hierarchies or institutional authority, the result was a profound destabilisation of legitimacy and social expectations. I have called this shift the emergence of new “information situations”: media not only expand what we see, but change the very conditions under which the social becomes observable. With digital media, this transformation deepens. We do not only see the backstage of others; we interact with it, react to it and are drawn into reciprocal performance. Social media disrupt not only information structures but interaction structures. Visibility becomes participatory, moralising and immediate.
In the United States, this dynamic has contributed to a political environment where disagreement has escalated into moral disgust. Trump supporters are routinely depicted as ignorant or racist; Democrats as decadent, “woke” and immoral. These are not simply ideological divisions; they are judgements on the legitimacy and character of entire groups. The political opponent is not mistaken, but unworthy. In this way, Bruns extends the trajectory identified by Meyrowitz: media do not merely change what is communicated, but reconfigure the social environments in which legitimacy, identity and moral standing are constituted.
Habermas’ most recent analysis in Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (2022) similarly highlights how digital media erode the normative structures that once stabilised public discourse. He notes the increasing convergence of political communication with entertainment logics: emotionalisation, spectacle and affective mobilisation replace argumentation, deliberation and civic restraint. What was already visible with television – the collapse of formal roles and the emergence of performative politics – becomes radicalised in networked media environments. What is now collapsing is not merely role-based authority but the informal norms that sustained pluralistic coexistence.
If Meyrowitz analysed the collapse of place-based role norms, and Habermas diagnoses the erosion of deliberative norms, Bruns names the consequence: polarisation as a condition of antagonistic visibility, where constant mutual observation replaces institutional mediation. In such an environment, conflict becomes second-order: we no longer simply disagree about issues, but about each other’s right to participate in the public sphere at all.
To understand this moment, it is helpful to view it within a longer media-historical horizon. Each major communication transformation has destabilised existing societies before new norms could emerge. After the invention of print, Europe endured more than a century of religious conflict before Enlightenment thought, Bildung traditions and constitutional freedoms gradually institutionalised new modes of coexistence. With the rise of radio and cinema, publics unprepared for mass-mediated affect and aesthetic politics were swept into fascist mobilisation. The spread of television precipitated a crisis of authenticity and moral visibility in liberal democracies, exposing private contradictions and destabilising role performances. Today, digital media have introduced new information and interaction situations, characterised by unfiltered mutual visibility, accelerated judgement and the collapse of contextual boundaries.
The present crisis of polarisation is not therefore simply the product of social media design. It arises because the new medium environment renders visible – and intensifies – norm conflicts that older media structures kept at a distance or cushioned through institutional filters. As Marshall McLuhan observed, the medium is the message: media do not merely transmit content, they reorganise the architecture of perception, interaction and power. We now inhabit a communication environment in which transparency, immediacy and identity performance unsettle the foundations of democratic coexistence.
History does not guarantee that liberal democratic norms will survive such transitions. Previous media revolutions eventually generated stabilising cultural forms – Bildung, constitutionalism, journalistic professionalism – but only after prolonged turbulence and violence. The digital public sphere may yet develop its own equivalents, but this is not assured. We are not only learning how to speak within a new medium environment; we are discovering whether this environment can support the ethical and institutional conditions of pluralistic democracy at all. In this sense, we stand not at the end of polarisation, but at its beginning. The outcome is open. Media do not determine our future, but they condition the field in which future forms of social and political life will be selected. Whether democratic norms can be reinvented under conditions of radical visibility remains an empirical question – one that our societies are now living through in real time.
Recent Comments