The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics

Axel Bruns, Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbo, Anders Olof Larsson, Christian Christensen, Axel Bruns, Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbo, Anders Olof Larsson, Christian Christensen, Anders Larsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138300934
• eBook ISBN: 9781317506553
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Social media are now widely used for political protests, campaigns, and communication in developed and developing nations, but available research has not yet paid sufficient attention to experiences beyond the US and UK. This collection tackles this imbalance head-on, compiling cutting-edge research across six continents to provide a comprehensive, global, up-to-date review of recent political uses of social media.

Drawing together empirical analyses of the use of social media by political movements and in national and regional elections and referenda, The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics presents studies ranging from Anonymous and the Arab Spring to the Greek Aganaktismenoi, and from South Korean presidential elections to the Scottish independence referendum. The book is framed by a selection of keystone theoretical contributions, evaluating and updating existing frameworks for the social media age.

Part I THEORIES OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND POLITICS

1 POLITICS IN THE AGE OF HYBRID MEDIA Power, Systems, and Media Logics

DOI: 10.4324/9781315716299-1

Andrew Chadwick, James Dennis and Amy P. Smith

In a mass, (1) far fewer people express opinions than receive them; for the community of publics becomes an abstract collection of individuals who receive impressions from the mass media. (2) The communications that prevail are so organized that it is difficult or impossible for the individual to answer back immediately or with any effect. (3) The realization of opinion in action is controlled by authorities who organize and control the channels of such action. (4) The mass has no autonomy from institutions; on the contrary, agents of authorized institutions penetrate this mass, reducing any autonomy it may have in the formation of opinion by discussion.

(C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956: pp. 303–4, quoted, approvingly, in the closing pages of Jürgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1962, transl. 1989: p. 249)

Our opening quotation records a happy meeting of minds, just as the broadcast media era was getting into full flow, of two of the most influential social scientists of the last hundred years: C. Wright Mills and Jürgen Habermas. But this quotation inevitably begs a huge question that has been at the heart of the research on media and politics for two decades: to what extent is it an adequate account of how things work in the early 21st century? Political communication is journeying through a chaotic transition period induced by the rise of digital media. But how do we explain how power works amid the chaos? To what extent can the Western media systems of the present post-broadcast era be characterised as more inclusive and democratic than those so acutely analysed by Habermas and Mills?

Consider the following:

• Denver, Colorado, July 2008: Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in front of 80,000 supporters at the Democratic National Convention at Denver Football Stadium is an event that symbolises the integration of television, physical space, and digital media—to spectacular effect.
• London, October 2011: British data from reputable polling organisation YouGov shows that some 55 per cent of the British public under the age of 55 years old use social media to engage in real-time commentary about television shows as they watch.
• Boston, April 2013: the confluence of television and social media shapes the reporting of the Boston bombings, as CNN television news reporters routinely check their Twitter feeds for leads, even while reporting on camera to their television audience.
• And, in necessarily undisclosed locations, June 2013: The Guardian conducts a live Web chat with fugitive U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, as the 192-year-old news organisation flexes its professional investigative muscle while simultaneously engaging with online social media networks to give the NSA story powerful impact.

The argument of this chapter is that these and many other similar phenomena are episodes in the ongoing construction of a hybrid media system. We discuss how the hybrid media system approach sheds light on recent developments in three centrally important fields of political communication: news and journalism, election campaigning, and engagement and mobilisation. We briefly set out some key themes and empirical developments in these three areas. We then review a range of examples from the emerging body of research that draws upon the hybrid media system approach to make sense of today’s increasingly dynamic and volatile political communication environment.

The Hybrid Media System Approach: Power, Systems, and Media Logics

As Carolyn Marvin (1988) has argued, ‘old’ and ‘new’ are relative terms. We can reinforce that point by using the terms ‘older’ and ‘newer’ media. This chapter argues that that there is a need to integrate the study of older and newer media in politics, and to develop holistic approaches that help us map where the distinctions between older and newer matter, and where those distinctions are dissolving. There is also a need to examine renewed media—older media that adapt and integrate the logics of newer media. This requires a systemic perspective, but one rooted in specific illustrations of forces in flow, and not abstract structural prejudgments and statistical snapshots. The key here is a conceptual understanding of power, but one that can be illustrated empirically.

The hybrid media system is built upon interactions among older and newer media logics—where logics are defined as bundles of technologies, genres, norms, behaviours, and organisational forms—in the reflexively connected social fields of media and politics. Actors in this system are articulated by complex and ever-evolving relationships based upon adaptation and interdependence and concentrations and diffusions of power. Actors create, tap, or steer information flows in ways that suit their goals and in ways that modify, enable, or disable others’ agency, across and between a range of older and newer media settings (Chadwick 2013: 4).

We can study this systemic hybridity in flow—in information consumption and production patterns, in news making, in parties and election campaigns, in activism, and in government communication. A mix of methods can be used: conceptual work, historical analysis, documentary analysis, real-time ‘live’ online research, and insider ethnography.

