Public Sphere

” The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action.” – Wikipedia

A Public Sphere can come in many different shapes and sizes for my example today we will look at one Public Sphere which I often use on a somewhat usual basis known as ‘Reddit’. “Reddit is an American based social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Registered members submit content to the site such as links, text posts, and images, which are then voted up or down by other members.” – Wikipedia.

Reddit has thousands of subreddits that cover hundreds of topics from sporting teams, food, news and politics etc. Users in those subreddits are able to create their own posts in regards to that topic and other users can join upvote and downvote posts that they like and they can also comment and add their own thoughts and opinions on the subject presented. Reddit has become one of the most popular forum based website and social sphere in the last coming years even passing facebook in 2018 as the third most popular site on the internet. – Digital Trends

One of the main issues with Reddit is that anybody can create an account. Even though this is important for Reddit to continue to grow, any people that has an account and comment on any single thread across the platform not matter what. This can be an issue for debates about certain topics that require knowledge of the topic area and can make threads become off-railed and become locked for breaking the Reddit’s rules.

But with this Reddit is a very inclusive environment having thousands of subreddits for almost every topic imaginable. This is a very unique and great way to grow your user base which is why Reddit has become one of the most popular websites and public spheres available over the internet with a total visitor base of 330 million as of March 30th 2019.
(Social Media Today).

Media has not had a major impact on reddit during its history of operation. Because of Reddit’s ability to be operated by the user it’s has be able to operate without the media’s influence. With this there is no followers, subscribers etc for people to establish themselves as a popular individual so media companies cannot use there pre existing fan base to become a major influence on the platform. The only reputation you can gain is through karma by creating popular posts and being liked which is a very difficult task and would be time consuming for a media company to take advantage of.