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Drawing on an original study of internet users across nine Western democracies, Outside the Bubble offers an unprecedented look at the effects of social media on democratic participation. The book reveals that, for most users, social media do not constitute echo chambers where people only hear what they want to hear. Instead, these platforms facilitate accidental encounters with news and exposure to electoral mobilization. While social media may contributeto many societal problems, they can help address at least two important democratic ills: citizens' apathy towards politics, and inequalities between those who choose to exercise their voice and those who remain silent.
A comparative analysis of political websites and their users from seven Western democracies. Digital politics is shorthand for how internet technologies have fueled the complex interactions between political actors and their constituents. Cristian Vaccari analyzes the presentation and consumption of online politics in seven advanced Western democracies—Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States—from 2006 to 2010. His study not only refutes claims that the web creates homogenized American-style politics and political interaction but also empirically reveals how a nation’s unique constraints and opportunities create digital responses. Digital Poli...
Political disagreement is widespread within the communication network of ordinary citizens; furthermore, political diversity within these networks is entirely consistent with a theory of democratic politics built on the importance of individual interdependence. The persistence of political diversity and disagreement does not imply that political interdependence is absent among citizens or that political influence is lacking. The book's analysis makes a number of contributions. The authors demonstrate the ubiquitous nature of political disagreement. They show that communication and influence within dyads is autoregressive - that the consequences of dyadic interactions depend on the distribution of opinions within larger networks of communication. They argue that the autoregressive nature of political influence serves to sustain disagreement within patterns of social interaction, as it restores the broader political relevance of social communication and influence. They eliminate the deterministic implications that have typically been connected to theories of democratic politics based on interdependent citizens.
This companion brings together a diverse set of concepts used to analyse dimensions of media disinformation and populism globally. The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism explores how recent transformations in the architecture of public communication and particular attributes of the digital media ecology are conducive to the kind of polarised, anti-rational, post-fact, post-truth communication championed by populism. It is both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, consisting of contributions from both leading and emerging scholars analysing aspects of misinformation, disinformation, and populism across countries, political systems, and media systems. A global, compar...
This international edited collection brings together the latest research in political journalism, examining the ideological, commercial and technological forces that are transforming the field and its evolving relationship with news audiences. Comprising 40 original chapters written by scholars from around the world, The Routledge Companion to Political Journalism offers fundamental insights from the disciplines of political science, media, communications and journalism. Drawing on interviews, discourse analysis and quantitative statistical methods, the volume is divided into six parts, each focusing on a major theme in the contemporary study of political journalism. Topics covered include f...
This book explores how digital media use affects political attitudes and behavior, and how this relationship is shaped by political environments across countries. While research in this area has concentrated on the United States and United Kingdom, such results are set in comparative relief through the analysis of cases across Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. The book concludes that digital media have an effect on users, and depicts some of the characteristics of different political systems that play a significant role for online political engagement.
This book reflects on the political capacity of citizen users to impact politics, explaining the danger in assuming that mass online participation has unconditionally democratising effects. Focusing on the case of Italy's Five Star Movement, the book argues that Internet participation is naturally unequal and, without normative and strong design efforts, Internet platforms can generate noisy, undemocratic crowds instead of self-reflexive, norm-bounded communities. The depiction of a democratising Internet can be easily exploited by those who manage these platforms to sell crowds as deliberating publics. As the Internet, almost everywhere, turns into the primary medium for political engagement, it also becomes the symbol of what is wrong with politics. Internet users experience unprecedented, instantaneous and personalised access to information and communication and, by comparison, they feel a much stronger level of irrelevance in the existing political system.
This volume investigates the role of social media in European politics in changing the focus, frames and actors of public discourse around the EU decision-making process. Throughout the collection, the contributors test the hypothesis that the internet and social media are promoting a structural transformation of European public spheres which goes well beyond previously known processes of mediatisation of EU politics. This transformation addresses more fundamental challenges in terms of changing power relations, through processes of active citizen empowerment and exertion of digitally networked counter-power by civil society, news media, and political actors, as well as rising contestation of representative legitimacy of the EU institutions. Social Media and European Politics offers a comprehensive approach to the analysis of political agency and social media in European Union politics, by bringing together scholarly works from the fields of public sphere theory, digital media, political networks, journalism studies, euroscepticism, political activism and social movements, political parties and election campaigning, public opinion and audience studies.
This book critically investigates the complex interaction between social media and contemporary democratic politics, and provides a grounded analysis of the emerging importance of Social media in civic engagement. Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, have increasingly been adopted by politicians, political activists and social movements as a means to engage, organize and communicate with citizens worldwide. Drawing on Obama’s Presidential campaign, opposition and protests in the Arab states, and the mobilization of support for campaigns against tuition fee increases and the UK Uncut demonstrations, this book presents evidence-based research and analysis. Renown...
New communication technologies have reshaped media and politics. But who are the new power players? The Hybrid Media System shows how the interactions among older and newer media technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms now shape power relations among political actors, media, and publics.