This article is dedicated to Lukas H. Meyer on the occasion of his 60th birthday.
Introduction
For many years now Big Tech companies like Google have been running ads to promote the teaching of digital skills such as creating websites or sharing documents. These skills, these ads emphasize, contribute to economic flourishing: they enable the digitally educated to tap into economic potentials afforded by mastering “digital technologies,” including the improvement of client service, visibility, or workflow. As defined by Andreas Reckwitz, digital technologies rely on computerization, digitization, and the internet. They consist of algorithm-executing data processors, the binary, discontinuous representation of media content, and the communicative networking of computers via a universal basic protocol (i.e., the internet protocol suite), respectively.Footnote 1 Likewise, several educational scholars and political theorists have started defending the importance of teaching digital skills as a matter of democratic citizenship education, by which I mean educational efforts to shape citizens in ways that are conducive for realizing democracy by way of developing their political attitudes, knowledge, and skills. These scholars have been highlighting the democracy-enhancing benefits of equipping citizens with digital skills like crafting persuasive social media posts or fact-checking information online. I appreciate their efforts in thinking through these issues of digital citizenship education, by which I mean democratic citizenship education in liberal democratic Western societies that are deeply affected by the widespread use of digital technologies, or “digitized societies,” for short. By highlighting the possible democratic gains of learning digital skills, they have generated a valuable narrative on digital education which counters that of the Big Tech companies.
In this article I argue, however, that digital citizenship education must not focus exclusively on the transmission of digital skills or techniques but should also concentrate on contributing to a more democratic political culture. I draw on central ideas of democratic citizenship from John Rawls’s political liberalism, the relevance of which for deliberative democracy within digitized societies is insufficiently explored.Footnote 2 To defend this Rawls-inspired cultural turn, Section 1 begins by presenting the tendency in the scholarly literature on digital citizenship education to neglect questions of political culture. Section 2 explains that the widespread use of digital technologies not only manifests but also reinforces the increasing dominance of an “ethos of authenticity”Footnote 3 and a “culture of singularization”Footnote 4 and that this cultural shift crowds out the kind of public reasoning that deliberative democracy requires. Section 3 argues that the effects of these shifts on the digitized societies’ “nonpublic political culture”—which, following Rawls, “mediates between the public political culture and the background culture … [and] comprises media”Footnote 5—tend to undermine public reasoning when discussing or voting on political issues of fundamental importance. This section develops three Rawlsian rationales that ground three connected proposals for digital citizenship education: (1) holding members of the public political culture (judges, government officials, and political candidates) accountable for the educational impact of their (lack of) public reasoning; (2) reinforcing culturally oriented democratic citizenship education in schools; (3) regulating private social media platforms by way of protecting private data or turning their services from private into public goods.
1. Digital Citizenship Education
Over the course of the last decade, the widespread use of digital technologies has turned the “one-to-many” mass-media environment of political communication and expression into a “many-to-many” networked one. Henry Farrell and Melissa Schwartzberg,Footnote 6 Jürgen Habermas,Footnote 7 and Joshua Cohen and Archon FungFootnote 8 speak, respectively, of a “digital,” “new,” or “structural transformation of the political public sphere.” I abbreviate political public sphere as public sphere, while recognizing that nonpolitical public spheres (e.g., a literary public sphere) also exist. In the mass-media political public sphere, mainly economic, political, cultural, and academic elites publicly debated via editorially curated media like radio, TV, or newspapers.Footnote 9 These media, in turn, channeled that debate to the wider public. Citizens who did not belong to these elites remained as relatively passive readers, listeners, or viewers. However, citizens still played an important role because they would eventually approve or disapprove—through opinion polls, protests, and the voting booths—the claims that the elites proposed as publicly justifiable.Footnote 10
By contrast, in the public sphere of digitized societies—the digital sphere—citizens can circumvent editorial gatekeeping and publish their views on social media platforms at almost zero cost.Footnote 11 Private digital platforms of social media provide networked, yet fragmented, communicative and expressive flows through which citizens can debate and engage with one another.Footnote 12 Indeed, the digital sphere did not hollow out the formal governmental institutions at the core of the political system.Footnote 13 As Joseph Kahne, Danielle Allena, and Jennifer Light argue, it pluralized and increased the volume of non-elite voices and decentered debate from the gated elite circles of mass media.Footnote 14 In Cohen and Fung’s view, it rendered the political discussion more diverse and inclusive in many respects.Footnote 15 Meanwhile, the lack of editorial gatekeeping not only led to an immense augmentation of the sheer amount of media content but also allowed the proliferation of false or inaccurate information.Footnote 16 The journalistic ethos characteristic of the mass-media public sphere emphasized the importance of providing accurate, true, and publicly relevant information. This ethos was not “carried over” to the extremely numerous and diverse groups of contributors of the digital sphere, as Renate Fischer and Ottfried Jarren have argued.Footnote 17
