Political Action in the Network society – readings summary
Table of contents
Week 1: The Network Society: How do digital media connect to politics in the age of the
Network Society?........................................................................................................................2
Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. (2014). Networked: The New Social Operation System. Chapter
2: The Social Network Revolution. (pp. 21-59)......................................................................2
Castells, M. (2007). Communication, Power, and Counter-power in the Network Society.
International Journal of Communication, 1, 238-266. Available at:
https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/46/35.............................................................8
Week 2: Echo chambers, filter bubbles and political polarisation............................................13
Esteve Del Valle, M., & Borge Bravo, R. (2018). Echo Chambers in Parliamentary Twitter
Networks: The Catalan Case. International Journal of Communication, 12, 1715 – 1735...13
Dubois, E., & Grant, G.(2018). The Echo Chambers is Overstated: The Moderating Effect
of Political Interest and Diverse Media. Information, Commiunication & Society, 21 (5),
729-745..................................................................................................................................16
Zhu, Q., Skoric, M., & Shen, F. (2017). I shield myself from thee: selective avoidance on
social media during political protests. Political Communication, 34(1), 112–131. .............18
Morozov, E. (2011). The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hidding from You (Book
Review). Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/books/review/book-review-
the-filter-bubble-by-eli-pariser.html......................................................................................22
Week 3: cyber politics...............................................................................................................23
Gerbaudo, P. (2019). The Digital Party. Introduction (pp. 1-19), London: Pluto Press.......23
Bimber, B. (2014). Digital Media in the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012: Adaptation to
the personalized political communication environment [Special issue], Journal of
Information Technology & Politics, 11 (2), 130-150............................................................25
Kreiss, D., Lawrence R.G. and McGregor S.C (2018) In their own words: political
practitioner accounts of candidates, audiences, affordances, genres, and timing in strategic
social media use, Political Communication 35(1), pp. 8-31,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10584609.2017.1334727............................31
Week 4: Digitization, networks and their impact on journalism..............................................35
Witschge, T., Anderson, C.W., Domingo, D. & Hermida, Al. (2016). The SAGE Handbook
of Digital Journalism. Chapter 6 (by Hermida, Al.): Social media and the news.................35
Broersma, M., & Graham, T. (2015). Tipping the Balance of Power: Social Media and the
Transformation of Political Journalism. In A. Bruns, E. Skogerbø, C. Christensen, A. O.
Larsson, & G. Enli (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (pp. 89-
103). Routledge.....................................................................................................................39
Week 5: Social movements and networked action...................................................................42
, Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action: digital media and
the personalization of contentious politics. Information Communication and Society, 15(5),
739–768. ...............................................................................................................................42
Flanagin, A., Stohl, C. & Bimber, B. (2012), ‘s, Communication Monographs 73 (1), pp.
29-54......................................................................................................................................47
Gerbaudo, P. (2010). Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism.
London: Pluto Press. Introduction. Available at:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt183pdzs.4?refreqid=excelsior
%3Ada2341a9a40e994199196c476fffe94f&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents...............53
Week 6: Information disorder in the network society...............................................................56
Tandoc, E.C. Jr., Wei Lim, Z., & Ling, R. (2018) Defining “Fake News”, Digital
Journalism, 6 (2), 137-153....................................................................................................56
Beckett, C. (2017). ‘Fake news’: the best thing that happened to journalism, LSE blogs,
Available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/76568/1/blogs.lse.ac.uk-Fake%20news%20the%20best
%20thing%20thats%20happened%20to%20journalism.pdf.................................................60
Wardle, C., The Age of Information Disorder
https://datajournalism.com/read/handbook/verification-3/investigating-disinformation-and-
media-manipulation/the-age-of-information-disorder...........................................................62
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,Week 1: The Network Society: How do digital media connect to politics in
the age of the Network Society?
Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. (2014). Networked: The New Social Operation System.
Chapter 2: The Social Network Revolution. (pp. 21-59).
The Social Network Revolution came first: it is not a shift in technology, but a shift in how
people relate to each other.
A social network is a set of relations among network members (people, organizations, or
nations).
everyone is embedded in structures of relationships that provide opportunities,
constraints, coalitions, and work-arounds.
it is made out of a tangle of networked individuals who. operate in specialized,
fragmented, sparsely interconnected, and permeable networks
New technologies and major social changes: people today are less bound to their national
allegiance, village, and neighborhood. Flexible, maneuverable connectivity has increased,
group boundaries have weakened, and information has become more directly available
They have created technological, social, and economic circumstances that helped
make the network operating system possible.
9 key changes that have facilitated the change to networked individualism:
Widespread connectivity
1. Automobile and airplane trips have made travel wider-ranging and broadly
affordable, helping spread social networks worldwide
2. The rapid growth of affordable telecommunications and computing has made
communicating and gaining information more powerful and more personal
o The combination of proliferating computer-supported information and
communication technologies (ICTs) with easier air and car travel shifted cities into
functioning more as hubs of social networks and less as heaps of people and
industries.
3. The general outbreak of peace and the spread of trade have driven commercial
and social interconnectedness.
o Less interstate conflicts, high levels of globalized production and consumption,
higher import rates
Weaker group boundaries
4. Family composition, roles, and responsibilities have transformed households
from groups to networks.
o Fewer marriages, smaller families, women doing paid work
5. Structured and bounded voluntary organizations are becoming supplanted by
more ad hoc, open, and informal networks of civic involvement and religious
practice.
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, o Trends towards individualization: lower membership rate in American
organizations, shift away from instutionalized and religious institutions
6. Common culture passed along through a small number of mass media firms has
shifted to fragmented culture dispensed through more channels to more
hardware
o Changes in hardware both reflected and encouraged the person-alization of
broadcast information.
Increased personal autonomy
7. Work has become flexible in the developed world, especially the shift from
pushing atoms in manufacturing to pushing bits in white-collar “ creative ” work.
o Increased use of personal computers, allows flexible schedules and work sites.
o Decline of working-class jobs and the rise of creative jobs have changed the face of
many workplaces from industrial-age hierarchies to networks of collaboration
8. American society has become less bounded by ethnicity, gender, religion, and
sexual orientation
o But still polarization and not complete acceptance
9. The decline of defined benefit pensions and the rise of independent retirement
accounts.
o American society is shifting away from an institutionalized employee welfare
system to one where people must play a more active role managing their
personal wealth, work lives, and retirement
More personalization, weakening of traditional boundaries, more mobilization,
flexibility
Towards networked individualism.
People think they are in groups but they are in networks
Was missed because people were observed to be either in groups of as individuals
A group is often a stereotype — a shortcut for how we think about our relationships
because:
1. groups are governed by a culture of generalized exchange where favors given to one
person are not repaid directly by that person, but by other group members
2. prominent people may emphasize “groupiness” to bolster their power and compliance
to group norms in what sociologist Émile Durkheim called “ mechanical solidarity”.
3. it is comforting for people who crave stability to think of them-selves as belonging to
a small set of groups rather than as maneuvering through murky, shifting sets of
relationships at home, work, and in the community.
People live in fluid and changing networks that go well beyond groups and Facebook.
In networked societies, boundaries are more permeable, interactions are with diverse
others, connections shift between multiple networks, and hierarchies tend to be flatter
and more recursive.
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