The course will introduce students to the study of the public sphere and the processes through which digital media shape the emergence of publics and the circulation and sharing of public discourses, that is, those representations and descriptions of reality that express a collective sentiment and are relevant to politics and democracy. The course will provide interpretive and critical tools for understanding 1) what public discourse is, what characterizes it, and what makes it relevant to democracy; and 2) how public discourses take shape on social media and are shaped by the communication cultures that develop there. By the end of the course, students will have acquired the basic conceptual tools necessary for understanding the processes of the digital public sphere.
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The course includes a combination of lectures and practical, application-oriented activities to facilitate learning—in particular, group work involving the presentation and discussion of essays (flipped classroom, peer education).
The course is divided into two parts. The first part will be devoted to presenting and analyzing the main theories and concepts used to describe the public sphere, as well as to exploring the analytical and conceptual tools useful for analyzing the formation of publics and public discourses. In the second part, we will examine empirical research conducted in the field of the sociology of communication and media that highlights specific types of public discourse emerging on social media platforms.