In response to this profound transformation, several political and educational theorists have demanded shifting democratic citizenship education toward teaching digital skills, for example, skills of how to fact-check information or create social media posts. These scholars’ contributions reflect the formation of a new paradigm of digital citizenship education, which involves a profound reassessment of the skills that citizenship requires within digitized societies. Joseph Kahne, Erica Hodgin, and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl identify four core practices of democracy: investigation and research; mobilizing for change; dialogue and feedback; production and circulation of information. To enable the continuation of these practices, they argue, democratic education must be adapted so that citizens are capable of “expressing one’s perspective persuasively in a digital format,”Footnote 18 “tapping social networks to forage for information,”Footnote 19 or learning “how to craft persuasive messages that will reach a targeted audience.”Footnote 20 Sigal Ben-Porath and Gideon Dishon encourage teaching and learning the capacity for the self-enforcement of norms of fair and inclusive digital communication via asynchronous, collaborative learning platforms. This capacity is of special importance, they maintain, because digital communication contexts such as social media often lack a moderator or a hierarchically imposed accountability structure. Hence students must learn to rely on horizontal forms of accountability that those participating in digital communication generate themselves.Footnote 21
Harry Brighouse argues that the ubiquity of information and the increased amount of false or inaccurate information would require doubling down on the teaching of information literacy skills. Citizens must be able to cross-check information and differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information, as well as between trustworthy and untrustworthy sources of information.Footnote 22 Sharing these epistemic concerns, Johannes Drerup points out that providing high-quality general education is the best way of ensuring that citizens can detect and immunize themselves against “fake news.” Increasing citizens’ knowledge will allow them to question claims that are incompatible or in tension with what they know are well-established scientific facts.Footnote 23 Habermas insinuates that adapting to the digitized public sphere is above all a matter of skill-formation or “training,” when he writes that “Just as printing made everyone a potential reader, today digitalisation is making everyone into a potential author. But how long did it take until everyone was able to read?”Footnote 24
These ways of conceiving digital citizenship education are plausible and compelling. Yet they suffer from concentrating on the requirement that citizens learn how to effectively use the latest instruments of political communication and expression. This one-sided emphasis is evident in Kahne et al.’s demands for fostering practical skills of how to create digital media content, Habermas’s emphasis on writing a political text for a public audience, or Brighouse’s emphasis on assessing information. This focus on skills seems to assume that the changes related to the digital sphere do not affect citizens’ self-conception, and that digital citizenship education can concentrate on providing the instruments or tools that citizens need to master. Similarly, Ben-Porath and Dishon do not question whether the recently formed digital sphere has affected citizens’ motivation to engage in fair and inclusive political communication and expression. Instead, they emphasize that citizens need to learn how to horizontally self-enforce norms of fairness and inclusion in the non-hierarchical structures of digital communication and expression. Drerup does not ask whether citizens in the digital sphere may be lacking motivation to be well-informed, but merely emphasizes that gaining and generating accurate knowledge now requires making sure that educators provide general education.
As I explain in Section 2, these calls for teaching digital media skills neglect the ways in which the effects of cultural shifts within digitized societies threaten to undermine public reasoning and thus a core element of democratic deliberation.Footnote 25 These cultural changes are reflected in the growing importance of an ethos of authenticity and cultural processes of singularization, which not only favored the rise of digital technologies, but were reinforced by the continuous and increasing use of these technologies.Footnote 26 There is thus a tendency within the digital sphere for affirmations of particularistic or singular identities to crowd out the communication and expression of political demands that claim public justifiability. These cultural shifts reflect, according to Habermas, the development of the public sphere into a “semi-private, semi-public sphere.”Footnote 27 I refer to this as “hybrid culture.”
2. The Culture of the Digital Sphere
In this section I defend and explain my claims that an ethos of authenticity and a culture of singularity have gained in importance within digitized societies, and that this has led to the hybrid culture of the digital sphere, by sketching long-term cultural developments within Western modernity and late modernity. Initially, my reconstruction may suggest that the nonpublic political culture has been emerging independently of far-reaching developments within information and communication technology. But I clarify that the development of digital technologies, and especially of information and communication platforms that facilitate social networking, has been deeply intertwined with these cultural shifts. The result of this imbrication between (late) modern culture and digital technology is the hybrid culture characteristic of the digital sphere.
