The following essay is adapted and condensed from my book Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, forthcoming in May from InterVarsity Press.
Recent months have seen increased efforts to find a technical or political fix for the chaotic, confusing, polarized discourse that plays out on social media. In November 2020, Twitter covered over some of Trump’s posts and labeled them “misleading.” In December the FTC announced a suit aiming to breakup Facebook. Is it possible that such fixes can remedy the alienation, vitriol, and partisanship that afflict our public conversation? Probably not, unfortunately. Such solutions may ameliorate the most egregious problems, but the challenges posed by the digital public sphere and its deformative effect on our affections and thinking run deeper. If Christians hope to participate redemptively in this sphere, we will need to be deeply formed in different kinds of communities.
Throughout history, shifts in media technologies and institutions have reconfigured social belonging. Our digital media ecosystem is once again reorganizing how we belong to one another. Understanding these dynamics is particularly important because our social memberships guide our thinking: our thinking is downstream from our communal belonging, and when we fail to recognize this reality, we tend to fall into what Jonathan Haidt calls the “rationalist delusion,” the belief that we can simply reason our way to truth and agreement. Hence, many pundits continue to dispense misguided advice about how to overcome the hyper-partisan divides that define our media landscape. Calls for institutions to bolster fact-checking and for individuals to “diversify your news feed” are well-intentioned, but they fail to address the underlying reasons for our warped dependence on the news and our fragmenting social fabric. Perhaps instead of looking to the news to create better communities, we should be looking to strengthen our communities so that they can create better news.
The Public Sphere
Before the societal transformations wrought by the printing press, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of vernacular culture, European Christendom was stitched together by a cosmopolitan elite who communicated in Latin. While most people didn’t directly participate in this international, Christian culture, bilingual priests and others served as mediators between heaven and earth, between Christendom and local communities. Even illiterate commoners, then, understood their local communities as participating in a larger, sacred community. As Benedict Anderson argues, however, “the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized.” And as the public sphere developed and expanded, the rise of vernacular literacy and relatively inexpensive printed books and periodicals meant that more and more people were able to participate in it directly. Over time, these changes drastically altered the way people imagined their communities.
Anderson, for instance, has famously argued that the public sphere created by newspapers and other products of print capitalism played an essential role in the formation of modern nation states. Vernacular newspapers invited people to imagine themselves not as members of some trans-national Christendom, but as members of linguistically-bounded markets, communities constituted by a common language and economy. Early newspapers offered their readers a taste of the simultaneity we experience today when we read about some celebrity’s death or the latest terrorist attack and are aware that other people like us are attending to the same thing. Citing Hegel’s dictum, “Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer,” Anderson describes the effects of this daily religious ceremony: “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?” Nations are particular instances of such communities. More broadly, however, the work of scholars such as Anderson and Charles Taylor suggests three prominent features of communities that are constituted by the public sphere: they are secular, meta-topical, and market-based.
In naming such communities secular, it’s important to keep in mind the etymology of this word. Secular comes from a Latin word meaning “age” or “generation” and referred to things that pertained to the profane world rather than to the Church. To be secular in this sense is to imagine our lives within chronos time. Drawing on Anderson’s description of simultaneity, Taylor describes the effects of a secular public sphere:
Modern “secularization” can be seen from one angle as the rejection of higher times, and the positing of time as purely profane. . . . The modern notion of simultaneity comes to be, in which events utterly unrelated in cause or meaning are held together simply by their co-occurence at the same point in this single profane timeline. Modern literature, as well as news media, seconded by social science, has accustomed us to think of society in terms of vertical time-slices, holding together myriad happenings, related and unrelated.
The public sphere, particularly as it is formed by the news media, provides a space in which community can be formed around the events of chronos. What gets lost in such communities is any real sense of tradition, yet as Christians, we should imagine ourselves as members with all those across time who have been joined to Christ’s body. Insofar as we are caught up in the news, however, we come to imagine ourselves as participants in a conversation about the many events of our moment with others who share this moment.
The second key attribute of communities constituted by the public sphere is that they are meta-topical. In using this term, Taylor is relying upon two meanings of topical: place and subject. The Greek term meant “place,” but as Aristotle’s Topics indicates, it also had a metaphorical sense, referring to disparate but related ideas or examples gathered under a common heading. So to call the public sphere meta-topical means that it hosts a unified conversation happening in many places about many subjects or issues. What defines this conversation and gives it coherence is not a particular topic (the way that an academic discipline organizes an ongoing, diachronic conversation around a particular set of questions) nor a particular place (the way a front porch, neighborhood pub or coffeeshop, or workplace water cooler defines the conversations it hosts) but a time and a set of media—the public sphere includes all those issues and events being discussed on TV, the radio, newspapers, and social media. In other words, the public sphere invites us to imagine a single, coherent (if diffuse) conversation occurring simultaneously in many places about many issues.
The third feature of the public sphere is that it is an extension of the market. The public sphere depends upon manufactured, widely-circulated, purchased words. Thus it inevitably tends to commoditize language and human conversation. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan, Anderson notes that books were “the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity.” A book “is a distinct, self-contained object, exactly reproduced on a large scale.” It’s not an accident that Amazon, now the world’s largest online retailer, began as bookstore. Periodicals and newspapers are likewise commodities purchased by readers or advertisers. This became particularly evident with the rise of mass media in the nineteenth century. Today, after digital technologies have developed new ways to monetize attention and have disrupted traditional media institutions, the news remains embedded in market transactions. Modern news organizations double as lifestyle brands; where we get our news signals and shapes our identity. Even those interactions in the digital public sphere that aren’t explicitly monetized remain transactional—individuals post links or updates to get more followers, likes, or retweets.
