Some of us can still remember the early days of the internet, when it seemed to symbolize what the world had been waiting for – a technological revolution that was also a giant leap for humankind. We thought that nations would grow closer as the world grew smaller. That ideals, such as equality, solidarity, and liberty, would finally shape a new world order, and democracy would triumph across the globe.

Social Media: A Platform for Populists?

But as we know, the honeymoon phase didn’t last for long. The internet’s image has since been badly damaged by phenomena like online trolling, while social media in particular have been widely criticized for giving populism a platform or even undermining democracy, in the wake of scandals involving the sabotage of democratic elections.

Despite this, however, most people still retain a certain idealism about the internet, believing that it has created a truly global public sphere. Precisely this assumption, however, is now being questioned by researchers.

Joint Research with the University of Vienna and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Communications expert Professor Barbara Pfetsch from Freie Universität Berlin calls this often unconsciously held belief “the fantasy of a global village.” She explains that while the technical features of the internet theoretically offer an opportunity to create a global public sphere, we know next to nothing about how this influences real-life interactions between users.

The research project “Translocal Networks: Public Sphere in the Social Web” aims to investigate this relationship in more detail. It forms a subproject in the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) “Re-Figuration of Spaces,” established by the German Research Foundation at Technische Universität Berlin in early 2018. Within the CRC, it is part of the “Spaces of Communication” project area. Professor Pfetsch is working on the project together with Professor Annie Waldherr from the University of Vienna and in cooperation with Professor Neta Kligler-Vilenchik from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Perhaps surprisingly, not much research has been done on how communication via social media is influenced by spatial factors. For example, how many posts and tweets can be traced back to the fact that people who once shared a classroom are now sharing vacation pics? How much of the Twitterverse really concerns itself with global debates on global issues?

Twitter under the Microscope

Pfetsch, Waldherr, and Kligler-Vilenchik, along with their colleagues Daniela Stoltenberg and Alexa Keinert, have already completed some initial studies, mainly focused on Twitter, a platform once best known for only allowing posts of 140 characters or less. Professor Pfetsch argues that Twitter, unlike, for example, Facebook, really does facilitate a kind of digital public space, “where things that matter to the general public do get talked about and debated.”

Local Research in Berlin and Jerusalem

The research team has chosen Berlin and Jerusalem to represent a cross-section of the digital world. “Both are ‘global’ cities with online public spaces and big data volumes,” explains Pfetsch. But the two cities are also very different: “They both have a history characterized by division, but while Berlin is no longer a divided city, society in Jerusalem is still very much segregated along social, religious, and ethnic lines.”

Can Twitter help build bridges or create a local public space online? Does this kind of local public space contribute to a bigger, global public sphere? Or does every community just look inward, happy to stay inside its own local bubble?

Initial findings show that before we even start talking about a “digital public sphere,” we need a new vocabulary to reflect its structures and realities. Do local issues predominate? Or is there really such a thing as a global village? Professor Pfetsch says, “In this context, we can’t make a neat distinction between local and global. They are connected in highly complex ways. For example, we might find local topics cropping up in discussions between users who are based in different countries, while neighbors chat online about global issues.”

Professor Pfetsch thinks that this reality represents a kind of “new unknown,” which can be summed up by the neologism “translocal.” “Translocality,” says Pfetsch, “means that one can literally occupy multiple spaces at once, both digital and physical.” This tends to destabilize notions of the local and the global, just as it has already begun to blur the lines between what is public and what is private.

The research team is working with a research object – a digital public space – that is constantly changing; not only because users change their behavior, but also because digital platforms are continually modifying their structures and algorithms. Every digital platform, says Pfetsch, functions like an island in the internet ocean, structuring “the public realm” in its own individual way.

Research associate Daniela Stoltenberg notes that this constant reconfiguration doesn’t lead to the creation of a homogenous “global village.” Rather, it creates very selective connections between places that are also strongly anchored in local relationships. “But these local relationships don’t just come about by chance. They emerge out of social and political conditions, like conflicts,” says Stoltenberg.

In Jerusalem, for example, there are hardly any digital points of contact between Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli Twitter users. The platform hasn’t built bridges in this particular space. Instead, it has created translocal connections from East Jerusalem to the wider Arab world or from West Jerusalem to the Jewish diaspora in New York or London.

On the other hand, the study indicates that in Berlin local topics are more often referenced than in Jerusalem. “In Berlin, a user is likely to talk about culture, sports, or traffic in one tweet and then go on to national or transnational themes in the next,” says Barbara Pfetsch.

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This text originally appeared in German on February 20, 2021, in the Tagesspiegel newspaper supplement published by Freie Universität.