Digital Society

Nathan Gardels at Noema: In a recent Noema interview, Byung-Chul Han further noted how the structure of peer-to-peer social media is deleterious to democracy. “Information is spread without forming a public sphere,” he says. “It is produced in private spaces and...

Political Anger

Steven W. Webster, Elizabeth C. Connors, and Betsy Sinclair have written a study titled “The Social Consequences of Political Anger.”  The abstract: A functioning democracy relies on social interactions between people who disagree—including listening to...

The Decline of Local News

\ Jack Shafer at Politico: In 2009, just as the apocalypse befell the newspaper industry but while local news was still in relative abundance, many readers gave it an apathetic shrug. A Pew Research Center survey from that year found that an astonishing 42 percent...

Grim Days for Newspapers

Mason Walker and Katerina Eva Matsa  at Pew: Staff layoffs continued to pummel the beleaguered U.S. newspaper industry in 2020. A third of papers with an average Sunday circulation of 50,000 or more experienced layoffs last year, a period complicated by the impact of...