Atomized Swarmers
When the public sphere was just one rather weak form of communal identity among many others—family, place, ethnic group, religious tradition—then its dynamics were muted. But as other forms of belonging and membership have eroded, the particular forms of community on offer through the public sphere become increasingly important and formative in people’s lives. When we belong less profoundly to our families, our places, and our religious traditions, we’re more susceptible to being caught up in the secular, meta-topical, market-driven communities of the public sphere. Yet such forms of belonging are inadequate substitutes for thick, sustaining communities; they are better described as swarms of atomized individuals.
Many sociological studies of American culture over the past several decades have painted a picture of an increasingly lonely, atomized culture. Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous assertion that Americans are obsessed with “moral and intellectual associations” no longer rings true. Perhaps the most notable analysis of these trends is Robert Putnam’s 2000 Bowling Alone, which charted Americans’ declining participation in social organizations. Fewer Americans belong to the civic institutions that once knit together the nation’s social fabric. More recently, Tim Carney’s Alienated America narrates the further withering of civic society and the severe consequences this loss has for the health of people and communities. Such disconnected individuals become estranged and vulnerable. As Robert Nisbet puts it in his classic study The Quest for Community, an individual thus alienated “not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it.” Loneliness has now become an epidemic in Western liberal democracies. And apparently, being lonely is worse for someone’s health than being a smoker. Hence Britain has created a new government position to address this health crisis: the Minister for Loneliness.
Yet attending to the news is an inadequate remedy for the disease of loneliness. As we have already seen, shared attention to issues in the public sphere can only form certain kinds of community. Further, the mediums through which news circulates in this space shape the modes of community that are available. In particular, the medium of printed language itself seems to individuate readers. Elizabeth Eisenstein, in her seminal work on the history of print, contrasts an oral public with a reading public, concluding that “a reading public was not only more dispersed; it was also more atomistic and individualistic than a hearing one.” Instead of gathering together to hear something spoken or read aloud, people read on their own. The result was not simply greater individualism; it was also the creation of new kinds of community:
But even while communal solidarity was diminished, vicarious participation in more distant events was also enhanced; and even while local ties were loosened, links to larger collective units were being forged. Printed materials encouraged silent adherence to causes whose advocates could not be found in any one parish and who addressed an invisible public from afar. New forms of group identity began to compete with an older, more localized nexus of loyalties.
As Eisenstein’s description suggests, the public sphere is simply not conducive to forming rooted, traditioned, embodied communities, communities in which members can enact their love for one another.
Today, our mobile society and digital media ecosystem amplify these tendencies set into motion by Gutenberg’s printing press and industrial mass media. The title of Sherry Turkle’s book on how digital technologies are changing the shape of our communities is apt: we are “alone together.” One has only to observe the behavior of online mobs to get a sense for how digitally-connected individuals “swarm” in response to some stimulus: a bit of news, an image, a poorly-worded phrase goes viral and attracts a fierce, though short-lived, attentional community. The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman distinguishes such swarms from more traditional forms of community: “swarms tend to replace groups, with their leaders, hierarchies, and pecking orders. . . . Swarms . . . assemble, disperse, and come together again from one occasion to another, each time guided by different, invariably shifting relevancies, and attracted by changing and moving targets.” Swarms have no organization, no division of labor, no discrete and differentiated identities; each individual is a mere fungible quantity. When a community is forged exclusively through the digital public sphere, it is almost inevitably a swarm. To put this in the terms of my previous chapters, we might say that swarms are the kind of pseudo-community that results when individuals with macadamized minds fixate on the events of chronos.
Such collections of individuals do not provide a clear sense of identity or purpose for their members, and they do not have the structure necessary to accomplish much of substance. As Byung-Chul Han puts it, “digital swarms lack . . . resolve. . . . Because of their fleeting nature, no political energy wells up.” In Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufekci assesses the 2011 Arab Spring protests and their aftermath. As her title indicates, digital technologies have great power to connect and mobilize large populations, but any communities they form remain fragile and vulnerable to disruption. Lasting social or political movements require embodied, thick communities and institutions, but Twitter movements are shallow and quick; they burn hot and then go out. When we only read about social issues or political problems and post online hot takes, we are susceptible to being caught up in swarm behavior: maybe we’ll dump ice water on ourselves for the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge or register our outrage over a #MeToo scandal or a #BlackLivesMatter tragedy, but will we actually discuss such issues with our neighbors or, better yet, actively address them in our communities? Because swarms simply respond to stimuli, they can’t coordinate or sustain the patient, difficult work of love and care.
Inadequate Fixes: Fact Checking and Diversifying Your News Feed
There is a growing consensus that our digital media ecosystem contributes to unhealthy forms of community: essays and books appear regularly that bemoan the effects of social media on our culture and decry the hyper-partisan nature of our politics. Most of the solutions these authors recommend, however, remain firmly within the confines of the public sphere. Such solutions will be inadequate to remedy the root causes of our weakened communities; the public sphere is simply not conducive to the formation of Christian community. I’ll briefly examine two popular remedies for our atomized swarms—fact-checking and diversifying our news feeds—before suggesting that a genuinely Christian remedy to these ills requires us to belong well outside of the public sphere.
Many news organizations and pundits have called for more fact checking as a way to combat the disinformation and confusion that circulates through social media and hyper-partisan news outlets. Snopes has built an entire business around fact checking, and The Poynter Institute maintains an “International Fact-Checking Network,” which was founded in 2015 and serves to support and coordinate such efforts. This is all well and good, but fact-checking and “media literacy skills” can’t fix what’s wrong with the atomized swarms that populate the public sphere.
