Abstract
Outside the Bubble makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the impact of social media (SM) usage and political participation across citizens and democratic systems. The rapid expansion of the Internet and social media use has made this a fast-growing area of social science research, attracting interest from political scientists, communications scholars, and information experts. The effects of these developments are made even more complex by their rapidly changing form, the reaction of political actors, and the difficulty of researching a moving target.
Vaccari and Valeriani should be applauded for providing a rich overview of the burgeoning inter-disciplinary literature on social media and participation. The book’s strongest feature is its re-conceptualization of the nature of social media usage and its relationship to political participation. For example, Chapter 1 discusses how information flows on social media often include multiple social cues that are lacking from other information sources; these features can broaden information sources and help citizens evaluate new information. Another section discusses the unique characteristics of social media usage compared to other information sources. Many of their ideas can deepen the reader’s understanding of the field. Moreover, the presentation is clearly written for a broad audience. Their conceptual framework in this chapter provides a map for the study’s empirical analyses.
The authors conducted a 9-nation survey of SM use and political participation (Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States). This is a valuable resource in a field typically based on single-nation analyses.
Chapter 2 introduces their measures of political participation. A single table presents the marginal percentages from the combined nine nations. Readers might benefit if the chapter said more about these measures, such as their inter-relationships and the activity levels across nations. This would benefit readers’ understanding and evaluation of the analyses that follow.
Chapter 3 tests a common belief that social media create echo chambers when users hear messages that reinforce their own beliefs. In contrast, their survey respondents report that they are more likely to experience divergent views on SM than in offline conversations. Extensive multivariate analyses show surprisingly little socio-economic differences in these patterns, although political attitudes are more important in structuring homogeneous information networks. Information bubbles are more common among political junkies and heavy SM users.
Chapter 4 focuses on the relationships between social media usage and political participation. The study finds that accidental exposure to political news has a modest effect, an SM environment that supports one’s views has a larger effect, and online exposure to electoral mobilization messages can increase participation by up to 50% (p.151)! Effects also vary across different types of participation in significant ways. Assessing causality is difficult in survey research; the multiple models used in Chapter 3 would be more useful than presenting a single multivariate model with more than two dozen control variables.
Chapter 6 was of special interest because it examines whether national context affects social media influences. The chapter presents three Poisson Regression models predicting participation that test the previous findings-with nations now grouped by their contextual traits. Readers would be better informed if the book provided basic information about cross-national levels of political participation, SM usage, SM experience, etc. Readers see the final pooled models, but not the building blocks of the structure.
In the same vein, the text also should provide some essential information on the cross-national survey that readers need to understand and evaluate the findings. Details on the time frame, the survey method, the response rate, the survey firm, and other vital information are under-reported. One never sees the wording of survey questions. Over-reliance on an online appendix -but without information on its location - detracts from the presentation.
Outside the Bubble is at its best when it integrates the diffuse concepts involved in social media usage and participation - and then puts these ideas to a test. This study creates a new perspective on the way social media usage functions with supportive cross-national data. This makes the book a valuable resource in a field where social media structures and practices are rapidly evolving, along with the research literature on this topic.