Abstract
Tim Highfield introduces the reader to the ideas that drive the book though a selfie on the second page of the book, in which the author is in the process of casting his vote. The fact that he is in a voting booth may provide a frisson of the political, but the project of the book is to shift the attention away from the ways in which social media and politics are usually covered. There is a growing literature – perhaps even an incipient canon – that addresses the role of social media in electoral politics, in grassroots movements, and in similarly traditional political processes. Social Media and Everyday Politics asks us to take a step back and examine what it means to be political online in a broader sense.
The book is situated at the intersection of social media, everyday politics, and networked publics. In taking this as a starting point, Highfield has a rich set of traditions from which to draw. Each of these elements has reached a certain level of ubiquity. Social media platforms are available on a range of devices and are a part of our everyday context. Our everyday lives and choices are inherently political – not in the sense of what often shows up in the daily papers as ‘politics’ but rather in the ways in which they engage relations of power and require that we navigate through ideological structures. And as social media and political engagement have become more fragmented, the notion of what constitutes a public has also shifted from neat masses and spheres to messy temporary and interpenetrated networks. The book takes the intersection of these three elements as a position from which to understand many of the cultural currents online.
It does this by leading us through a range of contexts in which the politics of everyday online interaction reveal themselves. Chapter One presents a series of cases in which what would otherwise constitute everyday communication – sharing a photograph of a nursing baby or discussing the content of a videogame – come to present ‘political themes’. The second chapter suggests ways in which the participatory (and often playful) nature of social media changes how we engage with and talk about politics. Chapters Three and Four focus on the ways in which social media and the traditional forms of mass media play off one another in an ever-changing dynamic. Despite a view of a cohesive mainstream media and an upstart social media, at this point the ‘legacy’ media has adopted many of the practices and forms of engagement that were earlier the hallmark of social and participatory media. And when news media do present current events, social media provides new ways of curating, filtering, and reframing those events. The final part of the book addresses politics in its more traditional sense: behavior in explicitly political spheres. Chapter Five, ‘Collective and Connective Action’, traces the debate over the place of social media in influencing social movements. And completing the move toward more traditionally political topics, the final two chapters engage the ways in which politicians and parties use social media, and what this then means for electoral politics.
This arc from the more everyday toward more conventional views of what counts as politics is a bit of a missed opportunity. In particular, there are interesting examples of ‘bottom-up’ political organization in places like Wikipedia and in open-source communities that might have provided examples of everyday politics rarely recognized as such. Indeed, depending on how widely the idea of everyday politics is interpreted, it is difficult to see any online activity as apolitical. While this volume leaves those more mundane and, well, everyday expressions of political anti-institutions aside, it certainly paves the way for other scholars to explore these areas and provides an impetus to do so.
Highfield’s prose is approachable; informal to a noticeable degree and reflective of the social media he discusses. This makes the work more accessible to those who might be turned away from weightier (and too often opaque) diction. As a result it can serve as a gentle introduction for those who have not yet been exposed to cultural approaches to social interaction online, and as an outstanding map of the terrain for those coming from a variety of fields. Indeed, it would be difficult for me to imagine a better orienting text for my undergraduate courses on internet culture and politics. It fills an important gap in the existing literature and I suspect will find an eager and engaged audience.