Our digital “post-truth” moment, where “alternative facts” and fake news go viral, may seem to pose new challenges, but this isn’t the first time that journalistic institutions have tried to counter the dangers of partisan misinformation. In an insightful white paper written for the Knight Foundation, Danielle Allen and Justin Pottle survey the history of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, which was founded in the 1930s in response to the role propaganda played during World War I. If you swap out “Twitter” and “TV” for “radio” and “newsreel,” the press release announcing the formation of the IPA sounds like it could have been written in 2020: “America ‘is beset by a confusion of conflicting propaganda, a Babel of voices, warnings, charges, counter-charges, assertions and contradictions, assailing us continuously through press, radio, and newsreel. . . . There is today especial need for propaganda analysis. . . If American citizens are to have a clear understanding of conditions and what to do about them, they must be able to recognize propaganda, to analyze, and to appraise it.’” The IPA developed high school curriculum to try to accomplish this mission, but it proved difficult to find cut-and-dried rules that would distinguish normal political rhetoric from propaganda. Further, critics like Lewis Mumford questioned the merits of the IPA’s “‘suspicion of passion’”; in trying to objectively parse political statements, they lost the moral vision required to distinguish, in their case, between Hitler and Roosevelt. Hence Allen and Pottle conclude that the fact-checking approach represented by the IPA misses “the fundamental difficulty of political judgment, namely that evidence takes on its meaning and significance under the color of particular commitments of principle. . . . Key collective political judgments concern the just and the unjust; the advantageous and the disadvantageous, the admirable and the shameful.” Their argument doesn’t suggest that accuracy is irrelevant or unimportant, just that it’s insufficient. More and better information won’t fix what ails the public sphere and its swarming communities.
This is because merely adjudicating the veracity of viral stories or political claims doesn’t resolve contested cultural or political questions. And it certainly doesn’t heal partisan divides or forge healthy communities. In fact, the causal arrow points the other direction; “alternative facts” thrive because so many of us don’t really belong to our places or other thick communities. As Allen and Pottle conclude, “The opportunity to traffic in misinformation depends in the first instance on the existence of distinct communities of meaning and opinion within a society, and on the impermeability of those communities to one another.” Disinformation is the result of atomized individuals seeking community within a noisy, contested public sphere—it can’t be “fixed” with a technocratic solution like fact-checking.
Another solution to our hyper-partisan media ecology that some pundits recommend is diversifying your news feed. The thinking goes that because social media allows us to inhabit an “echo chamber” or construct a “filter bubble,” adding diverse voices and perspectives will deepen our understanding of those who differ from us and may even lead us to change our minds on some issues. On one level, this makes sense as a response to the “increasingly stringent partitioning of our society” that Jacques Ellul argued was a result of propaganda and mass media:
Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. They learn more and more that their group is right, that its actions are justified; thus their beliefs are strengthened. At the same time, such propaganda contains elements of criticism and refutation of other groups, which will never be read or heard by a member of another group. . . . As a result, people ignore each other more and more. They cease altogether to be open to an exchange of reason, arguments, points of view.
The problem that Ellul recognized in the 1960s—that mass media led to different ideological groups seeing different articles and messages—has only been exacerbated by the way news circulates through social media.
Given this situation, it’s understandable that some people advocate opening up our online filter bubbles so that we experience a broader range of views. In practice, however, filling your Twitter feed with people you disagree with or watching the enemy’s TV station probably won’t broaden your perspective. Instead, seeing analysis from those we disagree with tends to become an exercise in confirmation bias, reminding us how awful such people are. It more often results in moral grandstanding, virtue signaling, and “owning the libs” rather than genuine dialogue or learning. As Tufekci observes, people who read news online already “encounter a wider variety of opinions” than do those who do not, so the problem isn’t so much filter bubbles as it is the digital public sphere itself:
When we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone. It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one. In sociology terms, we strengthen our feeling of “in-group” belonging by increasing our distance from and tension with the “out-group”—us versus them. Our cognitive universe isn’t an echo chamber, but our social one is. This is why the various projects for fact-checking claims in the news, while valuable, don’t convince people. Belonging is stronger than facts.
Tufekci’s concluding claim, that belonging is stronger than facts, is why both fact-checking and encountering opposing voices fail to remedy the ills of public-sphere communities. These solutions presuppose that our formative communities will take shape in the public sphere, and they represent tweaks that might marginally improve how we belong to others in this space. But as long as the public sphere is populated by lonely, atomized individuals seeking somewhere to belong, no amount of tweaking will fundamentally improve it.
Belonging Outside the Public Sphere
What we really need is to be shaped by embodied communities that are rooted outside the public sphere and its unhealthy dynamics. Our engagement in the public sphere can only be redemptive to the extent that it is predicated on prior commitments—most fundamentally commitments to loving God and our neighbors. If these are indeed our primary commitments, we may learn about and respond to current events from a posture characterized by loving attention to the needs of our places and by a profound sense of our participation in God’s ongoing drama. In general terms, there are two sets of practices that can help us feel and think within healthy communities. The first category entails practices of joining that root our identity in embodied communities. The second category entails participating in the media in ways that counter the particular, warping pressures of the public sphere.
Most fundamentally, healing the tribalism that marks our media ecology will require Christians to take up what theologian Willie Jennings calls the “incarnational practice” of “joining,” the act of crossing racial or class or economic or ideological divides to belong with our fellow Christians and with our neighbors. Jennings offers a rich theology of joining, one that relies on recognizing place as an opportunity for redemptive engagement: “The space of communion is always ready to appear where the people of God reach down to join the land and reach out to join those around them, their near and distant neighbors.” Jennings challenges Christians whose communities have been fractured and marred by racism, pride, or selfishness to take up the work of joining—to move into a neighborhood, worship on Sunday morning, or grow a garden with people who don’t look like you. Such work will not result in perfect agreement about all issues; instead, it will lead to empathy for those with whom we disagree, but to whom we now belong.