2.1. The Ethos of Authenticity and the Culture of Singularity
Modern societies are shaped by a fundamental social transformation from a vertical social order with differing, birth-given ranks, in which only some members enjoy honors and privileges, into a horizontal social order in which all (male, propertied, and white) members have equal dignity.Footnote 28 This social transformation revolutionized the understanding of legitimate political authorityFootnote 29 and had pervasive cultural effects on modern individuals’ self-understanding. Individuals are no longer prompted to conceive their personal and social identity as being given by the rank into which they were born. Instead, they are now permitted, or even expected, to form an individualized identity, since their places in society and the world are no longer predetermined by tradition, convention, or religious authority.Footnote 30
Thus individuals should now listen to their “inner voice,” reflect upon, and experiment with the kind of life plan which fits best to who they truly are.Footnote 31 Charles Taylor describes this as a “massive subjective turn of moral culture, a new form of inwardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths.”Footnote 32 While subjective, this turn reflects, as Taylor points out, a cultural transformation, since the perception and declaration of oneself are created through dialog and defined in relation to “the things our significant others want to see in us.”Footnote 33 The pure inward generation of ourselves is not possible, as solitary reflection alone does not create our identity. Instead, its validity depends on others’ affirmation, and thus also presupposes cultural patterns of recognizing individualistic identities. A corresponding cultural transformation is visible in the Romantic movement which took much of its inspiration from Herder, and which emphasized particularistic experiences of individuals and groups in line with what Taylor calls an “ethos of authenticity.”Footnote 34
Highlighting the oppositional stance towards rationalist standardization, Reckwitz describes the cultural development of late modern societies as processes of singularization that build on and intensify tendencies of Romanticism.Footnote 35 According to Reckwitz’s narrative, in the so-called Trente Glorieuses from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s individuals and groups supposedly adhered to common, “rational” standards of middle-class lifestyles and followed similar patterns of consumption, production, and leisure activities. The alleged cultural homogeneity of the post-war era was also a consequence of the oppression of “abnormal,” “irrational,” or “unnatural” forms of living—concerning sexual orientation, for example. Still, the sense of a shared general culture, which may have been widespread in the mid-twentieth century, can plausibly be seen as resulting from the collectivist, nationalist efforts of the war and post-war reconstruction periods, as well as from the sense of solidarity and commonality that these efforts promoted.Footnote 36
The cultural liberation associated with the student movements of 1968 and the subsequent rise of liberal culture are turning points in this cultural development of singularization. The “politics of universalism” or “of equal dignity,” which paid special attention to redistributive politics for the sake of leveling the playing field and allowing for equality of socio-economic opportunity, was increasingly replaced by a cultural politics of identity and of social recognition, often informed by a “poststructural” critique of liberal universalism.Footnote 37 The latter type of politics was reflected, in particular, in the emergence of new social movements—feminist, ecological, as well as gay and lesbian movements, which struggle for social recognition of their group-based and individual identities.Footnote 38 Today, this cultural development is present in various forms of identity politics in which individuals and groups—the BLM or LGBTQ+ social movements, for example—strive for the appropriate social recognition of their distinctive forms of life.Footnote 39
2.2. Digital Technology’s Impact on the Nonpublic Political Culture
My characterization of the cultural developments in modern and late modern societies might suggest that the increasing dominance of an ethos of authenticity and the culture of singularity could be explained independently from the emergence and spread of digital technologies over the past few decades. That would be incorrect, however, because there are at least two dynamics through which digital technologies have been impacting these cultural shifts. First, the ethos of authenticity and the culture of singularity could gain their dominance only within the weak gatekeeping environment of political communication and expression that was created by the introduction of digital social networking platforms. Second, cultural and technological developments have formed a mutually beneficial symbiosis, whereby digital technologies have been created in response to certain cultural patterns, and these cultural patterns have been reinforced and shaped using such digital technologies.Footnote 40
To elaborate on the first dynamic, the mid to late twentieth-century mass-media public sphere was characterized by a strong gatekeeping environment and a relatively strong, publicly oriented journalistic ethos.Footnote 41 This consisted of a commitment to displaying an orientation towards the public good. Participating in public discourse usually required journalists or other elites to gain editorial approval for the views they wanted to express and communicate publicly through mass media such as television, radio, or newspaper. This filtering process created a demarcation between public and private communication or expression, which prompted an attitude appropriate for public expression and communication. The ethos was reinforced by a consciousness of its democratic importance, given that the extent of the public sphere was limited and the journalistic work thus likely to be politically impactful. The journalistic ethos propelled a back-and-forth of arguments among economic, political, and cultural elites as to which policies or laws would further the public good.
Emphasizing journalists’ distinct ethos in the mass-media political communication and expression environment should not cover up, however, the multiple blind spots and biases that informed public deliberation in the mass-media-based public sphere. The asymmetric patterns of journalists’ educational, class, gender, racial, and geographic backgrounds necessarily resulted in one-sided information and deliberation that failed to be sufficiently inclusive of a diverse citizenry. In the context of the US, for example, Cohen and Fung show that the livelihoods of African-American, low-income, or low formal education households received less attention in the public sphere than would have been justified on the grounds of their proportion within the US population.Footnote 42
The prevalence of this distinct journalistic ethos in the mass-media political communication and expression environment must not be understood as a reflection of journalists being more morally motivated at that time, and that ever since we have been witnessing a moral decline in that profession. Rather, the journalists’ orientation toward the public good should be recognized as a feature of the distinct mass-media political communication and expression environment and its institutional mechanism of strong gatekeeping along the lines of a public-private divide. This is all the clearer when we take into consideration the political economy of the mass-media environment, in which advertisements became an increasingly important source of media financing. As advertisers favored media with the largest reach, editors and journalists were incentivized to appeal to as large an audience as possible, which meant that they tried to appear politically neutral to increase their audience.Footnote 43
By contrast, the many-to-many political communication and expression environment consists of weak gatekeeping in which virtually all citizens can easily publish their views at almost zero cost.Footnote 44 This renders the digital sphere more diverse and inclusive.Footnote 45 Traditionally underrepresented social movements like feminism or anti-racism have gained more public attention and have been able to correct some of the biases from which the mass-media public sphere suffered. Weak gatekeeping also implies that the large-scale cultural shifts toward an ethos of authenticity and a culture of singularity are now much more visible within the nonpublic political culture. This ethos and culture are no longer filtered from the digital sphere on the grounds that they are inappropriate for a political discourse which should be oriented towards the public good. There are simply no gatekeepers that wield this kind of filtering power. Consequently, the ethos of authenticity and the culture of singularity have migrated from the background culture of civil society to the nonpublic political culture, at least if we understand background culture, like Rawls, as the “culture of the social, not of the political. It is the culture of daily life, of its many associations: churches and universities, learned and scientific societies, and clubs and teams, to mention a few.”Footnote 46
Concerning the second dynamic of how digital technology has impacted on the nonpublic political culture, it is noteworthy that the design of digital technologies dovetails cultural developments and then reinforces and modulates them. As Nassehi has argued, the cultural trends of self-optimizing and curating one’s personal life, following an ethics of authenticity, contributed to the dissemination and employment of digital technologies that serve that very purpose.Footnote 47 Likewise, designing digital devices and software programs in ways that allow for their personalization, for example, by conceiving smartphones in ways that allow their individualization through the addition of self-chosen apps, further contributes to the singularizing of culture.Footnote 48 Algorithms that are programmed to increase the use of a given digital technology seek to identify the users’ distinctively personal preferences and provide corresponding content, as well as targeted ads, which further individualizes the experience generated through digital technologies.Footnote 49 Cass Sunstein thus aptly describes the newsfeed of social media users as the “Daily Me.”Footnote 50 As in the case of the first dynamic, digital technology reinforces and modulates these cultural shifts. Therefore, the increasing dominance of an ethos of authenticity and the culture of singularization must not be viewed solely through the prism of long-term cultural developments.
