The Public Sphere Fragmentation and Its Political Consequences: Between Democratic Promises and Authoritarian Biases

The expansion of digitalization and the adoption of social media as a means of daily communication and information have changed the contours of what is now understood as the public sphere. The link and importance of this concept to democracy and the formation of political will, however, remains relevant. In this paper, I bring together elements on the meaning of the diagnosis of the fragmentation of the public sphere amid digitalization and the expansion of social media in order to contribute to a conceptual update. Considering the close link between the public sphere and democracy, these elements show the political consequences of these processes amid recent threats to democracies. To accomplish these tasks, I first organize the characteristics that point to the occurrence of a new structural change in the public sphere, with the central characteristic of a radical fragmentation (1); then, I analyze what is characteristic of this new structural change in the public sphere and what elements can be considered as a continuation of past conceptions (2); finally, I sketch a possible relation between the new transformation of the public sphere to the political consequences of the democratic “paradoxes” found in the description of the new structural change in the keys of authoritarianism and democracy, thinking about its current and future consequences for the democratic rule of law (3).