Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
The affective polarization of the sociotechnical configuration that I term controversial encounters of the second kind leads to the closing of the rhetorical mind. Hence, it becomes imperative to consider how we may imbue the emerging configuration, controversial encounters of the third kind, with affective alternatives, aiming to re-arrange the relationship between reasoning and motives so as to open the rhetorical mind and enable persuasion. To this end, this chapter reconsiders nasty conflict and sweet consensus as expressions of structures of feeling, organized around hate and love, respectively. It then turns to consider affective alternatives that may be more amenable to constituting and continuing controversy as anything but a spectacle. Here, vulnerability, humour and hope are offered as starting points for building structures of feeling that enable sustained engagement with difference and disagreement.
This introductory chapter establishes the book’s central argument and main premises: public debate is being squeezed from two sides – polarization and personalization – which pull processes of meaning formation in the opposite directions of consensus and conflict, leaving no room for controversial encounters. These developments have a common source, namely, the algorithmic organization of public debate on affective forces of ‘nasty conflict’ and ‘sweet consensus’. Further, they have similar consequences, adding to citizens’ inability to productively encounter opinions that are different from their own and, hence, to engage in controversy as a means of reaching democratic decisions. To save democracy, we need to attune processes of meaning formation to other affective forces. Beginning with affective alternatives, we may reshape the sociotechnical configuration of public debate and make disagreement good again.
How can we have meaningful public conversations in the algorithmic age?
This book explores how digital technologies shape our opinions and interactions, often in ways that limit our exposure to diverse perspectives and fuel polarization. Drawing on the ancient art of arguing all sides of a case, the book offers a way to revive public debate as a source of trust and legitimacy in democratic societies.
This is a timely and urgent book for anyone who cares about the future of democracy in the digital era.
The concept of controversial encounters is central to the book’s argument that we must ‘make disagreement good again’ to save democracy – and it indicates how to do so. Chapter 4 explores the concept’s historical roots in the classical rhetorical notion of controversia, defined as arguing from all sides of a case. When dealing with classical concepts, one must consider their continued relevance and usefulness. To establish controversia’s contemporary relevance, the concept is posited as a middle ground to notions of deliberative democracy and agonistic pluralism, and similarly the practice of controversy is placed in between consensus and conflict. To establish controversia’s contemporary usefulness, I argue that it must be reconsidered through the lenses of feminism and postcolonial theory, thereby reckoning with the historical and present exclusions performed in the name of rhetoric.
This chapter explores the current sociotechnical configuration of digital public debate – what I term controversial encounters of the second kind. As such, the chapter unfolds the process that I have labelled the closing of the rhetorical mind, showing how digital affordances invite memetic circulation and how algorithmic reason organizes intensities of feeling into datafied affect. The underlying orientation towards profit-maximization organizes digital communication around the principle of engagement, leading people further and further into closed circuits of ‘sweet consensus’ and ‘nasty conflict’. In combination, the intensification of these two feelings leads to spirals of entrenched detachment, as people are increasingly likely to encounter more of what they like and to mostly encounter what they dislike as a confirmation of their own existing preferences rather than an opportunity to develop new tastes, let alone opinions. Thus, controversial encounters are turned into spectacles of controversy, which can be harnessed for profit but are ill-suited for meaning formation.
Whereas the sociotechnical configuration of public debate that I dub controversial encounters of the second kind takes shape from algorithmic reason and datafied affect, the emergent configuration, controversial encounters of the third kind, is shaped by the possibility of automated persuasion. More specifically, as Chapter 6 shows, the advent of generative AI has sparked much debate; the technology itself has become controversial, but this controversy is primarily articulated within the existing patterns of polarization, taking the form of utopian and dystopian sociotechnical imaginaries – or visions of the future. Locking the debate around these two opposite options, I argue, leads to tech determinism; whether you fear the fully automated future or cheer it on, its coming seems inevitable. Focusing on the case of AI art, I discuss alternatives to this dichotomous determinism, pointing to ways in which the discussion of automation may begin shaping the future rather than just awaiting its coming. This also points the way to more nuanced forms of debate and more productive controversial encounters.
In the theory of deliberative democracy, the public sphere is posited as mediator between the private sphere and the state; it is the space for the formation of public opinion through the exercise of public reason. This theory is challenged in numerous ways, not least by current technological developments, and this chapter considers the digital transformation of the public sphere in conceptual terms, asking how we should theorize the democratic potential of digital public debate. I initially answer that question through Michael Warner’s (2002) concept of self-organizing publics and go on to consider how algorithmic reason challenges publics’ ability to self-organize, constituting them instead as calculated publics (Gillespie, 2014). This is why Jürgen Habermas and other proponents of deliberation view digitalization as detrimental to democracy. And it is also why Jodi Dean conceptualizes digitalization as a depoliticizing process. While agreeing with this diagnosis, I nevertheless end the chapter with an indication of where to look for alternatives within processes of digital public debate, pointing to the potential (re)politicization of self-organized digital counterpublics.
This concluding chapter draws together the different pieces of the book’s argument, summarizing how digital technologies are stifling public debate by inviting a sociotechnical configuration of detached entrenchment. The combined personalization and polarization of public debate leads to the closing of the rhetorical mind as disagreement is shunned and persuasion is feared. Building on the affective alternatives introduced in Chapter 7, I then present three strategies for improving digital public debate from within the current configuration: self-organizing controversies, embodied resistance and communicative interruption. Hence, I suggest we can take advantage of the current shifts in the digital organization of public debate, shifting emergent controversial encounters of the third kind away from automated persuasion and towards concerted contestation. Such controversial encounters may facilitate motivated reasoning about specific issues and invite reflection on the very conditions of possibility for public debate.
How does digitalization organize communication? I propose answering this question through Jodi Dean’s lens of communicative capitalism, exposing how the online circulation of affect is, today, harnessed for profit and therefore rendered meaningless. I explore three key dimensions of this process: online-offline integration; communicative and organizational convergence; and the financialization of affect. I depart from Dean’s position in arguing that affect and meaning are not in opposition. To the contrary, meaning formation is inherently and necessarily affective. Therefore, organizing digital communication holds political potential. I explore how this potential is both repressed by and contained within relations of digital labour, arguing that making such labour visible is a prerequisite to its repolitization. This incurs paying attention to digital embodiments and to the formation of digital subjects.
Chapter 5 offers insights into a critical aspect of the inner workings of movement organizations – the practice of political organizing. This practice, which often takes place behind the scenes, plays a crucial role in the sustainable functioning of these organizations and ensures their readiness for action when the time comes to mobilize for their cause. Chapter 5 shows that Southern European activists use a wide range of media-related tools and actions, both digital and non-digital, in their daily efforts to organize and engage politically. It also outlines three main challenges that activists face, mostly due to the increased use of digital media. First, activists grapple with the acceleration of political time, which provides immediacy but limits opportunities for reflection and collective exchange. Secondly, the boundaries between political and non-political life are blurring as the incessant flow of data infiltrates various aspects of activists’ daily routines. Finally, the production and dissemination of data takes place within digital media owned by commercial entities, raising concerns about surveillance and privacy. In response to these challenges, Chapter 5 explains how activists exercise agency over the data stream through three key strategies. They incorporate slower forms of digital communication to counter the rapidity of the data stream, break the stream into manageable sequences of information, and engage in less digitally mediated interactions, including face-to-face meetings, to protect themselves from surveillance. Despite these common challenges, Chapter 5 also makes clear that activists’ experiences of digital media and, more broadly, the data stream, vary across Italy, Greece, and Spain, also due to the political issues at stake, available resources and the specific contexts of each country.