The foundation of the approach is an ontology of hybridity. Across the social sciences, hybridity has long been an organising principle for a wide range of research: in political science (hybrid regimes), communication, cultural, and media studies (hybrid cultures and genres), organisation studies (hybrid organisational norms and structures), and science and technology studies (actor-network theory’s hybrid networks of human and technological agents, or ‘actants’, as Bruno Latour, 2005, calls them). Understandably, scholarly research on media technologies has typically paid much attention to newness, even though newer media always exhibit substantial continuities with older media. Hybrid thinking rejects simple dichotomies, nudging us away from ‘either/or’ patterns of thought and toward ‘not only, but also’ patterns of thought. It emphasises how older media logics are renewed and ultimately evolve as they interact with newer media logics. It offers a powerful way of thinking about politics and society because it foregrounds complexity, interdependence, and transition. It draws attention to boundaries, to flux, to ‘in-betweenness’, and it concerns how practices intermesh and coevolve. This basic ontology informs three further theoretical pillars of the hybrid media system approach. First, power. Second, the idea of a system. And third, media logics.

The concepts of power and system have both been absolutely central to the social sciences, and it would take multiple volumes to even rehearse the debates, let alone critically interrogate them. But in basic terms, understanding power involves examining the relations between social actors. Less obviously, we also need to examine the relations between social actors and media technologies. By exploring exchanges among social actors, and how media are used in and come to shape those exchanges, we can get inside power relationships, empirically.

We can take this a stage further and say that these many and diverse interactions aggregate to constitute systems. Systems are often flexible and adaptable. They may exhibit hierarchy, fixity, and asymmetrical power relations, but they may also exhibit horizontality, fluidity, and symmetrical power relations. Following Brian McNair’ (2006) recent work on media and cultural chaos, we can assume that systems have varying degrees of complexity, instability, and messiness. Systems often undergo long and chaotic periods of change.

A further point about systems is that they are based on competition and conflict, but there is also a great deal of interdependence among actors (Easton 1965; Keohane and Nye 1989). Even the most powerful must cooperate with those who are less powerful, in the pursuit of collective goals. And, as the pluralist tradition in political science has established, those who are powerful in one field may not be powerful across all fields (Dahl 1961). These aspects of systems sometimes give those who appear to have few obvious resources the power to act in ways that force adaptation among those who might have looked like they had greater resources before specific social interactions began. So, building upon what Manuel Castells’ (2007, 2009) work has recently reminded us, power is relational and becomes a matter for detailed empirical investigation.

Systems are also based on divisions of labour that emerge among actors in the pursuit of goals, especially in important large-scale societal projects, like politics and media, because these projects cannot be undertaken without some embedded, regularised structures for managing cooperation over time (Grewal 2008). These structures might be formal bureaucratic organisations but increasingly they are not (Bennett and Segerberg 2013). Because digital media are both forms of communication and organisation, today the structures for cooperation in civic life may be relatively loose, ad hoc, and spontaneous; they are continually adapted according to the goals being pursued. In this sense, they may be understood as assemblages.

Assemblage theory, which originates in the social theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004), suggests that there are permeable boundaries between different modular units of a collective endeavour, and the meaning and force of any individual modular unit—whether it is a person, a group, a technology, a frame, even a building, and so on—can only be understood in terms of its interactive and interdependent relations with other modular units. The hybrid media system approach shows, for example, that political news making is now carried out in such assemblages, as digital technologies enable individuals and collectivities to plug themselves into the news making process, often in real time, and strategically, across and between older and newer media settings (Chadwick 2011a, 2011b).

Two final points about power and systems. First: the importance of time. Embedding norms through acting with regularity are important parts of exercising power in a system. But so, too, is acting with timeliness, which is something different. The mastery of temporal rhythms is an important but surprisingly underresearched force in political communication. Yet, the ability to create and act on information in a timely manner, especially in real time, is key to exercising power. Political and media actors try to master time: they often shock and surprise to get ahead of the game, or they deliberately delay, or drag information from the archives and give it new life. The important point is that this temporal power is now enabled and constrained in different ways by different media, as digital and broadcast media increasingly interact. The second point about power and systems concerns how systems must be enacted and continuously re-enacted, often with incremental changes, by social actors. And this process of enactment and re-enactment is also how power is exercised, as actors come to shape the very systemic conditions under which they may then exercise power over others.

Identifying how older and newer media shape politics also requires that we think about how media interact with the political field. A useful concept here is ‘media logic’. First introduced in the late 1970s by sociologists David Altheide and Robert Snow (1979), this approach showed how the norms and practices of mass media have come to penetrate other areas of life. As Altheide and Snow memorably put it: “today all social institutions are media institutions” (1991: ix). More recently, Peter Dahlgren has provided a helpful definition of media logic as “the imperatives that shape the particular attributes and ways of doing things within given media . .. the procedures of selection, form, tempo, informational density, aesthetics, contents, modes of address, and production schedules” (Dahlgren 2009: 52).

The media logic approach suggests that we try to understand the norms that emerge in the daily practice of those in the fields of media and politics—the ongoing decisions about ‘what goes where’. So it opens up useful avenues for in-depth qualitative work. However, the media logic approach also has some limitations. It was first developed in the era of mass communication, when mass broadcast media were more obviously dominant than they are today. It also assigned great power to formal media organisations and a singular media logic that was said to pervade social life. Today, the media environment is more polycentric. This calls for a more expansive idea of hybrid media logics, in the plural. With this, we can focus on how the norms that determine the character of mediation evolve across and between different media. The hybrid media system constantly requires judgements from actors about which medium or combination of media is most appropriate for shaping a political event or process. Over the last two decades, disruptive media logics have emerged from online networks, and these have created rival sources o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Theories of Social Media and Politics
• PART II Political Movements
• PART III Political Campaigns
• Index