Description
The article argues that the very features which make social media engagement facile and alluring – algorithmic automation, personalization, and gamification – generate afflictions and frustrations we witness in the digital public sphere at large. I draw on Gijs Van Oenen’s analysis of an interpassive turn in civic culture characterized by increasing incapacity of citizens to interactively re-affirm civic norms they wilfully endorse. Similarly, I argue that the expansion of digital media as a participatory realm gradually unsettles the tension at the heart of participatory democracy, namely, the desirability of active citizens' participation on one hand and the right not to participate, or the right to silence, on the other. By making interactive engagement appealing through gamification and nudging it increases participation and yet degrades its democratic legitimacy. Notably, interactivity remains the set-default in digital environments where silence simply does not register. Instead, it is replaced by interpassive forms of expression e.g., emojis, circulating in the digital economy of likes and shares. These digital affordances render digital speech prone to context collapse, i.e., parody or ventriloquism, as attested by Poe’s law. The risk of genuine civic expression being parodied or distorted in turn creates pressures for response in order reclaim one’s views and thus suppresses one’s right to silence. This dynamic helps to explain the prevalence of dark forms of participation online thriving on dark irony and vitriol, whose implications remain global in scale in so far as the interactive features are built in the algorithmic architecture of the digital platforms. In light of this analysis, I call for a renewed attention to the right to silence as a critical perspective for understanding communicative failures that frustrate digital public sphere and consider silence in terms of ‘patiency’ or response-ability as preconditions for more genuine communication capable of bridging partisan divides.
