Why the digital town square is no replacement for physical space
This essay is part of a series studying the long, enduring, and essential relationship between public space and democracy. This essay will explore the continued importance and centrality of physical public space to sustaining our democratic ideals of civil discourse and engagement, free assembly and self-government, in our increasingly virtual and online lives along with new risks and threats that are part of the new and emerging technologies of the digital age.
With social media sites like Meta’s Facebook and Threads and X, formerly known as Twitter, casting themselves as “digital town squares,” does the relationship between democracy and physical space still matter? Many historians and scholars have grappled with the question of whether we still need physical public spaces to maintain our democratic ideals. While their work spans nearly two decades, their answers share much common ground.
For example, in his 2009 book, Speech Out of Doors, the legal scholar Timothy Zick convincingly dispels this notion by succinctly summarizing the unique characteristics that are associated with the “experience of assembling with others and speaking in material places” that include “proximity, symbolism, emotion, and solidarity [that] are very difficult, if not impossible, to replicate in existing virtual places.”1
Moreover, Zick notes that “Message placement is often inextricably intertwined with message content…certain places provide critical proximity to target audiences. A particular place…may symbolize an on-going contest, dispute, or grievance…[and] such places often help to maximize media coverage.”2
To that point, what the academic John R. Parkinson asserted a decade ago remains true today: “[a]s political activists have understood for years, it is not the issue per se that gets coverage, it is the dramatization of the issue, and that requires physical action, creating pictures and a story, in physical space… [and] demonstrating the sheer scale of popular anger still matters – even in a world where the public sphere has burst out of the coffee house, beyond the confines of the central plaza, and onto the airwaves.”3
Beyond simply providing the stage for political action, public spaces, as Zick has written, “…are also important venues for “self-actualization… [that have] encouraged public citizenship by facilitating interaction among diverse groups of citizens, and among citizens and public officials.”4
As Zick notes “In public places people are most visible – to government and officials and one another. Only there are others forced in some sense to count and reckon with them.”5
Zick suggests that there are “three critical democratic functions” of public spaces: [t]hey facilitate speakers’ identify claims, they create the necessary breathing space for democratic participation and self-government and lend critical transparency to democracy and governance.”6
These critical democratic functions were on full display in public space protests across the world over the last decade, the 2011 Arab Spring protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in New York City the same year, the anti-government protest camp in Independence Square in Kyiv in 2013, and even more recently the 2023 mass protests in Israel against Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned overhaul of that nation’s judiciary.
In the context of these large-scale public protests, in 2022, the Turkish sociologist Nilüfer Göle asserted the emergence of a new form of politics: “public space democracy.” Observing patterns in which “protesters express their discontent, manifest their presence and change democratic agendas in assembling together and enacting new forms of citizenship in the public square”7, Göle suggest that protesters are “reclaim[ing] the stage (confiscated by digital power, state surveillance, and private ownership) for personal and collective renewal.”8
In the context of growing authoritarianism and anti-democratic trends world-wide, Göle suggests that “public agency and assembly” can empower citizens into “acting together and enacting in public… [to] reset democratic agendas and question preestablished contracts.”9
In perhaps her most hopeful assertion, Göle has further suggested that the recent decline in democracy can be arrested if “the emancipatory power of public space can be rediscovered personally and collectively.”10
The New and Emerging Threats of Technology
While it’s clear that that the online, virtual world is a poor and ineffective substitute for in-person mass public protest, there are new political and technological risks that pose direct and longer-term threats to the relationship between public space and open public debate in the search for truth and shared knowledge.
Searching for the causes of the more numerous but smaller size of public protests that have been staged since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term in office, Gal Beckerman of The Atlantic recently observed that “Alongside demoralization runs justifiable caution; the act of protest itself has become more dangerous. Not only has the president said that he would have little compunction about using the military to deal with the ‘the enemy from within,’ but the tactics of surveillance – including facial recognition, geolocating tracking, and AI-enhanced identifications – have gotten more pervasive and sophisticated.”11
Noting that “The police and FBI have long used and abused tools for monitoring protest” Beckerman further reflects that “…the average protester at a peaceful 20th-century gathering could at least assume that they would melt into a sea of indistinguishable people. Technology has made that impossible. There is no safety in numbers. You cannot disappear.”12
Alarming as technological innovation in surveillance may be, perhaps even more worrisome is what Derek Thompson has characterized as a “weird experiment” underway in the early years of the 21st century in which “Americans have collectively submitted to a national experiment to deprive ourselves of camaraderie in this world of flesh and steel, choosing instead to grow (and grow and grow) the time we spend by ourselves, gazing into screens, wherein actors and influencers often engage in the very acts of proximity that we deny ourselves.”13
In her recent book, The Extinction of Experience, Christine Rosen, a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute further explores this theme, surveying the many and varied ways in which our relationships, our communities, and our society, have been negatively affected by the emergence of what she refers to as mediating technologies, such computers and smart phones, as well as the software, algorithms, and the internet.
