Country of Origin: Ukraine
Location: Lithuania
“Social Media Age: The Rise or Decay of Democracy”
The rapid expansion of social media has fundamentally transformed the architecture of political communication. Rather than functioning as channels of mass communication, digital platforms create personalized and networked communication fields in which individuals simultaneously consume, produce, and circulate political information. This transformation has weakened the traditional gatekeeping role of governments and mainstream media while contributing to what is commonly described as a post-truth communication environment. This lecture develops a theoretical framework for understanding how these new communication fields reshape democratic politics. It argues that social media replace information scarcity with information abundance, shifting the central political challenge from access to information to its selection, interpretation, and evaluation. Interactivity dissolves the conventional distinction between information producers and consumers, allowing individuals to become active participants in constructing political reality. As a consequence, political behavior increasingly reflects moral intuitions, emotions, and value-based identities rather than purely rational deliberation.
The lecture further examines the paradoxical consequences of this transformation. Rather than asking whether social media strengthen or weaken democracy, the lecture argues that they are transforming democracy into a new form whose quality increasingly depends on trust, individual responsibility, and the capacity to sustain communication across competing identity bubbles.
Willing to share personal story.