2.3. The Hybrid Culture of the Digital Sphere
The cultural shifts just described and their reinforcement through digital technologies have resulted in more performative and phatic forms of political communication and expression.Footnote 51 Performative and phatic political communication and expression strive to highlight one’s singular identity as well as to receive social recognition of this identity. Consequently, political communication and expression can be conceived as a staging of one’s identity vis-à-vis a large audience, yet it does not necessarily imply responding to that audience. The most important feedback expected from the audience may simply be whether it approves or disapproves of the presentation of one’s identity. It does not involve a back-and-forth of arguments but operates primarily on the level of affects.Footnote 52
Reckwitz also emphasizes that affect-orientation is characteristic of digital political communication and expression:
To a considerable extent, the Internet is an affect machine. Its circulating elements excite, entertain, cheer up, relax, arouse, and generally affect people. In light of all the arguments about our supposed knowledge society, it can be easy to overlook the fact that, in large part, the digital objects that captivate recipients and producers are not cognitive in nature but rather possess a narrative, aesthetic, design, or ludic character. This is true of images, films, texts, sounds, and games.Footnote 53
Accordingly, the use of digital technologies in general and social media in particular puts special emphasis on pictures and videos, which affect users more than mere text.Footnote 54 This orientation toward affects is intensified through algorithms programmed to increase the use of social media and other online platforms like search engines. Such algorithms tend to prioritize emotional content, especially if it is extreme, like hate speech, for such content generates more attention as measured by likes, clicks, or screen time.Footnote 55
What is remarkable about affect-oriented, performative, and phatic political communication and expression is that so much takes place on virtually public digital social networking platforms. After all, these platforms are either directly publicly accessible online or accessible to anyone willing to sign up to the relevant platform. Political communication and expression are thus “publicly private” as speech which would usually be considered as nonpublic or private is exhibited publicly. Zizi Paparachissi elaborates on this erosion of the private-public distinction:
The process of self-presentation is complicated in the context of SNSs [social network sites] that combine a variety of audiences, of variable privacy or publicity, into a single crowd of spectators observing the same performance, but from a variety of vantage points, depending on their relationship to the performing self. The individual must then engage in multiple mini performances that combine a variety of semiological references so as to produce a presentation of the self that makes sense to multiple audiences, without sacrificing coherence and continuity. The process of modifying behavior so as to be palatable to a variety of audiences is not new for individuals. In everyday cycles of self-presentation and impression formation, individuals perform on multiple stages, and … blend social spheres online that may have been separate offline, thus confusing private and public boundaries. Footnote 56
This confusion is also present in “privately public” forms of expression, in which the content is publicly accessible but the identity of the person sharing the content is kept private.Footnote 57 Due to the fast technological improvement of language programs, the number of anonymous users, including bots who do not have any human personal identity, is continuously increasing.Footnote 58
The technologically reinforced cultural developments seem to have transformed citizens’ understanding of the nonpublic political culture, resulting in what Habermas has called a “semi-private, semi-public sphere.”
These spaces … can be understood neither as public nor as private, but rather as a sphere of communication that had previously been reserved for private correspondence but is now inflated into a new and intimate kind of public sphere. … They differ from the fundamentally inclusive character of the public sphere—and the contrast to the private sphere—through their rejection of dissonant and the inclusion of consonant voices into their own limited, identity-preserving horizon of supposed, yet professionally unfiltered, “knowledge”.Footnote 59
What seems appropriate in this sphere is particularistic identity-confirming, private or nonpublic speech, which does not claim to be publicly justifiable, even though it is put forward in digital flows and spaces of political expression and communication that are publicly accessible.