Rosen writes that “Our continued unwillingness to account for what has been lost won’t lead to a world of technology-enabled progress; rather, this inability to grapple with the extinction of fundamental human experience creates a world where our shared reality and purpose is further frayed, and where growing distrust of human judgement will further polarize our culture and our politics.”14
We all intuitively are beginning to have a sense of the loss to which Rosen is referring to in our home life, work life, and community life, that is caused by our over-engagement and over-reliance on virtual technology and social media. The potential impact of the increasing incursions of the online, virtual world on our in-real-life ability to organize, engage in political life, and govern ourselves is just now coming into focus.
Rosen’s book catalogues the chipping away of things that are essential to our development as human beings and the development of human societies from the decline of face-to-face interactions and the trust building that comes from them to the drowning out of truth in a tsunami of online lies, alternative facts, propaganda, and conspiracy theories in the post-truth era.
Rosen also points to the risks of the relentless acceleration of everyday life, our growing expectation for things to happen more quickly, and our increased impatience with waiting-- generated by our increasing online lives. Rosen connects these changes to our concern of the impact on democracy building, noting that “[a] society that cannot delay gratification or exercise the patience to plan will have very different approaches to the consumption of natural resources, to institutional and professional experience, and to politics than one that does. On-demand works well for video, but not always for democracy.”15
Tying directly back to the central thesis of the relationship between public space and democracy, Rosen reinforce the points that others have made that public spaces “often also serve as the proving ground for protest and political action, noting that “[i]t is not a coincidence that large-scale civic engagement often begins in the physical town square, or in public meeting places where people of different backgrounds come together. In physical places we are forced to confront, compromise and get along with those around us in ways that we can avoid when we are online.”16
Again, exercising our democracy through public debate and assembly is a business that is best conducted in person, face-to-face in public space. Rosen argues that “We need to defend the sensory world and remind ourselves of the crucial importance of the physical body, the integrity of physical space, and the need for people to cultivate inner lives. From these flow things that can’t be made by machines: serendipity, intuition, community, spontaneity, and empathy”17 - - all of which are essential ingredients to our humanity, our ability to form communities, build societies, and democratically govern ourselves.
All these scholars and writers remind us that the trust building that is a pre-condition for our democratic society to thrive and flourish is dependent on direct and in-real-life human interactions. And that if we are unhappy with the policies and decisions of our leaders, if we are dissatisfied with the political culture of our country, those interactions need to involve exercising our Constitutionally-protected rights to gather together in our public spaces, our streets, our parks, and our town squares to engage in a new public debate about the direction of our nation, our cities, and our communities. While it may be true that a handful of tech-bro billionaires may own social media and the internet, the people still own public spaces, at least for now.
Notes on cited works
1. Timothy Zick. Speech Out of Doors - Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Spaces. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4
2. ibid, 10
3. John R. Parkinson. Democracy & Public Space - The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 69
4. Timothy Zick. Speech Out of Doors - Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Spaces. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13
5. Ibid, 14
6. Ibid, 13
7. Nilüfer Göle, Introduction, Public Space Democracy - Performative, Visual and Normative Dimensions of Politics in a Global Age, editor, Nilüfer Göle (London: Routledge, 2022), 1
8. ibid, 22
9. ibid, 3
10. ibid, 2
11. Gal Beckerman, "Protest in Trump 2.0 Looks Different", Atlantic Monthly, April 2025.
12. ibid
13. Derek Thompson, "Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out", Atlantic Monthly, February 2024.
14. Christine Rosen. The Extinction of Experience - Being Human in a Disembodied World
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2024), 4
15. ibid, 106
16. ibid, 187
17. ibid, 12-13
