if democracy is conceived of rule by an atomized public informed by engagement-focused media, it will be a form of misrule. you can’t exhort media to be different to fix it. you have to reconfigure the polity to be something more rational than an atomized, distractable mass public. 1/

specifically, the democratic public has to rule by participating in institutions that both meaningfully enfranchise them and act rationally, rather than reactively, on behalf of their interests and values. 2/

usually when democracy has worked, these institutions have taken the form of political parties. but there are other possibilities. /fin