Social media and new forms for civic participation

For about 20 years, ever since the early 1990s, the Internet’s potential to change how we think and act about politics has been a reoccurring theme in social science research. Already the Internet’s early introduction into Western societies was accompanied by thought-provoking suggestions regarding its political and civic potential. It was perceived to have the power to substantiate the idea of an electronic direct democracy (Hague and Loader, 1999; Kitchin, 1998), to change our idea of what the public sphere is (Poster, 1995), to facilitate stronger contacts between citizens and local government (Tsagarousianou et al., 1998) and to stimulate new versions of a more active citizenship (Coleman, 2001), to mention a few of the many opportunities that were identified. The fact that these and similar propositions regarding the new information and communication technology’s (ICT) abilities to reshape politics and civic action also became subjects of critical analyses, that called for a less celebratory treatment of the new medium (cf. Margolis and Resnick, 2000; Wilhelm, 2000), did not stop researchers from ascribing the new medium great potential for civic and political change.

The Internet was introduced into the Western world at a time when there was a great sense of overall social and cultural change. These changes were often referred to as a transformation from modernity to a state of late modernity (cf. Beck, 1992 [1986]; Giddens, 1990, 1991; Thompson, 1995). The notion of late modernity holds a wide variety of social and cultural transformations in it. It includes, for instance, changing levels of trust in the expert systems of modernity (Giddens, 1991) and an increasing sense of global risks (Beck, 1992 [1986]), such as environmental hazards. The potential implications of these changes are vast, but in this context, one of them is of specific importance – the ways in which late modernity has contributed to a transformation of what politics and citizenship mean (Dahlgren, 2009; Inglehart, 1997).

Lance Bennett (2008) offers an influential contribution to the debate regarding this putative transformation with his conceptualization of changing modes of citizenship. Drawing on both his and other researchers’ analyses, Bennett sensed a shift in citizenship styles, from ‘Dutiful Citizenship (DC)’ towards ‘Actualizing Citizenship (AC)’. The DC is the citizenship of modernity. It is a mode of citizenship that is mainly related to national, parliamentarian politics and its practices, such as voting, joining political parties and established civil society organization. The AC, on the other hand, is ‘late modern’. The typical AC-citizens are younger citizens having a ‘diminishing sense of obligation’ (Bennett, 2008: 14) to participate in established, modern forms of engagement. They instead prefer ‘more personally defined acts’ of civic engagement (Bennett, 2008) and less formally organized political practices. The AC-citizens are the young, individualized (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) and self-reflexive (Giddens, 1991) citizens of late modernity, who have reshaped what civic engagement means and the boundaries for where ‘politics’ is being played out.

In Lance Bennett’s conceptualization, the changing mode of citizenship, from DC to AC, was helped by the Internet (Bennett et al., 2009). The new ICT substantiated the sort of looser, more informal and network-like communication that he found typical for the younger (AC) generation’s civic engagement and participation. This latter line of thought has also been very well represented in social science research. A number of books and articles have come to follow this vein and have looked specifically into how young citizens engage with and through Internet-based media (cf. Bennett, 2008; Dahlgren, 2007; Olsson and Dahlgren, 2010).

The fact that the early versions of the Internet was reshaped into ‘web 2.0’ (Jenkins, 2006; O’Reilly, 2005) did not make the connection between emerging digital media and changing modes of citizenship any less relevant. The ‘more interactive’ and ‘user friendly’ (O’Reilly, 2005) web rapidly became a platform for a large number of new social networking sites (SNS) (van Dijck, 2013). Despite their internal differences, SNS such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as websites for sharing such as YouTube, contribute to make the new version of the web into a sphere that offers a sense of additional user participation (cf. Burgess and Green, 2009).