This work of joining can form us to enter the public sphere in more redemptive ways. It does this by reshaping the directionality of our allegiances: Is our belonging in the public sphere dictating our interactions with our fellow church members, relatives, and neighbors, or are we entering the public sphere on the basis of our commitments to our neighbors, the least of these in our community, and our fellow parishioners? Obviously there will be mutual influence: the stories we read in our news feed will affect our worship and our conversations with relatives or co-workers. But if we imagine ourselves as members of embodied communities, we will be better equipped to enter the public sphere redemptively while resisting its particular warping pressures. The key question is who are we imagining ourselves as members of when we engage the news? If our primary allegiance is to our swarm in the public sphere, we will be tempted to grandstand, signal our virtues, or “own the libs.” If, however, we belong primarily to our places we might wonder how a new citizenship policy will affect our immigrant neighbor, or how a new bus schedule could improve the lives of our neighbors who don’t have cars.
Such belonging shapes both how we read the news and how we might ourselves speak into the public sphere. Wendell Berry’s poem “To A Siberian Woodsman” provides a good example here, particularly as it also shows how belonging to our places affects our engagement with international events. The poem was published during the Vietnam War (and, of course, the ongoing Cold War), and Berry explicitly frames it as a response to “looking at some pictures in a magazine”; he’s modeling one way of responding to a distant news story. Instead of imagining himself as an abstract American citizen confronting a generic Russian, Berry imagines himself “here in Kentucky” as a father and a farmer reading about another father who, like Berry, fishes with his son, eats with his family, works in the woods, and delights in the beauty of the forest. Because both the poet and the Siberian woodsman belong to their respective places, they have much in common, and so Berry asks “Who has invented our enmity?” Berry’s commitments to his place do not lead him to opt out of the public sphere; rather, his participation in this space is shaped by his love for his neighbors and his theological convictions regarding pacifism. In fact, because he is speaking from these commitments, his poem works against the grain of the very public sphere it participates in.
In this regard, Berry’s poem is one small gesture within a much broader tradition of Christians seeking to enter the public sphere while remaining firmly rooted in embodied, theological communities. Christians have long been early adopters of new communications technologies because they’ve recognized the ways that these tools—Gutenberg’s printing press, the industrial printing methods of the nineteenth-century, radio, TV, and now the Internet—provide incredible opportunities to raise public consciousness about important issues and topics, to bind people together around shared attention to important issues of the day, and to inspire acts of mercy, redemptive work, and prayer.
While the first decades of the third millennium have not been good for traditional media organizations or, in many respects, the overall state of our public sphere, small new media organizations doing good work abound. The proliferation of websites, podcasts, community newsletters, small print quarterlies, and local papers is, overall, a promising development. It’s true that digital technologies can amplify fringe voices and enable toxic communities to spread their messages. Nevertheless, we can’t simply try to erase such voices and get everyone to listen to the same three broadcast TV networks or subscribe to the same “centrist” newspapers. 1950s America was a weird anomaly, and while we may long for the sense of civic unity that we associate with that era, we shouldn’t want a bland, monochromatic public discourse. The answer to the toxic communities that form through digital media—from the more extreme ones like white nationalists to the garden-variety echo chambers of our social media feeds—is not to seek to flatten the public sphere but to foster rich, vibrant, lively communities of discourse. As Jon Askonas and Ari Schulman recommend, “Rather than hoping for the restoration of a universalized intellectual culture, we would do better to ratify and manage the reversion to separate communities, to build institutions that encourage tribalism’s more fruitful expressions. Rather than shoving all our debates into a single, hellish town square, let each town have its own, and let us work to make each a place of fruitful exchange.”
Redemptive Christian news organizations and authors find ways to subvert the deformative dynamics of the public sphere. They labor along the margins of a broken system, making do as best they can to inspire and equip readers to belong more faithfully to their own places and people. Whereas conversations in the public sphere tend to be secular, non-topical, and market-based, these people and organizations host kairotic, topical, and convivial discussions. By kairotic, I mean that they publish evergreen stories and avoid being caught up in the topic de jour; their horizon of significance is the arc of the Christian narrative rather than the 24/7 news cycle. By topical, I mean that they don’t try to cover every issue or give equal space to all perspectives. Instead, they have an orienting mission, one rooted in the gospel or even a specific facet of the gospel. Finally, by convivial I mean that these organizations are not chasing subscribers and advertisers, but are instead cultivating a community of discourse among their readers. Paradigmatic examples include Catholic Worker and Plough Quarterly, which is published by the Anabaptist Bruderhof community; these publications are published by Christians who actually live together. But many other publications hold conferences and gatherings, host private Facebook groups, or find other ways to foster genuine community among their readers and contributors. Participating in these news communities will shape our intuitions so that we are more likely to respond to stories and events with love rather than outrage, prayer rather than bitterness, and local action rather than telescopic morality.
If subscribing to a paper is a kind of formative liturgy, then we should be careful what publications we regularly read. Indeed, rather than diversifying your news feed or subscribing to papers across some artificial political spectrum, we should subscribe aspirationally: to what community do I want to belong? What newspaper or podcast or website gathers this community, articulating and shaping its values and perspective? Participating in such discourse communities won’t magically fix the ills of our digital public sphere, but it might shape our affections and thoughts, helping us to more faithfully enact God’s divine drama of redemption in our particular place and time.
Jeffrey Bilbro is Assistant Professor of English at Spring Arbor College. He is the author of Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News.