3. Three Rawlsian Rationales and Proposals
I now critically analyze the hybrid culture of the digital sphere through a Rawlsian perspective and its distinctive understanding of the role of public reason and a corresponding duty of civility within deliberative democracy. For Rawls, the public political culture plays a constitutive role within a deliberative democracy. His political liberalism requires “to work up, from the fundamental ideas implicit in the political culture, a public justification that all citizens as reasonable and rational can endorse.”Footnote 60 These ideas include the conceptualization of the political subject, which is based on the ways in which citizens conceive of each other in the public political culture, which “comprises the political institutions of a constitutional regime and the public traditions of their interpretation (including those of the judiciary), as well as historic texts and documents that are common knowledge.”Footnote 61 Rawls’s “conception of the person is worked up from the way citizens are regarded in the public political culture of a democratic society.”Footnote 62 The resulting conception of democratic citizenship pays special attention to citizens’ reasoning in political discourse. Rawls even articulates the principles guiding citizens in their public reasoning in the form of a “companion agreement” that is attached, so to speak, to the social contract that lists his political liberal principles of justice. This companion agreement formulates an “ideal of citizenship” characterized by a form of free and public reasoning.Footnote 63 Democratic citizens are willing “to settle the fundamental political matters in ways that others as free and equal can acknowledge are reasonable and rational.”Footnote 64
This ideal gives rise to a “duty of civility,” which “directs us to appeal to political values in cases involving the constitutional essentials.”Footnote 65 These values include “not only the appropriate use of the fundamental concepts of judgment, inference, and evidence, but also the virtues of reasonableness and fair-mindedness.”Footnote 66 While reciprocity is the master idea of his conceptualization of reasonability and fairness, Rawls also presents two characteristics of reasonable citizens. One is that they can propose and comply with fair principles of social cooperation that are acceptable to supporters of any reasonable conception of the good.Footnote 67 The other is that they recognize “the fact of reasonable pluralism” within liberal societies.Footnote 68 They understand that the exercise of civil liberties leads to different reasonable “comprehensive doctrines” concerning the good, as well as to different reasonable conceptions of what social and political justice involve.Footnote 69 These virtues of reasonable citizens “must be constantly renewed by being reaffirmed and acted on in the present.”Footnote 70 Hence, the marginalization of the ideas of democratic citizenship within public political discourse must be prevented. A democratic society is in deep trouble if such discourse “betrays the marks of warfare … [and] consists in rallying the troops and intimidating the other side, which must now increase its efforts or back down.”Footnote 71 Such debate “overlooks … the great values achieved by a society that realizes in its public life the cooperative political virtues of reasonableness and a sense of fairness, of a spirit of compromise and the will to honor the duty of public civility.”Footnote 72 The public political culture is of essence for deliberative democracy.
3.1. The Orthodox Rawlsian Rationale and Proposal
At first glance, the hybrid culture of the digital sphere may seem to pose no problem from a Rawlsian perspective. In “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” Rawls limits the application of public reason and the duty of civility to political discourses on constitutional essentials and basic justice that take place within the public political forum, which is comprised of judges, government officials, and political candidates.Footnote 73 Public reason applies to the reasoning of citizens solely in their capacity as voters when constitutional essentials and basic justice are at stake, and thus only when citizens must imagine themselves as “ideal legislators,” as if they were members of the public political forum.Footnote 74 Given this stringent limitation of the applicability of public reason to the public political forum, the fact that the hybrid culture of the digital sphere does not favor the dissemination of public reasoning may appear unproblematic.
This also seems supported by the consideration that Rawls sharply distinguishes between the public political forum and the background culture of civil society and states that public reason and its requirements do not apply to the latter.Footnote 75 The “nonpublic political culture mediates between the public political culture and the background culture. This comprises media—properly so named of all kinds: newspapers, reviews and magazines, television and radio, and much else.”Footnote 76 By contrast, by “background culture,” Rawls means the “culture of the social, not of the political. It is the culture of daily life, of its many associations: churches and universities, learned and scientific societies, and clubs and teams, to mention a few.”Footnote 77 This consideration matters, because the background culture of civil society is “much the same” as what Habermas refers to as the (political) public sphere.Footnote 78 And so it seems to follow that Rawls holds that the demands of public reason do not apply to the nonpublic political culture that mediates between civil society and the public political culture.Footnote 79 Hence from this perspective, which I label the Orthodox Rawlsian Rationale, the hybrid culture of the digital sphere might seem to pose no problem for public reasoning.
Yet even within this Orthodox Rawlsian Rationale, the cultural shifts should be viewed as problematic to the extent that they engender an increasing incidence of violations of public reason on the part of the members of public political forum. After all, while the public political forum and its public political culture are distinct from the nonpublic political culture of the digital sphere, government officials and especially political candidates will necessarily be affected by, as well as participate in, political discourses taking place in this sphere. And while the demands of public reason do not apply in general to the digital sphere, they do apply to said members of the public political forum who are politically communicating and expressing themselves in this sphere to address one another or other citizens (outside the public political forum) on fundamental political questions.Footnote 80
Another way of putting this problem is that the hybrid culture of the digital sphere is polluting the discourses of members of the public political forum by prompting them to neglect public reason. Such pollution is neither chemically, nor logically, nor physically necessary, as government officials and political candidates can, when fundamental political questions are at stake, resist giving in to the phatic expression that is characteristic of the digital sphere. However, psychological phenomena such as conformity bias suggest that this will be motivationally more difficult than it otherwise would be, and that an increase of noncompliance with public reason is to be expected.
