Towards a Bubble Democracy?Notes for a Theoretical Framework. E-book. Formato PDF - 9788893359962

Towards a Bubble Democracy?Notes for a Theoretical Framework. E-book. Formato PDF. In the last few years, different hypotheses have been formulated to&nbsp; explain the success of populism, focused on socio-economic factors&nbsp; and on the &lsquo;cultural&rsquo; components of the crisis of western liberalism.&nbsp; However, the discussion often turned to the unpredictable evolutions&nbsp; of &ldquo;digital swarms&rdquo;, to their indifference towards rational arguments,&nbsp; to their inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Damiano&nbsp; Palano&rsquo;s&nbsp; book&nbsp; focuses&nbsp; precisely&nbsp; on&nbsp; the&nbsp; consequences&nbsp; that&nbsp; &ldquo;digital&nbsp; swarms&rdquo; can have on our democracies. The goal is, however, not to&nbsp; provide an explanation of the success of the &lsquo;new&rsquo; populism, of fake&nbsp; news or of the so-called &ldquo;post-truth&rdquo;. More simply, the aim is to up- date the theoretical vocabulary with which to interpret the change we&nbsp; are experiencing. This book &ndash; which must be read as a piece of a re- flection in progress &ndash; focuses in fact on the implications that the new&nbsp; communication scenario has on contemporary democratic regimes.&nbsp; The thesis is that we are facing a new context, very different not only&nbsp; from the &lsquo;old&rsquo; <i>party democracy</i>, but also from the <i>audience democracy</i>.&nbsp; In many ways, the spread of social media seems in fact to mark the&nbsp; decline of the &ldquo;audience&rdquo;, at least if it is understood as an audience&nbsp; made basically homogeneous by the existence of &lsquo;generalist&rsquo; commu- nication channels. Rather than actually sanctioning mechanisms of dis- intermediation, the spread of new media triggers a fragmentation of&nbsp; the audience into a plurality of segments that tend to have no roots in&nbsp; a common sphere. And so, the public sphere is transformed into a&nbsp; myriad &lsquo;bubbles&rsquo; that become largely self-referential and potentially&nbsp; polarized. Taking into account the transformations in the communica- tive scenario, as well as the implications on the relationship between&nbsp;citizens, information and parties, this book proposes the ideal-typical&nbsp; image of a new <i>bubble democracy</i>.&nbsp;