Social Media and Democracy

Brian D. Loader, Dan Mercea, Brian D. Loader, Dan Mercea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136459702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book critically investigates the complex interaction between social media and contemporary democratic politics, and provides a grounded analysis of the emerging importance of Social media in civic engagement.

Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, have increasingly been adopted by politicians, political activists and social movements as a means to engage, organize and communicate with citizens worldwide. Drawing on Obama's Presidential campaign, opposition and protests in the Arab states, and the mobilization of support for campaigns against tuition fee increases and the UK Uncut demonstrations, this book presents evidence-based research and analysis. Renowned international scholars examine the salience of the network as a metaphor for understanding our social world, but also the centrality of the Internet in civic and political networks. Whilst acknowledging the power of social media, the contributors question the claim it is a utopian tool of democracy, and suggests a cautious approach to facilitate more participative democracy is necessary.

Providing the most up-to-date analysis of social media, citizenship and democracy, Social Media and Democracy will be of strong interest to students and scholars of Political Science, Social Policy, Sociology, Communication Studies, Computing and Information and Communications Technologies.

1 Networking Democracy?

Social Media Innovations in Participatory Politics

Brian D. Loader and Dan Mercea

Introduction

The first wave of enthusiasm for Internet-based visions of digital democracy were largely predicated upon the desire to produce virtual public spheres (Loader 1997; Tsagarousianou et al. 1998; Blumler and Gurevitch 2001). Democratic governance, it was contended, could be significantly improved through the open and equal deliberation between citizens, representatives and policy-makers afforded by the new information and communications technologies. For cyberlibertarians this could even be achieved without the need for governments (Barlow 1996). For left-of-centre progressives it could enable stronger participatory democracy through the emergence of online agoras and Habermasian forums (Habermas 1962/1989; Hague and Loader 1999). The history of science and technology provides many instances of the fanfare of transformative rhetoric which accompanies the emergence of ‘new’ innovations which are then often followed by disappointment and more measured appraisal (Bijker et al. 1987). So perhaps it should have been little surprise that the utopian perspectives of the first generation of digital democracy were quickly replaced by findings that documented the myopia of such visions (Hill and Hughes 1998; Wilhelm 2000). Instead of transforming representative democracy the new media, as Hill and Hughes suggested, was more likely to be shaped by the existing entrenched social and economic interests of contemporary societies (ibid., p. 182). By the turn of the millennium a more accurate picture of the influence of the Internet upon democratic governance was emerging as the technologies were understood as part of the mundane activities of ‘everyday life’ (Wellman and Haythornthwaite 2002). Here was to be found the factionalism, prejudice and abuse which have all too often mired the aspirations of deliberative decision-making (Doctor and Dutton 1998). But perhaps more significantly, the very idea of a virtual Habermasian public sphere was subjected to extensive critiques from cultural studies scholars (McKee 2005) and feminist theorists (van Zoonen 2005). They have revealed how such models of deliberative democracy frequently privilege a particular style of ‘rational’ communication that largely favours white wealthy males to the exclusion of other identities (Pateman 1989; Fraser 1990).

Despite these setbacks to digital democracy, a fresh wave of technological optimism has more recently accompanied the advent of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, wikis and the blogosphere. The distinctiveness of this second generation of Internet democracy is the displacement of the public sphere model with that of a networked citizen-centred perspective providing opportunities to connect the private sphere of autonomous political identity to a multitude of chosen political spaces (Papacharissi 2010). It thus represents a significant departure from the earlier restricted and constrained formulations of rational deliberation with its concomitant requirement for dutiful citizens. In its place is a focus upon the role of the citizen-user as the driver of democratic innovation through the self-actualised networking of citizens engaged in lifestyle and identity politics (Bennett 2003a; Dahlgren 2009; Papacharissi 2010).

What then are we to make of these latest claims for digital democracy arising from the second generation of social media applications? Are they best interpreted as a further commercial incarnation of Internet mythology-making (Mosco 2005) destined to become absorbed through ubiquitous everyday incorporation? Or do they offer new opportunities for challenging dominant discourses and privileged positions of power? Is there evidence for the emergence of a more personalised politics being played out through social networks?