This Orthodox Rawlsian Rationale maintains that citizens will tend to fail to live up to the demands of public reason in their capacity as voters. Again, the hybrid culture pollutes voters’ reasoning to the extent that they are prompted to neglect distinguishing between the political values of public reason that must be upheld when they vote on fundamental political questions and their personal identity-specific values that they are continuously expressing in the digital sphere. This seems even more likely when politicians fail to adhere to public reason in their contributions to political discourse. The politicians’ behavior serves as a model and plays an educational role for citizens who are considering what it means to live up to the demands of democratic citizenship when voting.
Accordingly, the Orthodox Rawlsian Proposal for how to conceive digital citizenship education focuses on the problems arising from the ways in which the political discourses of members of the public political forum—judges, government officials, and political candidates—fail to abide by the norms of public reason. The proposal is twofold. First, members of the public political forum should hold each other accountable for adhering to the norms of public reason and thereby safeguard the democratic nature of their public political culture. Judges, government officials, and political candidates must remind—and, if necessary, educate—one another about the public duties that they have as political representatives. The history of the collapse of Germany’s Weimar Republic, likewise, teaches us the special obligations that the political elites have for maintaining the public political culture.Footnote 81 Second, citizens in their capacity as voters must repudiate those political representatives who fail to fulfill the requirements of public reason.
Safeguarding the public political culture matters for digital citizenship education because this culture plays a crucial educational role within deliberative democracy. On Rawls’s view, it is through this culture that citizens come to understand themselves as rational and reasonable:
We suppose, as a general fact of commonsense political sociology, that those who grow up in a well-ordered society will, in good part, form their conception of themselves as citizens from the public culture and from the conceptions of the person and society implicit in it.Footnote 82
Rawls also speaks of “the desirable effects of that [public political] culture … on citizens’ political character.”Footnote 83 By contrast, if citizens’ political virtues fail to be instantiated within the public political culture, it is possible that the “political capital” of these virtues will “depreciate.”Footnote 84 Under such circumstances the democratic educational effects of the public political culture, which impact “citizens’ experience as a whole” are missing.Footnote 85 Yet democratic citizens must not think, for example, that “a political party may properly, as a matter of its declared program, work to deny any recognized class or group its basic rights and liberties.”Footnote 86 Unfortunately, however, such thoughts are frequently expressed in the digital sphere by members of the public political forum. Influenced by such political discourse, as Rawls observes, “one may find the thought that to have character is to have firm convictions and be ready to proclaim them defiantly to others. To be is to confront.”Footnote 87 If citizens develop this type of character due to the public political culture that they encounter in the digital sphere, this will work directly against the realization of the ideal of democratic citizenship.
Due to the public political culture’s educational role within deliberative democracy, the Orthodox Rawlsian Proposal asks members of the public political forum to ensure that they defend the democratic nature of this culture by holding each other accountable. The second dimension of this proposal requires citizens to fulfill a duty of civility by applying public reasoning when voting, and to vote out of office political representatives who do not fulfill the requirements of public reason.
3.2. The Nonideal Rawlsian Rationale and Proposal
A Nonideal Rawlsian Rationale suggests that citizens who are not members of the public political forum also have discursive duties, and not only voting-related duties, to hold members of the public political forum accountable within the digital sphere whenever these members violate demands of public reason. This implies that, if the ideal of public reason is fulfilled, and members of the public political forum fulfill the duty of civility when discussing fundamental political questions, then citizens are under no obligation to apply public reasoning themselves when politically communicating and expressing themselves in the digital sphere. However, once the ideal of public reason is no longer fulfilled, citizens have a moral duty of civility to appeal to the political ideals of public reason and to hold members of the public political forum accountable.
This Nonideal Rawlsian Rationale is textually supported by Rawls’s 1993 Political Liberalism chapter “The Idea of Public Reason,” which notes that citizens exercise an equal share of coercive power “over one another by voting and in other ways,”Footnote 88 as well as that public reason applies to “citizens when they engage in political advocacy in the public forum, in political campaigns for example.”Footnote 89 On this view the demands of public reason apply to citizens not only in their capacity as voters, but also as participants in discourse addressing the public political forum. By contrast, this Nonideal Rawlsian Rationale is not clearly supported by “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” which is why I do not subsume it under the Orthodox Rawlsian Rationale. In this 1997 essay Rawls limits public reason to discussions of fundamental questions within the public political forum and then lists the discourses of judges, government officials, and candidates as belonging to this forum. He does not mention citizens’ discourses addressing the public political forum. Indeed, he speaks of “politically engaged citizens generally” in a footnote, but only to clarify that candidates are “responsible for what is said and done on the candidates’ behalf.”Footnote 90
That said, it is only two pages later that Rawls adds the following passage that could be viewed as clear textual evidence for my Nonideal Rawlsian Rationale: “[T]he disposition of citizens … to repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate public reason, is one of the political and social roots of democracy … Thus citizens fulfill their duty of civility and support the idea of public reason by doing what they can to hold government to it.”Footnote 91 Yet Rawls starts the paragraph in which this passage appears by stating that in “a representative government citizens vote for representatives” in response to the question of how “citizens who are not government officials” realize public reason.Footnote 92 Thus it is not clear whether he refers to citizens’ voting behavior only, or also refers to their political engagement via their participation in political discourse addressing the public political forum, when he mentions that citizens should do “what they can” to hold public officials accountable. A nonideal-theoretical reading of this passage, I maintain, understands Rawls to be saying that citizens realize public reason not only by voting but also through political criticism that is addressing the public political forum, and that this is a moral duty of civility of citizens under nonideal conditions.