The rapid development and spread of SNS, together with the fact that the late modern transformation of citizenship had inspired analysts to look more closely at informal forms of civic and political participation, provided an excellent breeding ground for the analyses that would follow upon the protests movement at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. These analyses often also served as examples of how SNS help substantiate the formation of and practices within new, informal civic and political action (cf. Castells, 2012; Gerbaudo, 2012; Tufekci and Wilson, 2012). They have covered, for instance, the role of Twitter in the Iranian revolution 2009, the ways in which blogging was important for the protests on Tahrir Square in 2011, and the use of Facebook for self-presentation and organizing within the Occupy movement. The studies have been very useful for the research field as first insights into the new empirical area. Meanwhile, they have also to some extent reminded of snapshots of what is going on with SNS in contemporary civic and political action. Hence, it is very welcome with studies that take a firmer and more systematic grip – theoretically, methodologically and/or empirically – of what is actually going on within the area of social networking and different forms of engagement and participation. This is also what is being offered by all three books included in this review.

The book The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics (2013) summarizes Lance Bennett’s and Alexandra Segerberg’s most recent research project on the theme digital media in contemporary political protests. As such, it offers insightful theoretical contributions to ongoing discussions within the field as well as a rich empirical material derived from a number of illuminating case studies. Some bits and pieces of this research have already been published as journal articles, but it is very useful for the field that the authors compile them into one coherent volume.

One short summary of the book and its arguments would say that it centres around one typology, two global issues and three theoretical touchstones. The typology is carefully worked out and presented in the book’s initial, theorizing part (p. 47). It summarizes three types of action networks: one network of collective action (organizationally brokered networks) and two networks of connective action (organizationally enabled networks and crowd-enabled networks) that are represented in and relevant to contemporary protest actions. The different types are used as analytical reference points for the book’s empirical chapters (chapters 2–5) to help shed light on differences and similarities between various actions, sometimes even ‘logics of action’. On one hand, more traditional and steered forms of action (collective action in established organization), which could be defined as ‘modern’. On the other hand, newer and less formalized forms of actions (connective action), which are more ‘late modern’. A specifically important thread in the analyses of the empirical cases is the role of digital media within these different action networks. Bennett and Segerberg argue convincingly for the fact that particularly social networking applications are shaped to play different roles within different network actions ‘as organizing mechanisms’ (p. 112) per se; they are shaped by and they also help shaping action networks.

The two global issues are, on one hand, the protests that erupted as a consequence of the global financial crisis in 2008 and, on the other hand, global, environmental climate concerns. These are the two issues that inspire the various protest actions covered in the empirical parts of the book. Among the empirical examples, we thus find cases such as Put People First, G20 Meltdown, Copenhagen climate protests and the Occupy protests, but also outlooks towards additional actions, such as the Spanish los indignados and the Arab spring. The many cases and examples, and the careful treatment of them, are illustrative and make the overall theoretical arguments convincing. They do, however, sometimes also contribute to make the analytical points in the book somewhat redundant.

Three ‘touchstones’ are parts of the analysis (p. 5): (1) understanding the personalization of politics and what it means for political mobilization, (2) understanding communication as integral to political participation and organization and (3) developing and grounding the different logics underlying the organization of collective versus connective action. The touchstones are partially melted into the typology of action networks, and the touchstones relate in an initiated manner to large parts of contemporary theoretical debates on the social and political transformations of the Western world. As a consequence, Bennett and Segerberg impressively manage to touch upon and include theories of late modern individualization (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), personalized politics (Inglehart, 1997), digital media’s networking logic (Benkler, 2006), as well as the field of social movements (della Porta and Diani, 2006) into their analyses.

This makes the book exceptionally knowledgeable and very much up to date on current theoretical debates. A flipside to this coin, however, is that the broad theoretical horizons occasionally also make it a bit difficult to follow the empirical case studies in terms of methodology. Which are actually the main operating theoretical perspectives that inform the different analyses that are presented? The quote below is a case in point: Are these conclusions derived from inspiration from organizational theory, from network theory or – possibly – from theories concerned with political protests? This is hard to discern from time to time:

Treating the network as an organizational unit opens up important dimensions for analysis. It directs attention to network-level mechanisms that emerge when a large number of participants move through the digitally dense contexts characterizing many networked protest spaces. In particular, it looks to the roles of social technologies as organizing mechanisms that are contingent on how various actors from organizations to crowds deploy them. (p. 112)

Despite this minor remark, Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg have offered an important contribution to the research field. It deserves a lot of readers and ought to inspire a wide variety of additional studies into digital media’s role in contemporary contentious politics.