The following essay is adapted and condensed from my book Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, forthcoming in May from InterVarsity Press.
Recent months have seen increased efforts to find a technical or political fix for the chaotic, confusing, polarized discourse that plays out on social media. In November 2020, Twitter covered over some of Trump’s posts and labeled them “misleading.” In December the FTC announced a suit aiming to breakup Facebook. Is it possible that such fixes can remedy the alienation, vitriol, and partisanship that afflict our public conversation? Probably not, unfortunately. Such solutions may ameliorate the most egregious problems, but the challenges posed by the digital public sphere and its deformative effect on our affections and thinking run deeper. If Christians hope to participate redemptively in this sphere, we will need to be deeply formed in different kinds of communities.
Throughout history, shifts in media technologies and institutions have reconfigured social belonging. Our digital media ecosystem is once again reorganizing how we belong to one another. Understanding these dynamics is particularly important because our social memberships guide our thinking: our thinking is downstream from our communal belonging, and when we fail to recognize this reality, we tend to fall into what Jonathan Haidt calls the “rationalist delusion,” the belief that we can simply reason our way to truth and agreement. Hence, many pundits continue to dispense misguided advice about how to overcome the hyper-partisan divides that define our media landscape. Calls for institutions to bolster fact-checking and for individuals to “diversify your news feed” are well-intentioned, but they fail to address the underlying reasons for our warped dependence on the news and our fragmenting social fabric. Perhaps instead of looking to the news to create better communities, we should be looking to strengthen our communities so that they can create better news.
The Public Sphere
Before the societal transformations wrought by the printing press, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of vernacular culture, European Christendom was stitched together by a cosmopolitan elite who communicated in Latin. While most people didn’t directly participate in this international, Christian culture, bilingual priests and others served as mediators between heaven and earth, between Christendom and local communities. Even illiterate commoners, then, understood their local communities as participating in a larger, sacred community. As Benedict Anderson argues, however, “the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized.” And as the public sphere developed and expanded, the rise of vernacular literacy and relatively inexpensive printed books and periodicals meant that more and more people were able to participate in it directly. Over time, these changes drastically altered the way people imagined their communities.
Anderson, for instance, has famously argued that the public sphere created by newspapers and other products of print capitalism played an essential role in the formation of modern nation states. Vernacular newspapers invited people to imagine themselves not as members of some trans-national Christendom, but as members of linguistically-bounded markets, communities constituted by a common language and economy. Early newspapers offered their readers a taste of the simultaneity we experience today when we read about some celebrity’s death or the latest terrorist attack and are aware that other people like us are attending to the same thing. Citing Hegel’s dictum, “Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer,” Anderson describes the effects of this daily religious ceremony: “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?” Nations are particular instances of such communities. More broadly, however, the work of scholars such as Anderson and Charles Taylor suggests three prominent features of communities that are constituted by the public sphere: they are secular, meta-topical, and market-based.
In naming such communities secular, it’s important to keep in mind the etymology of this word. Secular comes from a Latin word meaning “age” or “generation” and referred to things that pertained to the profane world rather than to the Church. To be secular in this sense is to imagine our lives within chronos time. Drawing on Anderson’s description of simultaneity, Taylor describes the effects of a secular public sphere:
Modern “secularization” can be seen from one angle as the rejection of higher times, and the positing of time as purely profane. . . . The modern notion of simultaneity comes to be, in which events utterly unrelated in cause or meaning are held together simply by their co-occurence at the same point in this single profane timeline. Modern literature, as well as news media, seconded by social science, has accustomed us to think of society in terms of vertical time-slices, holding together myriad happenings, related and unrelated.
The public sphere, particularly as it is formed by the news media, provides a space in which community can be formed around the events of chronos. What gets lost in such communities is any real sense of tradition, yet as Christians, we should imagine ourselves as members with all those across time who have been joined to Christ’s body. Insofar as we are caught up in the news, however, we come to imagine ourselves as participants in a conversation about the many events of our moment with others who share this moment.
The second key attribute of communities constituted by the public sphere is that they are meta-topical. In using this term, Taylor is relying upon two meanings of topical: place and subject. The Greek term meant “place,” but as Aristotle’s Topics indicates, it also had a metaphorical sense, referring to disparate but related ideas or examples gathered under a common heading. So to call the public sphere meta-topical means that it hosts a unified conversation happening in many places about many subjects or issues. What defines this conversation and gives it coherence is not a particular topic (the way that an academic discipline organizes an ongoing, diachronic conversation around a particular set of questions) nor a particular place (the way a front porch, neighborhood pub or coffeeshop, or workplace water cooler defines the conversations it hosts) but a time and a set of media—the public sphere includes all those issues and events being discussed on TV, the radio, newspapers, and social media. In other words, the public sphere invites us to imagine a single, coherent (if diffuse) conversation occurring simultaneously in many places about many issues.
The third feature of the public sphere is that it is an extension of the market. The public sphere depends upon manufactured, widely-circulated, purchased words. Thus it inevitably tends to commoditize language and human conversation. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan, Anderson notes that books were “the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity.” A book “is a distinct, self-contained object, exactly reproduced on a large scale.” It’s not an accident that Amazon, now the world’s largest online retailer, began as bookstore. Periodicals and newspapers are likewise commodities purchased by readers or advertisers. This became particularly evident with the rise of mass media in the nineteenth century. Today, after digital technologies have developed new ways to monetize attention and have disrupted traditional media institutions, the news remains embedded in market transactions. Modern news organizations double as lifestyle brands; where we get our news signals and shapes our identity. Even those interactions in the digital public sphere that aren’t explicitly monetized remain transactional—individuals post links or updates to get more followers, likes, or retweets.
