In this piece, Nathan Gardels, the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine, discusses what some respected thinkers are saying about how to approach “the infopocalypse,” which Aviv Ovadya of Harvard has described as “a catastrophic failure of the marketplace of ideas with no one believing anything or everyone believing lies.”
The piece argues that “democracy cannot survive this failure of the marketplace of ideas because it disables the formation of any shared ground where competing propositions can be tested against each other in the full gaze of the body politic as a whole.”
The main problem that the piece is trying to highlight is that “the digital media ecosystem disempowers the public sphere.” The author writes:
“Without institutions and practices that can establish and preserve the credibility of information, there is no solid ground for democratic discourse.”
His suggestion for creating such institutions and practices:
“[…] new mediating institutions, such as citizens’ assemblies, that encourage and enable civil discourse and consensus formation at the same virtual scale as social networks, are more necessary than ever because the forces of fragmentation have never been greater. Mending the breach of distrust between the public and institutions of self-government in the digital age can only happen by absorbing the wired activation of civil society into governance through integrating connectivity with common platforms for deliberation.”
Read the full article here.
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