The anthology Social Media and the Politics of Reportage: The ‘Arab Spring’, edited by Sava Bebawi and Diana Bossio, approaches the research field in a different manner. The editors’ ambition has rather been to collect and compile a more thematic book that offers insights from various case studies concerned with the ‘Arab Spring’. The book is divided into three rather loosely organized parts. The first part contains three chapters that all – in one way or the other – provide empirical studies of this heavily mythologized terrain. More specifically, they all contribute to our understanding of various forms of interaction. One of the two editors, Diana Bossio, revisits and analyses how the interaction between mainstream journalism and social media reporting (and activism) has been represented in both news media and academia during and after the Arab spring. After having repeated and usefully exemplified rather well-known positions of the debate – that is, optimistic and more pessimistic views of the promises offered by SNS – Bossio concludes her chapter by pointing towards the many interactions between social media activists’ communicative practices and journalism.

The notion of interaction is also important in the chapter by Axel Bruns and Tim Highfield. They look into the Twitter-sphere in order to map and highlight interaction within and between activists from different language groups. Approaching the notion of interaction from a different angle, William Lafi Youmans analyses how and to what extent the TV-channel Al-Jazeera English made use of influences from SNS and user-generated content in its reporting during the Egyptian uprising in 2011.

If the first part of the anthology highlights interaction in journalistic and activists’ communicative practices, the second part is much concerned with contextualizing these activities. Drawing on interviews with Syrian diaspora activists in Russia, Mervi Pantti’s and Evgeniya Boklage’s chapter emphasize the importance of political and media context. Despite the global opportunities offered by SNS’ network structure, diaspora activists’ practices are also circumscribed by local, contextual structures in their country of residence. Robert Imre and Stephen Owen contextualize online activism with a Foucauldian power perspective. They relate protests and demonstrations in both Iran and Ukraine, and in the ‘Occupy’ movement, to one and the same overarching form of ‘governance’.

The final part of the partbook actually contains only one single chapter, by one of the editors, Saba Bebawi. It summarizes the book with a specific outlook towards the potentially changing power relations between traditional journalistic practices and alternative, social media reporting. In a final remark, Bebawi notes that despite the rapid development of SNS, the ‘mainstream media remain dominant in reaching global audiences, and, in turn, their ability to shape social reality’ (p. 137).

It is certainly not a coincidence that Andreas Jungherr (2015) reaches a very similar conclusion in his empirically very ambitious study analysing Twitter data from the German election in 2009. Despite the fact that Jungherr’s book, Analyzing Political Communication with Digital Trace Data: The Role of Twitter Messages in Social Science Research, has a different point of departure – his analytical interest lies with Twitter’s role in formal politics – he also points towards the important part played by traditional (or perhaps mainstream) media in shaping politics. After having analysed German Twitter users’ communication and interaction before the election, one of his conclusions is, ‘Thus while Twitter is clearly a medium for political references and interaction, most politically vocal users do not use it as such very frequently and when they do it is usually in reaction to mediated political events’ (p. 102).

The quote is quite telling for the entire book in its very clear, unromantic view of SNS in general and Twitter in particular. Without denying the potential political significance of Twitter, Jungherr is very distinct and analytically careful in his approach all the way through his presentation of interpretive framework (chapter 3) via his large and varied source data analysis (chapters 4–7) to his conclusions (chapter 8).

To a large extent, Andreas Jungherr launches his study in opposition to previous research within the area. More specifically, he is critical towards approaches that have treated digital trace data as a ‘mirror’, understanding, for instance, Twitter data as ‘offer[ing] a more or less true image of reality’ (p. 62). Instead, Jungherr argues for a ‘mediation-hypothesis’ (p. 63) which ‘leads us to expect the reflection of political reality, found in digital trace data, to be biased in accordance with the underlying data generating processes’ (p. 63). A specifically telling example is offered in his empirical analyses: If Twitter would have been a mirror of the German public opinion during the election 2009, the German Pirate Party would have won. It was the most mentioned and most often discussed of all political parties on Twitter (p. 199). In the real life of parliamentarian politics, however, they gained approximately 2% of all votes and ended up being quite far from even qualifying for seats in the German parliament.