Digital Spaces of Civic Communication: The Practices and Interfaces of Online Commenting

This book addresses the socio-technical constitution of civic communication in increasingly digital democracies. Despite problematic phenomena like hate speech in online commenting, it argues that citizens’ potential for resisting technological inscriptions in digital media remains a fundamental democratic right. While producers inscribe anticipations for how people should be discussing political issues into commenting interfaces, citizens still resist these technological inscriptions in their commenting practices. This dialectic interrelation between interfaces and practices highlights the inadequacy of purely technological solutions for undemocratic tendencies in digital media.

The AuthorAnne Mollen is research assistant at the Department of Communication at the University of Münster and scientific coordinator at the Research Training Group ＂Trust and Communication in a Digitized World＂.