Abstract
Informed by Social Network Analysis (SNA) and critical theory, this book explores the impact of social media on politics and contemporary civic discourse and acts as a unifying product to gather previous research projects studying ‘how networks shape public discourse and social movements in the digital era’ (p. 6). Whilst largely referential to the United States, the primal focus of digital media and global contexts such as COVID-19 within this volume, bear it useful to studies of European media also. The volume is divided into three main sections, not including the introductory section. The introduction places Twitter (now ‘X’) at the forefront of study and acknowledges it as ‘the primary arena of political discourse and discord’ (p. 3) and establishes that the goal is to portray how the use of social media results in emotional appeals regarding socio-political concerns causes a reduction in the ability to reason in democratic self-governance and decreases the quality of civic discourse. Section I, ‘The Digital Body Politic’, outlines the theoretical foundations and methodology for exploring the digital space through SNA. Chapter 2 offers a survey of Western political philosophy and the body politic as a ‘biological organism comprising government authorities, social organizations, churches, and other institutions’ (p. 13). In Part II, ‘Networked Insights’, chapter 3 presents a new humanistic approach of language and analysis by blending techniques from the humanities, social sciences and computer science and uses COVID-19 as the case study for this mode of analysis. Chapter 4 uses Actor-Network-Theory as textual analysis to demonstrate how Twitter’s emotional appeals translate as socio-political discourse and their manifestation in the digital realm. In Part II, ‘Our New Networked Poitics’, further critical analysis is presented within chapter 5’s focus on Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’, the notion of ‘simulcacrum’ and Marx’s ‘base and supersturcture’ (p. 11). Overall, this book would be beneficial to scholars and students of a broad spectrum of subjects, particularly media and communication studies, journalism, political sciences, and sociology.