ABSTRACT
Social media offers an array of communicative opportunities associated with novel discourses and understandings of crime and justice. The exponentially expanded number of interlocutors and the increasingly porous boundaries between social media and the mass media provides multiple pathways to publicity, and new opportunities to debate and conceptualise social problems. This is key to the appeal of social media for social movements and activists. As Benhabib (1992: 79) observed, ‘The struggle over what gets included in the public agenda is itself a struggle for justice and freedom.’ It is not that social problems enter into the public domain fully formed but, rather, once they are on the ‘public agenda’, they become accessible to ‘debate, reflection, action, and moral-political transformation’ (Benhabib, 1992: 94). However, the ‘filtering effects of the bourgeois public sphere’, such as those hegemonic tendencies described in Chapter 2, can prevent some forms of suffering from reaching the ‘level of political thematization and organization’ (Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 116). These social problems remain, in effect, ‘privatised’; refused symbolisation in the public sphere, consigning affected individuals or groups to the doubled injury of ongoing suffering and the denial of that suffering. On social media, suppressed individual or social struggles can find articulation, and
potential responses can be debated. Social media has also provided mechanisms whereby new formulations of justice can be enacted, such as when women use social media to ‘name and shame’ perpetrators of sexual violence (Salter, 2013a). Such practices can be critiqued as vigilantism and a form of ‘trial by media’ (Greer and McLaughlin, 2011) but they should be contextualised within the pervasive failings of the justice system and mass media to address the extent and impact of interpersonal victimisation both ‘online’ and ‘offline’. There are unanswered questions about the political efficacy of alter-
native discourses of crime and justice on social media. The ideal of deliberative democracy places the public sphere in a constructive but critical tension with the powers of a nationally bounded government. The public sphere is understood to be functioning in the interests of democracy by independently scrutinising the government and other authorities, and developing shared understandings and points of consensus which are incorporated into democratic decision-making through elections and other mechanisms (McKee, 2004). This is sometimes described as the communicative flow from the ‘weak publics’ of the media and other public deliberative fora to the ‘strong publics’, primarily the parliament of a nation state, with the sovereign power to act on public opinion (Fraser, 1990). Social media appears to operate outside the ideal of deliberative democracy in ways that challenge optimistic assessments of its potential as a tool for social change or transformation. It is true that social media is relatively inclusive and diverse in comparison to established media industries such as newspapers, television and radio, whose exclusionary and mono-cultural tendencies have been a recurrent source of criticism. However, simply being inclusive does not make social media politically efficacious. As philosopher Nancy Fraser (2014: 9) has argued:
publicity is supposed to hold officials accountable and to assure that the actions of the state express the will of the citizenry. Thus, a public sphere should correlate with a sovereign power.