Atomized Swarmers
When the public sphere was just one rather weak form of communal identity among many others—family, place, ethnic group, religious tradition—then its dynamics were muted. But as other forms of belonging and membership have eroded, the particular forms of community on offer through the public sphere become increasingly important and formative in people’s lives. When we belong less profoundly to our families, our places, and our religious traditions, we’re more susceptible to being caught up in the secular, meta-topical, market-driven communities of the public sphere. Yet such forms of belonging are inadequate substitutes for thick, sustaining communities; they are better described as swarms of atomized individuals.
Many sociological studies of American culture over the past several decades have painted a picture of an increasingly lonely, atomized culture. Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous assertion that Americans are obsessed with “moral and intellectual associations” no longer rings true. Perhaps the most notable analysis of these trends is Robert Putnam’s 2000 Bowling Alone, which charted Americans’ declining participation in social organizations. Fewer Americans belong to the civic institutions that once knit together the nation’s social fabric. More recently, Tim Carney’s Alienated America narrates the further withering of civic society and the severe consequences this loss has for the health of people and communities. Such disconnected individuals become estranged and vulnerable. As Robert Nisbet puts it in his classic study The Quest for Community, an individual thus alienated “not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it.” Loneliness has now become an epidemic in Western liberal democracies. And apparently, being lonely is worse for someone’s health than being a smoker. Hence Britain has created a new government position to address this health crisis: the Minister for Loneliness.
Yet attending to the news is an inadequate remedy for the disease of loneliness. As we have already seen, shared attention to issues in the public sphere can only form certain kinds of community. Further, the mediums through which news circulates in this space shape the modes of community that are available. In particular, the medium of printed language itself seems to individuate readers. Elizabeth Eisenstein, in her seminal work on the history of print, contrasts an oral public with a reading public, concluding that “a reading public was not only more dispersed; it was also more atomistic and individualistic than a hearing one.” Instead of gathering together to hear something spoken or read aloud, people read on their own. The result was not simply greater individualism; it was also the creation of new kinds of community:
But even while communal solidarity was diminished, vicarious participation in more distant events was also enhanced; and even while local ties were loosened, links to larger collective units were being forged. Printed materials encouraged silent adherence to causes whose advocates could not be found in any one parish and who addressed an invisible public from afar. New forms of group identity began to compete with an older, more localized nexus of loyalties.
As Eisenstein’s description suggests, the public sphere is simply not conducive to forming rooted, traditioned, embodied communities, communities in which members can enact their love for one another.
Today, our mobile society and digital media ecosystem amplify these tendencies set into motion by Gutenberg’s printing press and industrial mass media. The title of Sherry Turkle’s book on how digital technologies are changing the shape of our communities is apt: we are “alone together.” One has only to observe the behavior of online mobs to get a sense for how digitally-connected individuals “swarm” in response to some stimulus: a bit of news, an image, a poorly-worded phrase goes viral and attracts a fierce, though short-lived, attentional community. The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman distinguishes such swarms from more traditional forms of community: “swarms tend to replace groups, with their leaders, hierarchies, and pecking orders. . . . Swarms . . . assemble, disperse, and come together again from one occasion to another, each time guided by different, invariably shifting relevancies, and attracted by changing and moving targets.” Swarms have no organization, no division of labor, no discrete and differentiated identities; each individual is a mere fungible quantity. When a community is forged exclusively through the digital public sphere, it is almost inevitably a swarm. To put this in the terms of my previous chapters, we might say that swarms are the kind of pseudo-community that results when individuals with macadamized minds fixate on the events of chronos.
Such collections of individuals do not provide a clear sense of identity or purpose for their members, and they do not have the structure necessary to accomplish much of substance. As Byung-Chul Han puts it, “digital swarms lack . . . resolve. . . . Because of their fleeting nature, no political energy wells up.” In Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufekci assesses the 2011 Arab Spring protests and their aftermath. As her title indicates, digital technologies have great power to connect and mobilize large populations, but any communities they form remain fragile and vulnerable to disruption. Lasting social or political movements require embodied, thick communities and institutions, but Twitter movements are shallow and quick; they burn hot and then go out. When we only read about social issues or political problems and post online hot takes, we are susceptible to being caught up in swarm behavior: maybe we’ll dump ice water on ourselves for the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge or register our outrage over a #MeToo scandal or a #BlackLivesMatter tragedy, but will we actually discuss such issues with our neighbors or, better yet, actively address them in our communities? Because swarms simply respond to stimuli, they can’t coordinate or sustain the patient, difficult work of love and care.
Inadequate Fixes: Fact Checking and Diversifying Your News Feed
There is a growing consensus that our digital media ecosystem contributes to unhealthy forms of community: essays and books appear regularly that bemoan the effects of social media on our culture and decry the hyper-partisan nature of our politics. Most of the solutions these authors recommend, however, remain firmly within the confines of the public sphere. Such solutions will be inadequate to remedy the root causes of our weakened communities; the public sphere is simply not conducive to the formation of Christian community. I’ll briefly examine two popular remedies for our atomized swarms—fact-checking and diversifying our news feeds—before suggesting that a genuinely Christian remedy to these ills requires us to belong well outside of the public sphere.
Many news organizations and pundits have called for more fact checking as a way to combat the disinformation and confusion that circulates through social media and hyper-partisan news outlets. Snopes has built an entire business around fact checking, and The Poynter Institute maintains an “International Fact-Checking Network,” which was founded in 2015 and serves to support and coordinate such efforts. This is all well and good, but fact-checking and “media literacy skills” can’t fix what’s wrong with the atomized swarms that populate the public sphere.
