Arena

Christian Baden, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
c.baden@mail.huji.ac.il

The arena describes the configuration of visibility and access regimes that govern participation in the public debate. People may ‘enter the arena’ to publicly express their opinions and interact with other speakers; or they may participate as spectators who engage the unfolding debate without presenting their own views. Since the metaphor was originally conceived, digital communication platforms have massively expanded the range of speakers who can access the arena, while facilitating participants’ switching of roles, and creating new intermediate forms of participation (e.g., indicating support for/boosting the visibility of others’ opinions; posting public shout-outs without engagement with other contributions).

Different media environments raise different hurdles for entering to the arena, which may be more or less exclusive, and involve additional gatekeepers and selection criteria: While anyone can post on X (formerly Twitter), not every letter to the editor is printed, and few are invited to sit on talk shows; some arenas are only accessible to speakers presenting relevant credentials (e.g., expertise, public office), or pre-define differentiated speaker roles (e.g., anchors, stakeholders, opposition members). In addition, arenas govern participation by imposing discursive norms that participants are expected to respect (e.g., civility norms, argumentative norms). Arenas may be thematically open, permitting participants to insert and redefine issues, or restricted, marking unrelated contributions as off-topic. Arenas also differ in their capacity to carry multiple discussions at once (scope) and accommodate numerous voices and contributions (scale).

Regarding their accessibility to spectators, some arenas are capable of actively rendering issues salient to audiences, while others require some amount of audience activity to achieve exposure. In addition, arenas differ in their management of visibility of speakers’ contributions, ranging from more egalitarian spaces (e.g., townhall meetings, visibility allocated based on user engagement), to hierarchically pre-structured ones (e.g., visibility for purchase, privileged speaker roles).

Keywords: public discourse, public sphere, political participation

Related Entries: Audience, Communication, Opinion, Public Opinion

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Schulz, W. (1997) Changes of mass media and the public sphere. Javnost - The Public, 4(2), 57-69.