This post lays out some ideas that I’ve been thinking about for a long while. You should treat my claims with appropriate skepticism – I’m saying that a lot of public thinking and academic research about social media is chasing after the wrong target, on the basis of (a) my idiosyncratic reading of social theory, and (b) my partial understanding of current events. But at the least, my approach provides a superficially coherent account of how the relationship between social media and democracy is changing in the U.S. and other countries.