Our digital “post-truth” moment, where “alternative facts” and fake news go viral, may seem to pose new challenges, but this isn’t the first time that journalistic institutions have tried to counter the dangers of partisan misinformation. In an insightful white paper written for the Knight Foundation, Danielle Allen and Justin Pottle survey the history of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, which was founded in the 1930s in response to the role propaganda played during World War I. If you swap out “Twitter” and “TV” for “radio” and “newsreel,” the press release announcing the formation of the IPA sounds like it could have been written in 2020: “America ‘is beset by a confusion of conflicting propaganda, a Babel of voices, warnings, charges, counter-charges, assertions and contradictions, assailing us continuously through press, radio, and newsreel. . . . There is today especial need for propaganda analysis. . . If American citizens are to have a clear understanding of conditions and what to do about them, they must be able to recognize propaganda, to analyze, and to appraise it.’” The IPA developed high school curriculum to try to accomplish this mission, but it proved difficult to find cut-and-dried rules that would distinguish normal political rhetoric from propaganda. Further, critics like Lewis Mumford questioned the merits of the IPA’s “‘suspicion of passion’”; in trying to objectively parse political statements, they lost the moral vision required to distinguish, in their case, between Hitler and Roosevelt. Hence Allen and Pottle conclude that the fact-checking approach represented by the IPA misses “the fundamental difficulty of political judgment, namely that evidence takes on its meaning and significance under the color of particular commitments of principle. . . . Key collective political judgments concern the just and the unjust; the advantageous and the disadvantageous, the admirable and the shameful.” Their argument doesn’t suggest that accuracy is irrelevant or unimportant, just that it’s insufficient. More and better information won’t fix what ails the public sphere and its swarming communities.
This is because merely adjudicating the veracity of viral stories or political claims doesn’t resolve contested cultural or political questions. And it certainly doesn’t heal partisan divides or forge healthy communities. In fact, the causal arrow points the other direction; “alternative facts” thrive because so many of us don’t really belong to our places or other thick communities. As Allen and Pottle conclude, “The opportunity to traffic in misinformation depends in the first instance on the existence of distinct communities of meaning and opinion within a society, and on the impermeability of those communities to one another.” Disinformation is the result of atomized individuals seeking community within a noisy, contested public sphere—it can’t be “fixed” with a technocratic solution like fact-checking.
Another solution to our hyper-partisan media ecology that some pundits recommend is diversifying your news feed. The thinking goes that because social media allows us to inhabit an “echo chamber” or construct a “filter bubble,” adding diverse voices and perspectives will deepen our understanding of those who differ from us and may even lead us to change our minds on some issues. On one level, this makes sense as a response to the “increasingly stringent partitioning of our society” that Jacques Ellul argued was a result of propaganda and mass media:
Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. They learn more and more that their group is right, that its actions are justified; thus their beliefs are strengthened. At the same time, such propaganda contains elements of criticism and refutation of other groups, which will never be read or heard by a member of another group. . . . As a result, people ignore each other more and more. They cease altogether to be open to an exchange of reason, arguments, points of view.
The problem that Ellul recognized in the 1960s—that mass media led to different ideological groups seeing different articles and messages—has only been exacerbated by the way news circulates through social media.
Given this situation, it’s understandable that some people advocate opening up our online filter bubbles so that we experience a broader range of views. In practice, however, filling your Twitter feed with people you disagree with or watching the enemy’s TV station probably won’t broaden your perspective. Instead, seeing analysis from those we disagree with tends to become an exercise in confirmation bias, reminding us how awful such people are. It more often results in moral grandstanding, virtue signaling, and “owning the libs” rather than genuine dialogue or learning. As Tufekci observes, people who read news online already “encounter a wider variety of opinions” than do those who do not, so the problem isn’t so much filter bubbles as it is the digital public sphere itself:
When we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone. It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one. In sociology terms, we strengthen our feeling of “in-group” belonging by increasing our distance from and tension with the “out-group”—us versus them. Our cognitive universe isn’t an echo chamber, but our social one is. This is why the various projects for fact-checking claims in the news, while valuable, don’t convince people. Belonging is stronger than facts.
Tufekci’s concluding claim, that belonging is stronger than facts, is why both fact-checking and encountering opposing voices fail to remedy the ills of public-sphere communities. These solutions presuppose that our formative communities will take shape in the public sphere, and they represent tweaks that might marginally improve how we belong to others in this space. But as long as the public sphere is populated by lonely, atomized individuals seeking somewhere to belong, no amount of tweaking will fundamentally improve it.
Belonging Outside the Public Sphere
What we really need is to be shaped by embodied communities that are rooted outside the public sphere and its unhealthy dynamics. Our engagement in the public sphere can only be redemptive to the extent that it is predicated on prior commitments—most fundamentally commitments to loving God and our neighbors. If these are indeed our primary commitments, we may learn about and respond to current events from a posture characterized by loving attention to the needs of our places and by a profound sense of our participation in God’s ongoing drama. In general terms, there are two sets of practices that can help us feel and think within healthy communities. The first category entails practices of joining that root our identity in embodied communities. The second category entails participating in the media in ways that counter the particular, warping pressures of the public sphere.
Most fundamentally, healing the tribalism that marks our media ecology will require Christians to take up what theologian Willie Jennings calls the “incarnational practice” of “joining,” the act of crossing racial or class or economic or ideological divides to belong with our fellow Christians and with our neighbors. Jennings offers a rich theology of joining, one that relies on recognizing place as an opportunity for redemptive engagement: “The space of communion is always ready to appear where the people of God reach down to join the land and reach out to join those around them, their near and distant neighbors.” Jennings challenges Christians whose communities have been fractured and marred by racism, pride, or selfishness to take up the work of joining—to move into a neighborhood, worship on Sunday morning, or grow a garden with people who don’t look like you. Such work will not result in perfect agreement about all issues; instead, it will lead to empathy for those with whom we disagree, but to whom we now belong.
