Ulrich Beck and the «public bads» of communication: notes on digital cosmopolitism

This paper focuses on the representative shifts engendered by the digital revolution, probed by Ulrich Beck in his posthumous analysis of the “politics of Visibility” (Metamorphosis of the World, chapter 8). His analysis is founded on the intertwining of «communication and world». Specifically, his thinking revolves around the communicative drawbacks of risk society, dependent on the tendency to reproduce and share any aspect of our daily experience. This is why Beck dwells on the «new landscapes of communication», bound to create new forms of communities in the era of globalized cosmopolitism. Hence follows the convergence of old and new media, which foster the way people turn into their “imagined communities”. This is the phase marked by the transition to global communication, ruled by the representation of risks undermining the global balance. In this sense, the narration of progress and technological innovation mingles with the underestimation of the negative effects of globalization in terms of health and poverty. As a result, the metamorphosis of our globalized world (cosmopolitan and multicultural) has to face the increasing sophistication of the interaction strategies bolstered by social actors, whose dependence on mobile devices attests the degree of relational shift fed by the end of great narrations. News consumers may turn into news makers. This is what Habermas remarks in an interesting essay published in 2008 in “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy still have an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research” (chapter 9), focused on the relationship between lobbies and «considered opinions» in the era of digital communications. In that essay Habermas deals with the risks connected to the «pathologies of political communication», in compliance with the progressive overlapping of mainstream and digital devices. These risks are highlighted in reference to the role played by lobbies and governments, involved in the circulation of considered opinions within the public sphere. This is one of the most relevant aspects concerning the risk society, nourished by the fast metamorphosis of the globalized world. Therefore, this essay aims to highlight the «public bads of communication» emphasized by Beck ‒ following Habermas’s lesson ‒ in the era of digital opinions, more and more fluctuating in the public sphere of connected actors.