This edited collection is intended to provide an opportunity for a more grounded appraisal of the potential of social media for second-wave digital democracy. The chapters have all been selected for their critical insights and articulations with contemporary debates about citizenship and democratic culture(s). Our objective in this introductory chapter is to provide a wider context to these analyses by outlining some of the existing claims made for the democratic potential of social media and laying out a number of issues and questions informing our own thinking on the subject. In sum, it is our contention that with the more widespread use of social media and Internet technologies and their absorption into the mundane practices of lived experience their potential to shape social relations of power becomes all the greater. Yet such influence is likely to be in ways that are indeterminate and contingent upon a multitude of clashes between social agents, groups and institutions who have competing conceptions of networking democracy. Such contests are becoming very familiar such as, for example, the use of social media platforms for disclosing government secrets through Wikileaks (Leigh and Harding 2011), organising student protests in the UK, mobilizing opposition in Egypt, orchestrating election campaigns, challenging privacy laws through Twitter, lampooning politicians on YouTube and other manifestations. Such disruptive activity can play an important role in democratic politics but what is less clear is how social media is shaped by and in turn influences social relations of power.

Social Media Democracy

Much of the hyperbolic rhetoric heralding the catalytic prophesies of social media arise from its marketing origins (O’Reilly 2005). Yet this should not obscure the enthusiastic assertions made by a number of prominent commentators (Benkler 2006; Jenkins 2006; Leadbeater 2008) that this latest generation of communications technologies has inherent democratic capacities. These writers share a common view that, in contrast to traditional mass media, networked media has the potential to reconfigure communicative power relations. By making use of ever easier social networking and ‘user-centred innovation’ (von Hippel 2005) citizens are able to challenge the monopoly control of media production and dissemination by state and commercial institutions. Freed from the necessities of professional media and journalist skills or the centralised control and distribution of industrial mass media organisations, social media is instead seen to be technologically, financially and (generally) legally accessible to most citizens living in advanced societies. Equipped with social media, the citizen no longer has to be a passive consumer of political party propaganda, government spin or mass media news, but is instead actually enabled to challenge discourses, share alternative perspectives and publish their own opinions.

The openness of social media platforms facilitates the potential of what Charles Leadbeater (2008) calls the ‘mass-collaboration’ of individuals and groups who become the source of new innovations and ideas in democratic practices. This view has an affinity with the work of scholars in the field of science and technology studies (STS) who have long argued for recognising the central role played by ‘social groups’ in shaping the design and diffusion of new technologies (Winner 1986). The fluid and contingent nature of technological innovation has been further exposed through the insights of feminist, actor network and domestication approaches which have all in their respective ways emphasised the importance of the ‘user’ in the co-construction of technologies (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2005). Through such perspectives, the flexible and contested development and experimentation with social media technologies can itself be seen as a democratic opportunity. But they also crucially dispel the deterministic idea that social media are themselves inherently democratic and that politics is dead. The acquisition of an iPhone or access to a social networking site does not in itself determine the engagement of citizens. As the first generation of digital democracy experiments demonstrated, the use of new media for deliberation was strongly influenced by a complex range of socio-cultural factors. In all likelihood, virtual public spheres and civic commons (Coleman and Blumler 2009) met with limited success not because of the deficiencies of the technologies but rather because the Habermasian model was incongruent with the contemporary political and social culture of many societies. In evaluating the democratic influence of social media then, a more fruitful approach may be to adopt the co-construction model with its more open, interpretive and contingent explanatory power, one that also recognises the influence of social diversity, inequality and cultural difference as important sources of power influencing democratic innovation.

User-Generated Democracy?

