Abstract
Too often, analyses of contemporary political communication are driven by unnecessarily rigid dichotomies. Legacy news organizations are contrasted with online upstarts, television-era political campaigns to emergent internet-based forms, and brick-and-mortar civic organizations to web-enabled styles of activism. Partly, these contrasts stem from excitement – or worry – about new developments in political communication. Yet, as Andrew Chadwick argues in The Hybrid Media System, such dichotomies obscure as much as they reveal. Novel online forms do not replace established ones so much as they encounter them. Understanding political communication today, he argues, requires a perspective that sees the intermingling of newer and older media forms as the result of ‘systemic hybridity’ – that is, the ongoing confluence of older and newer media forms, commingling and competing, adapting and reacting to each other in a fluid media environment.
The Hybrid Media System sits alongside a small number of recent books that attempt to give theoretical form to the changing landscape of political communication (e.g. Bennett and Segerberg, 2013; Williams and Delli Carpini, 2012). While all have noted the fluid character of mediated politics, Chadwick stands out for the attention he pays to the integrative aspects of hybridity. The political communication environment is not simply, or only, becoming diverse and fragmented; rather, the very forces driving diversification and fragmentation (e.g. the proliferation of news genres and providers, the splintering of audiences, etc.) also shape complex forms of interdependence among both actors and publics. While this environment is undoubtedly shaped by power asymmetries, Chadwick suggests that interdependencies may increase the likelihood of exposure to similar content across fragmented audiences and also increase opportunities for intervention by concerned citizens.
The book is structured in three parts. The first part (chapters 1–4) sets out the conceptual framework for hybridity as an analytical tool. It offers useful summaries of how hybridity has been taken up in the social sciences, a lively revisionist history of hybridity in media systems past, and a tour d’horizon of hybridity at work in the contemporary UK and US media environments. The second part (chapters 5–7) deploys and develops hybridity as a tool for reinterpreting key recent moments in political communication in both countries. It argues that entities like WikiLeaks achieve their greatest success when abandoning a go-it-alone strategy and instead seek to partner with prestigious legacy news organizations like the Guardian and the New York Times. Conversely, it also shows how political campaigns are not simply a matter of innovative digital strategies but also the relentless integration of new and old media forms: television advertisements and face-to-face communication mix with targeted press releases and digital videos. The book’s final part (chapters 8–9) draws on interviews with actors in the fields of journalism, politics and activism. It sketches out some of the ways actors in these fields integrate hybrid norms into daily practices and in the process further blur the boundaries between organizations, institutions and roles in the contemporary public communication environment.
Chadwick’s approach offers several important hypotheses and insights that political communication scholars will do well to examine in further empirical detail. His chapter on ‘political information cycles’, for example, suggests that the hybrid environment has unique spatial and temporal features that distinguish it from previous media environments. Spatially, he argues that political news making is no longer confined to an intra-elite game between politicians and journalists. Instead, elites must deal, often publicly, with a range of other actors aiming to insert themselves and their causes onto the news agenda. Temporally, Chadwick argues that time itself takes on multiple dimensions in the hybrid environment. Some stories lie dormant for long periods of time, while others flourish and fade quickly. Actors cultivate a temporal sensibility about the ‘right time’ to intervene in the public communication process. Empirical scholarship examining these hypotheses and insights will be important for the field moving forward (e.g. considering the conditions under which political information cycles are more or less open to alternative perspectives, investigating how actors acquire a temporal habitus, etc.).
In The Hybrid Media System, Chadwick’s primary aim is to peel away the misbegotten dichotomies shaping so many current debates surrounding contemporary political communication and to present alternative frameworks that go beyond those dichotomies. In that aim, he is extraordinarily successful. Once hybridity is acknowledged, though, it is less clear what ought to come next. What are the forms hybridity assumes and why? How and why do they vary from one setting to the next? These are questions Chadwick acknowledges as important but (understandably) does not pursue. Yet these are the sorts of questions that scholars of political communication need to be asking moving forward. Hybrid media systems may reinforce the powerful, or they may offer new opportunities to those seeking change. Knowing when and why they tend towards either remains a key task. Put differently: Recognizing hybridity is an important first step. Specifying its forms and integrating them into a broader account of contemporary media, politics and power remains a task to be accomplished.