This Nonideal Rawlsian Rationale is also supported by the fact that when speaking of citizens who are not members of the public political forum Rawls clarifies that the duty of civility is a moral and not a legal duty, because otherwise it would be “incompatible with freedom of speech.”Footnote 93 This clarification implies that the duty of civility includes speech acts such as political discourses, and not just the act of voting. There are thus good reasons for even Orthodox Rawlsians to adopt the Nonideal Rawlsian Rationale.
From this Nonideal Rawlsian Rationale as well, it counts as problematic if the ethos of authenticity and the culture of singularity are so dominant in the nonpublic political culture of the digital sphere that citizens tend to fail to live up to said nonideal requirements of public reason. Again, the claim is not that the hybrid culture of the digital sphere inhibits citizens from living up to these demands of public reason under nonideal conditions. Instead, the claim is that the hybrid culture renders the fulfillment of these demands psychologically more difficult, and that this will result in a lower incidence of compliance with these nonideal demands.
This is why the Nonideal Rawlsian Proposal maintains that additional educational efforts in schools are needed to pursue a culturally oriented citizenship education and to develop citizens’ critical capacities to express political criticism of political representatives within the digital sphere. The first reason is that in a situation in which the culture of the digital sphere pollutes the public political culture, the latter does not properly unfold its desired educational role. Given the lack of the needed educational effects stemming from this culture, it is necessary to double down on a culturally oriented digital citizenship education in schools.
I say doubling down, because Rawls is firmly committed to the centrality of a culturally oriented citizenship education in schools. “The state’s concern with their [children’s] education lies in their role as future citizens, and so in such essential things as their acquiring the capacity to understand the public culture and to participate in its institutions.”Footnote 94 Yet again, as Rawls is engaging in ideal theory, he assumes that the public political culture in a well-ordered democratic society includes ideas such as that of citizens being rational and reasonable. Practices of democratic citizenship education in such a society can build on the political virtues present within the public political culture. By contrast, under nonideal conditions, educators must make an extra effort to explain and justify why a democratic public political culture is of vital importance. After all, the effects of the undemocratic elements of the political culture tend to undermine their work.Footnote 95
The second reason is the importance of political criticism for avoiding democratic erosion. Citizens’ critical political discourses on fundamental political questions, addressed to members of the public political forum, should establish a counterweight to the violations of public reason by political representatives. Students should learn about challenges to their democratic political systems so that they understand that political critique is necessary for sustaining or rebuilding a broken or distorted democracy. Such education should not lead them to think that they simply need to learn the attitudes, knowledge, and skills necessary for socially reproducing a supposedly well-functioning democratic system. Instead, they must be prepared to transform the existing political system by working toward the improvement of the public political culture.Footnote 96
3.3. The Heterodox Rawlsian Rationale and Proposal
The Heterodox Rawlsian Rationale maintains that citizens have discursive duties to follow public reason and a corresponding moral duty of civility whenever they politically communicate and express themselves within the digital sphere on fundamental political issues. This perspective concedes that citizens neither need to follow public reason when they do not discuss fundamental political questions, nor do they need to follow public reason when they express themselves within the background culture of civil society. This presupposes that there is a difference between political communication and expression within the nonpublic political culture of the digital sphere and the communication and expression taking place within the background culture of civil society. This is relatively unproblematic to assume, however, because Rawls draws this distinction in a footnote.Footnote 97
This Heterodox Rawlsian Rationale is of special importance for journalists as well as all kinds of media experts, including “influencers” who hold especially powerful position in the digital sphere. Their compliance with the demands of public reason so conceived is particularly consequential for the extent to which members of the public political forum as well as citizens—whether in their capacity as voters or as participants in relevant political public discourses—will also follow the demands of public reason. Hence, this Heterodox Rawlsian Rationale also views it as problematic if the hybrid culture of the digital sphere tends to undermine citizens’ and especially journalists’ as well as other experts’ adherence to the demands of public reason.
While this rationale departs from Rawls’s strictures about how to conceive the applicability of public reason, it is nevertheless clearly aligned to basic ideas of deliberative democracy. As Rawls states, the “definitive idea for deliberative democracy is the idea of deliberation itself.”Footnote 98 Yet it would seem undemocratic, in the sense that it would go against the idea of democracy’s literal meaning of the “rule of the people,” to interpret the idea of democratic deliberation as being restricted to the discourses of judges, government officials, and political candidates (like the Orthodox Rawlsian Rationale), or only to those and those citizens who hold these (potential) representatives accountable when they fail to comply with public reason (like the Nonideal Rawlsian Rationale).
