Democratic Creative Destruction? The Effect of a Changing Media Landscape on Democracy

Abstract

The move to a more digital, more mobile, and more platform-dominated media environment represents a change to the institutions and infrastructures of free expression and a form of “democratic creative destruction” that challenges incumbent institutions, creates new ones, and in many ways empower individual citizens, even as this change also leaves both individuals and institutions increasingly dependent on a few large US-based technology companies and subjects many historically disadvantaged groups to more abuse and harassment online. That is the argument we advance in this chapter, where we will aim to step away from assessing the democratic implications of the Internet on the basis of individual cases, countries, or outcomes to focus on how structural changes in the media are intertwined with changes in democratic politics. We will set aside considerations of (important) individual phenomena like the Arab Spring, the indignados movement, and #MeToo, or (important) individual outcomes like the 2014 Indian general elections, the UK (Brexit) referendum on EU membership, or the 2016 US presidential elections, and instead identify a few key changes at the institutional level and the individual level that are part and parcel of the rise of digital media and discuss how this rise is in turn changing the institutions and infrastructures that enable free expression. Inspired by James Webster (2014) and his work on structuration, we examine structural change by considering the interplay between institutional change on the supply side and aggregate individual-level behavior on the demand side. We will do so through the lens of news, first the news media as an institution and second news as part of how individual citizens engage with public life. We focus on news as one of several key aspects of democratic politics, key to how we imagine it in its ideal forms and key to how we realize it imperfectly in practice. The structural changes we analyze are not dictated by technology but