Abstract
When Andrew Graham and I organised the first ever British conference to discuss the relationship between the Internet and democratic politics back in 1996, we had little more than intelligent speculation to guide us. For the next quarter of a century the debate went on, with both celebratory fantasies and dystopian accounts occupying their share of the intellectual limelight. Neither emancipated nor colonised by the Internet, most citizens have simply incorporated it into the complexity of their everyday lives, sometimes reproducing and at other times re-shaping their civic and political practices.
It is as if Cristian Vaccari and Augusto Valeriani have been quietly observing from the sidelines during this early period, gathering together the contested empirical findings, theoretical insights and experimental outcomes. Their book constitutes not only a fine attempt to make sense of the accumulated evidence, but to provide a refined conceptual vocabulary for investigating a question that has too commonly been answered in the vapid tones of ‘optimism’ or ‘pessimism’.
The authors begin by clearing away some unhelpful intellectual debris: first, the deterministic notion that ‘certain technical possibilities enabled by social media tend to more or less automatically produce specific political outcomes’ (pp. 24–25); second, that whatever those effects might be, they are uniform across social sub-groups (p. 27); and third, that the ways in which people interact with social media is universal rather than shaped by the contingencies of political context (p. 30). These are not original insights, but are important in setting up an argument for thinking about political participation as a multidimensional experience.
Vaccari and Valeriani's most significant insight is that specific types of experience generate different participatory effects. People do not simply experience politics online, but the quality of their online experience is itself politically shaped. Inadvertently stumbling upon an online story that changes your mind or galvanises you to some sort of action is qualitatively different from going online in search of political news or views, or connecting with others with a view to realising a political end. Much more important than the affordances of platform choice is how we approach social media as an experiential encounter.
Most of this excellent book is devoted to a carefully conducted comparative, six-country examination of experiential differentiation in relation to social media participation. The main experiential categories explored are accidental exposure to political content, agreement with like-minded others and mobilisation effects. I found the authors’ findings on inadvertent encounters with politics online especially interesting. They argue that ‘The more often people accidentally encounter political news on social media, the more they participate’ (p. 222). This claim contradicts two assumptions that have circulated widely over the last decade, often without adequate critical or empirical justification. The first is that the toxic nature of political social media puts people off politics and erodes participatory energies. The second is that online politics merely reflects, or even exacerbates, participatory inequalities. Vaccari and Valeriani refute such claims, without then going to the other extreme of claiming that online political experience is somehow a panacea for the pathologies of contemporary civic participation. As they say in their conclusion, ‘public discourse around digital media is undergoing a healthy empiricist reckoning that requires scholars – us included – to shed some of the myths, useful and otherwise that have colored our understanding of digital media's contribution to democracy and to ask new, difficult empirical questions in the public interest’ (p. 234). This is achieved with admirable cogency.