It also speaks in favor of the Heterodox Rawlsian Rationale that deliberative democracy is usually understood as a form of democratic decision-making that moves beyond the voting-based paradigm of the elitist or economic conception of representative democracy proposed by Joseph Schumpeter.Footnote 99 The point of deliberative democracy is that it does not reduce democratic citizenship to taking a vote regarding the alternative political programs proposed by the competing political parties.Footnote 100 Indeed, different from this elitist or economic conception, Rawls clearly suggests that those who occupy positions in the public political forum should engage in political discussion based on public reason. Yet it would be curious if a deliberative conception of democracy did not also extend the relevant public political deliberation to that in which citizens address one another on fundamental political questions. Rawls seems to suggest this in the following passage:
When citizens deliberate, they exchange views and debate their supporting reasons concerning public political questions. They suppose that their political opinions may be revised by discussion with other citizens; and therefore these opinions are not simply a fixed outcome of their existing private or nonpolitical interests. It is at this point that public reason is crucial, for it characterizes such citizens’ reasoning concerning constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice.Footnote 101
This makes it even more difficult to understand why he does not explicitly include political discourses on fundamental political questions of citizens amongst one another as ones to which the requirements of public reason apply.
In line with this, the Heterodox Rawlsian Proposal calls for a stronger regulation of the digital social networking platforms. As these platforms constitute the technological infrastructure of a substantial segment of the digital sphere, adequate regulation must work towards what Valentina Gentile has dubbed a “culture of civility.”Footnote 102 Such regulation could consist in limiting and prohibiting the capturing, storage, and analysis of private data, which digital platform providers sell to advertisers for running micro-targeted ads. This would force digital platform providers to change their business model to one based on subscriptions or other types of user fees, and would lower the pressure on the digital platform providers to maximize the time that users spend on social networking platforms. Providers would have fewer incentives to use algorithms that maximize users’ engagement with their digital platforms, and this would tend to lower the extent to which affect-oriented contents, as well as individualized and personal identity-specific contents, are displayed.
Another type of regulation could consist in the public provision of digital social networking platforms that would be designed for the sake of facilitating political communication and expression that is free, informed, and reasonable. Taxpayers’ contributions would finance the public provision—like their contributions for public radio, and television—and would thus ensure that political communication and expression within the digital sphere would have the nature of a public good.Footnote 103 Due to the network effects from which the private digital platform providers benefit, however, this proposal might not be feasible, as many users will not voluntarily switch to another platform with many fewer users. It also seems unlikely that governments will prohibit private digital platform providers or force users to move to the public digital social networking platforms. That said, public officials in countries like France are already discussing a minimum age, possibly 15, for the use of digital platforms, which suggests that political will exists for significantly changing the present digital information and communication environment.
Conclusion
In this article I aimed at developing a Rawlsian Rationale in defense of a cultural turn in the debate on digital citizenship education. Such a rationale would demand greater attention to the culture of the digital sphere, given that the political culture is of fundamental importance for realizing and socially reproducing deliberative democracy. Digital citizenship education, I have maintained, should pursue a cultural turn and consider ways in which the political culture of digitized societies could be rendered more democratic. Based on three Rawlsian rationales—Orthodox, Nonideal, and Heterodox—I made three educational proposals. The Orthodox Rawlsian Rationale followed Rawls in assuming that political elites have special obligations for safeguarding their countries’ democratic public political culture and play an essential educative role in how citizens learn to conceive themselves as political subjects. The Nonideal Rawlsian Rationale affirmed, like Rawls, that democratic citizenship education must concentrate on transmitting certain cultural goods such as fair-mindedness, reasonability, and a spirit of compromise, which are necessary for being able to fulfill the requirements of public reason. The corresponding proposal argued that such education must be intensified in digitized societies, given that these societies are subject to cultural processes that tend to undermine these goods. Unless additional educational efforts are undertaken for fostering and promoting the ideal of democratic citizenship, political representatives of the public political forum will tend to violate public reason, and citizens will fail to publicly criticize them for their shortcomings. Finally, the Heterodox Rawlsian Rationale suggested, furthermore, that citizens should uphold public reason when addressing one another on fundamental political questions in the digital sphere, and that regulation should be put in place which would counter the tendencies of digital social networking platforms to support the hybrid culture. This regulation could consist in limitations on the use rights of private data, as well as in the provision of digital social networking platforms as public goods.
Acknowledgments
This article originated as a paper for the international conference “Duties of Civility? Rawls’s Theory of Deliberative Democracy and its Relevance in the Digital Age,” which took place at the University of Regensburg, Germany, in March 2024. I also presented subsequent versions of this paper at the University of Utrecht’s Future of Democracy seminar series “Democratic Education,” at Northwestern University’s “Global Theory Workshop,” and at a symposium of the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Ethics & Education. I am very thankful to Eva Odzuck, Sarah Stroemel, Maurits de Jongh, Shmulik Nili, Marie Laplante-Anfossi, Harry Brighouse, Libby Southgate, Gabriele Badano, Juri Viehoff, Joel Anderson, Paul Weithman, Sharon Llyod, Karoline Reinhardt, Ricarda Wünsch, and Daniel Eggers for their comments and questions.
