Building the Demos in Hybrid Media Space: Democracy Beyond Demography

This paper discusses what the postfoundational, performative ontology on the one hand and hybrid media on the other implies to thinking of democracy. The rapid expansion of social media use worldwide has diversified opportunities for political participation. Intertwining with the traditional media as hybrid media, social media platforms now act as a virtual agora where communication, mobilization and even, to some degree, decision-making take place. Unlike the classical Athenian agora, however, social media does not occupy a physical space. It is flexible: its virtual nature means that it can form or disband around specific issues, rather than exist as a space of consistent political practice. Yet it is rarely totally divorced from spaces of physical interaction or material concerns of the people. In the era of hybrid media, it is increasingly apparent that foundational understandings of given bases of political differentiation do not work: instead we political process is about generation of those bases. What kind of demos and what kinds of dividing lines emerge through communication. If social media defines the locus of politics online, who are 'the people'? While previously liberal democracy has been able to rely on differentiation in people to get all the characteristics and socio-economic positions represented, hybrid media in par with post-foundational understanding of democracy helps to generate peoples and articulate demands. This is where we utilize an analytical distinction between demography that takes the demos for granted as a particular set of differences, and democracy where the demos is always fluid and open for constestation. The resulting ‘demos’ is both temporary and heterogeneous, acting in a space where the possibility of direct communication with political elites gives primacy to affects. There are several ways in which the people in this fluid site would also witness exclusion: Participation through social media is restricted through access, knowledge or willingness to engage (digital divide), but the constitution of the demos is neither uneven. Instead of agonistic engagement in a parliamentary debate where the political other is acknowledged and appreciated even though the views might be in disagreement, the online debates exclusivist rhetoric may flourish and the other get abused or silenced. Our paper is primarily theoretical, but our empirical examples would draw from a multi-lingual big data analysis of Twitter debates prior to the European elections in May 2019.