A number of early indications suggest that we should be cautious in proclaiming the democratic potential of social media for significantly challenging the existing commercial and political dominance of many social groups. In the first place, if we consider social networks, in contrast to an even distribution of links representing a wide diversity of interests, we find instead that individual preferences reveal an unequal spread of social ties with a few giant nodes such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and YouTube attracting the majority of users (Barabasi 2011). Such concentrations of hyperlinks to a few dominating spaces could be seen to grant a disproportionate authoritative influence over information sources for users. The potential for competition between political discourses may be restricted, for example, by such mechanisms as search engine ranking algorithms which privilege access to information (Halavias 2009). Richard Rogers, in his work with the Issue Crawler, has suggested that the strength of social ties and the density of their clusters can provide a visualisation of information politics as relational sources of power (2004). Whilst such analyses do not preclude the influence of citizen-users, we need more detailed and nuanced examinations of the actual use of social media before we can assess its democratic affordances.

What evidence we do have about social media platforms suggests that the most active political users are social movement activists, politicians, party workers and those who are already fully committed to political causes. Adopting the commercial model of social media as a means to target consumers, these users are attracted by its perceived cost-effective scalability to spread their ideas and attract recruits. Even the potential of citizen journalism appears to be restricted by the domination of a limited number of political bloggers (Rettberg 2008). Instead of facilitating an increasing host of active citizen-users, social media perhaps more typically facilitates online shopping, gossip and file-sharing between friends already known to each other.

Whilst clearly a cause for concern for those optimists wishing that more of their fellow citizens would join them in political discussions online, should we conclude that the everyday use of social media has limited potential for democratic innovation? In part the answer to the question depends upon what we regard as democratic activity. If we move beyond the traditional engagement with mainstream politics, such as voting, party membership, petitioning representatives and the like, and adopt a more fluid conception of democratic citizenship, a different focus and set of questions emerge that are more attuned to the potential changing perceptions of citizens who are less inclined to be dutiful and are open instead to a more personalised and self-actualising notion of citizenship. This is an approach which does not valorise the more rigid one-dimensional political identities of previous times but instead recognises the multiplicity of identity positions which citizens are required to grapple with in contemporary societies, where the spheres for democratic engagement reach into the private spaces to enable the personal to become political (Squires 1998). In this framework it may be possible to interpret the democratic potential of social media in a new light.

Papacharissi (2010), for example, points to how citizen-users can participate in campaigns whilst simultaneously enjoying television and/or chatting with family in the privacy of their own homes. More-over, the very malleability of social media offers the prospect of innovative modes of political communication that may go beyond the constrictions of rational deliberative exchanges. It might facilitate Iris Young’s exhortation that testimony, story-telling, greetings and rhetoric can all be employed as discursive forms of democratic engagement capable of enabling a more inclusive democracy (2000). Thus, we could look for the kinds of political self-expression more widely experienced and performed through a variety of text, visual, audio and graphic communication forms. The playful repertoires of innovative YouTube videos, mobile texting language, protest music and the celebration of trivia may all be regarded as aspects of the political.

Those sceptical of such broad definitions of politics are likely to reject the democratic potential of social media and instead point to its capacity to undermine serious rational deliberation. They will cite its use for negative campaigning and encouraging populist rhetoric and even extremism; a further means to sensationalise the public sphere and foster celebrity politics. More-over, the very ‘networked individualism’ (Wellman et al. 2003) which characterises social media can be regarded as further evidence of the social fragmentation which is seen as corroding collective action and social responsibility (Putnam 2000).

To date perhaps the most obvious impact of social media upon democratic politics has been its disruptive capacity for traditional political practices and institutions. Distinctions have become blurred, for example, with mainstream news media increasingly reliant upon political blogs and citizen-user content, while the potential power of collaborative sharing has been demonstrated by the Wikileaks disclosure of US government foreign policy statements online. Different in style from earlier forms of civic participation, such disruption is effected by enabling citizens to critically monitor the actions of governments and corporate interests. It could potentially enable political lifestyle choices to be informed through shared recommendations from friends, networked discussions and tweets, and direct interaction with conventional and unconventional political organisations. What the more lasting effects of these disruptions might be remains to be seen and we have yet to know what the response will be from governments, corporations or judiciaries to such user-generated challenges.

