On the Production of Crowds

Abstract

This chapter contributes to sociology of media as it looks into how digital technology has changed a public sphere which is now of thanks to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs of created with the help of algorithms. In order to do this, the chapter discusses the role of the digital public by looking at examples like the reporting of news on Twitter, or the death of the British newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson which could be solved with the help of digital recordings. Adding Hannah Arendt’s description of the public to Jürgen Habermas’s famous definition of ‘the public sphere’, the chapter finds that there is a digital public, when something becomes potentially accessible for everybody, and there is a journalistic public, when something becomes potentially accessible but also is relevant for all at the same time. Finally, it discusses the digitalization of the press which gave rise to a broader reach, new financial concepts, and new ways of reporting.