New media and political participation: Searching for the passion in protests

Abstract

[Extract] New media practices aided through social media have made a lot of academics and theorists hot under the collar. Media and political theorists across the globe are attempting to decipher how Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have come to matter to new networks of political engagement. From Google's marketing staff to David Graeber's 99 per cent slogan that framed the Occupy movement, to protests around the world, we find that recent events have spurred the publication of a large amount of academic literature created to analyse just what has happened to society over the past few years. This essay evaluates three books to explore how new media technologies and social media practices shape political participation. The edited collection by Anduiza, Jenson and Jorba, and books by Gerbaudo and Lovink chart the use of social media in relation to wider debates on political participation, the search for new theories, and globalisation of protest movements. Each text examines whether social media can be useful in generating networks of wider political participation. What link these three texts are the dominating role of new media in the everyday, and the role of social media sites in shaping our understanding of contemporary society. Each text explores networks of protest, through the paradigm of the 2011 uprisings in North Africa, Europe, Latin America, China, the Middle East and the global Occupy movement.