Sam Lessin:

This stood in stark contrast to the public sphere—speaking on a stage or to a mass audience through a broadcast—where your audience could be of almost unlimited size. But your speech was limited to the messages which would appeal to a diversity of people and you had to be OK with everyone knowing what you said.

In its first iteration, the largely anonymous internet of webpages looked like a simple, if powerful, extension of the public sphere. It allowed individuals to speak to more people than previous mediums did, on a far wider diversity of topics.

But, as the internet has become ever more personalized, it increasingly represents a strange hybrid of the public and private spheres. Through micro-targeting and customization, the internet now provides the opportunity for people to reach an unlimited audience with unlimited speech.

If there is, therefore, a conversation to be had about the impact of the internet on the election, it shouldn’t be about fake news and feed ranking (which I believe are red herrings). It should be about what it means that a public candidate can for the first time effectively talk to each individual voter privately in their own home and tell them exactly what they want to hear.