Grounding the Analysis

The foregoing debates and issues provide the context to the contributions that follow. They represent an attempt to investigate in detail how these competing claims may be playing out in concrete situations. In the opening chapter, Bennett and Segerberg propose that, in a political environment increasingly marked by the individualisation of choice (Giddens 1991; Bauman 2000), a dissipation of established solidarities and an entrepreneurial mode of engagement (Flanagin et al. 2006), collective action is growing new roots. At the heart of such renewal lie the social media of personalized, network-based communication (Hogan and Quan-Hasse 2010). Bennett and Segerberg’s comparative analysis examined two contrasting protest networks that took shape in the run up to the 2009 G20 meeting in London. ‘Put People First’ was both ideologically and organisationally the more loosely articulated of the networks. By contrast, the ‘G20 Meltdown’ coalition united an ideologically consistent radical front of anti-capitalist and environmental organisations. Their deployment of social media stood in stark contrast. ‘Put People First’ placed an emphasis on the personalisation of both participation and collective goals. Its mobilisation strategy foregrounded the empowerment of prospective participants by harnessing the collaborative capacity of social media. ‘Put People First’ was able to both maintain its political focus and attain a level of cohesion that rivalled that of the more homogenous activist coalition. The latter, however, was not equally competent in its use of social media, relying on them principally for the distribution of calls for action. Most importantly, Bennett and Segerberg make a persuasive case that social media may contribute to the reconciliation of the competing pressures of achieving both personalisation and solidarity in collective action.

The inquiry into the G20 protests raised other crucial questions which cross over into deliberations of the relationship between social movements and media organisations as well as the power held by the media to represent a movement’s public agenda. The allowances ‘Put People First’ made for personalised communication did not seem to dilute its core message nor hinder the dissemination of its appeals in the mass media. Their example may lend empirical support to the claim made in Chapter 3 by Donatella della Porta that social movements are beginning to stand on a more equal footing with media organisations in their capacity to depict their actions in their own desired light. This may be a recurring assertion made in relation to social movements’ use of the Internet (Atton 2004; Castells 2007). However, della Porta locates its wider significance within the context of the power differential in the relations between social movements and more resourceful social actors such as the media or the state. Her theoretical exposition is an invitation to place social movements at the heart of the power dynamic which keeps democracy in an organic state of perpetual transformation. In this way, one is reminded that democratic institutions act not only as structural conditions for social movements. On the contrary, social movements have the agency to place democratic institutions at the centre of a normative debate which they can engender through networked communication. By so doing, social movements come to actively shape the structural conditions in which they operate, previously defined exclusively by the more powerful social actors.

Yet the media remain the main stage where public discourse is formed and, as Castells (2007, p. 241) contends, ‘what does not exist in the media does not exist in the public mind’. In Chapter 4, Joanna Redden brings empirical evidence to bear on this assertion in her consideration of media representations of poverty in Canada and the UK. People’s shared depictions of poverty are drawn from the media (Park et al. 2007). The media in the two countries, Redden argues, are systematically constructing representations of poverty which legitimate market-type evaluations of public policy interventions. Highlighting individual responsibility for material disadvantage and reifying statistical calculations which evidence public spending on poverty seem to leave little space for a reasoned assessment of its structural causes. Alternative discourses may, nonetheless, be bubbling up online where poverty activists are organising their contestation of the mainstream coverage of poverty. However, Redden reminds us that established media outlets have a much more prominent presence online. Activists are, therefore, faced with the uphill struggle to reset the debate and bring new democratic scrutiny over institutional responses to poverty. Ultimately, the networked communication that comprises tools for both interaction and dissemination may gradually enable resource-poor political actors not only to gain a foothold in the public realm but also perhaps to have a larger imprint on democratic politics.

In Chapter 5, Cristian Vaccari discusses the possibility that counter to entrenched notions of media organisations acting as the watchdog of democratic politics (Curran 1991), traditional media organisations may begin to deploy an arsenal of digital media to promote their own political agenda. In that way, media organisations may enter the political fray, mobilise their own support base and vie for political influence side by side with political parties and interest groups. Conceptualised as ‘political parallelism’...