This work of joining can form us to enter the public sphere in more redemptive ways. It does this by reshaping the directionality of our allegiances: Is our belonging in the public sphere dictating our interactions with our fellow church members, relatives, and neighbors, or are we entering the public sphere on the basis of our commitments to our neighbors, the least of these in our community, and our fellow parishioners? Obviously there will be mutual influence: the stories we read in our news feed will affect our worship and our conversations with relatives or co-workers. But if we imagine ourselves as members of embodied communities, we will be better equipped to enter the public sphere redemptively while resisting its particular warping pressures. The key question is who are we imagining ourselves as members of when we engage the news? If our primary allegiance is to our swarm in the public sphere, we will be tempted to grandstand, signal our virtues, or “own the libs.” If, however, we belong primarily to our places we might wonder how a new citizenship policy will affect our immigrant neighbor, or how a new bus schedule could improve the lives of our neighbors who don’t have cars.
Such belonging shapes both how we read the news and how we might ourselves speak into the public sphere. Wendell Berry’s poem “To A Siberian Woodsman” provides a good example here, particularly as it also shows how belonging to our places affects our engagement with international events. The poem was published during the Vietnam War (and, of course, the ongoing Cold War), and Berry explicitly frames it as a response to “looking at some pictures in a magazine”; he’s modeling one way of responding to a distant news story. Instead of imagining himself as an abstract American citizen confronting a generic Russian, Berry imagines himself “here in Kentucky” as a father and a farmer reading about another father who, like Berry, fishes with his son, eats with his family, works in the woods, and delights in the beauty of the forest. Because both the poet and the Siberian woodsman belong to their respective places, they have much in common, and so Berry asks “Who has invented our enmity?” Berry’s commitments to his place do not lead him to opt out of the public sphere; rather, his participation in this space is shaped by his love for his neighbors and his theological convictions regarding pacifism. In fact, because he is speaking from these commitments, his poem works against the grain of the very public sphere it participates in.
In this regard, Berry’s poem is one small gesture within a much broader tradition of Christians seeking to enter the public sphere while remaining firmly rooted in embodied, theological communities. Christians have long been early adopters of new communications technologies because they’ve recognized the ways that these tools—Gutenberg’s printing press, the industrial printing methods of the nineteenth-century, radio, TV, and now the Internet—provide incredible opportunities to raise public consciousness about important issues and topics, to bind people together around shared attention to important issues of the day, and to inspire acts of mercy, redemptive work, and prayer.
While the first decades of the third millennium have not been good for traditional media organizations or, in many respects, the overall state of our public sphere, small new media organizations doing good work abound. The proliferation of websites, podcasts, community newsletters, small print quarterlies, and local papers is, overall, a promising development. It’s true that digital technologies can amplify fringe voices and enable toxic communities to spread their messages. Nevertheless, we can’t simply try to erase such voices and get everyone to listen to the same three broadcast TV networks or subscribe to the same “centrist” newspapers. 1950s America was a weird anomaly, and while we may long for the sense of civic unity that we associate with that era, we shouldn’t want a bland, monochromatic public discourse. The answer to the toxic communities that form through digital media—from the more extreme ones like white nationalists to the garden-variety echo chambers of our social media feeds—is not to seek to flatten the public sphere but to foster rich, vibrant, lively communities of discourse. As Jon Askonas and Ari Schulman recommend, “Rather than hoping for the restoration of a universalized intellectual culture, we would do better to ratify and manage the reversion to separate communities, to build institutions that encourage tribalism’s more fruitful expressions. Rather than shoving all our debates into a single, hellish town square, let each town have its own, and let us work to make each a place of fruitful exchange.”
Redemptive Christian news organizations and authors find ways to subvert the deformative dynamics of the public sphere. They labor along the margins of a broken system, making do as best they can to inspire and equip readers to belong more faithfully to their own places and people. Whereas conversations in the public sphere tend to be secular, non-topical, and market-based, these people and organizations host kairotic, topical, and convivial discussions. By kairotic, I mean that they publish evergreen stories and avoid being caught up in the topic de jour; their horizon of significance is the arc of the Christian narrative rather than the 24/7 news cycle. By topical, I mean that they don’t try to cover every issue or give equal space to all perspectives. Instead, they have an orienting mission, one rooted in the gospel or even a specific facet of the gospel. Finally, by convivial I mean that these organizations are not chasing subscribers and advertisers, but are instead cultivating a community of discourse among their readers. Paradigmatic examples include Catholic Worker and Plough Quarterly, which is published by the Anabaptist Bruderhof community; these publications are published by Christians who actually live together. But many other publications hold conferences and gatherings, host private Facebook groups, or find other ways to foster genuine community among their readers and contributors. Participating in these news communities will shape our intuitions so that we are more likely to respond to stories and events with love rather than outrage, prayer rather than bitterness, and local action rather than telescopic morality.
If subscribing to a paper is a kind of formative liturgy, then we should be careful what publications we regularly read. Indeed, rather than diversifying your news feed or subscribing to papers across some artificial political spectrum, we should subscribe aspirationally: to what community do I want to belong? What newspaper or podcast or website gathers this community, articulating and shaping its values and perspective? Participating in such discourse communities won’t magically fix the ills of our digital public sphere, but it might shape our affections and thoughts, helping us to more faithfully enact God’s divine drama of redemption in our particular place and time.
Jeffrey Bilbro is Assistant Professor of English at Spring Arbor College. He is the author of Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News.
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