From The Rule of Information

If we look at the meta-level cause of today's crisis of communicative action, the disappearance of the other stands out. The disappearance of the other means the end of discourse. That disappearance strips communicative rationality from opinion. The expulsion of the other reinforces the self-propagandistic compulsion to inject one's own view into oneself. This self-doctrine-injection produces autistic information bubbles, and those bubbles make communicative action difficult. The greater the compulsion to self-promote, the more discursive space is replaced by echo chambers (Echokammer). Inside an echo chamber, I listen, above all, to my own words.

Discourse presupposes separating one's own views from one's own identity. Those who lack this discursive capacity cling combatively to their opinions. Because if they don't, their identity is put at risk. For this reason, attempts to detach them from their own beliefs are bound to fail. They accept no one's words and simply do not listen. But discourse is the practice of listening. The crisis of democracy is primarily a crisis of listening.

According to Eli Pariser, the personalization of networks through algorithms destroys public space. "Next-generation internet filters look at what you seem to like — what activities you've done online in the past, or what things or people you've liked — and draw various conclusions from that. Prediction machines are constantly building and refining theories about your personality and predicting what you'll do and want next. Through the cooperation of these machines, a unique information universe is created that corresponds to each of us — I call this universe a filter bubble — and the way we arrive at ideas and information is fundamentally transformed. The longer I roam inside the internet, the more my filter bubble fills with information I like and that reinforces my beliefs. I only see views that don't contradict my own view of the world. Other information is filtered out. Thus the filter bubble traps me in a perpetual 'I-loop' (Ich-Schleife)."

Eli Pariser sees network personalization as threatening democracy itself. According to Pariser, the foundation and raison d'etre of democracy are social topics lying outside an individual's immediate interests. But the personalization of the internet makes our lifeworlds and range of experience ever smaller and more constrained. Thus that personalization causes the rupture of the democratic public sphere. "Inside the filter bubble, the public space — the zone where common problems are recognized and dealt with — becomes, in a word, more trivial."

Filter-bubble theory has a decisive weakness in that it blames the shrinking range of experience in the information society solely on the algorithmic personalization of networks. Contrary to Pariser's view, the rupture of the public sphere is not a purely technical problem. The personalization of search results and newsfeeds plays only a minor role in that rupture. Self-doctrine-injection and self-promotion already occur offline.

As the atomization and narcissification of society deepen, we lose the ability to hear the voice of the other. And we lose empathy. Today everyone worships the self. Everyone performs and produces themselves. It is not the algorithmic personalization of networks but the disappearance of the other, the absence of the capacity to listen, that is the cause of the crisis facing democracy.

A discursive situation that strives for communication and understanding does not operate without premises and context. Rather, it is surrounded by a zone composed of culturally self-evident things or socially acquired practices. That zone pre-reflectively regulates communicative action.