Donald Trump, the Arab Spring, Brexit: digital media have provided political actors and citizens with new tools to engage in politics. These tools are now routinely used by activists, candidates, non-governmental organizations, and parties to inform, mobilize, and persuade people. But what are the effects of this retooling of politics? Do digital media empower the powerless or are they breaking democracy? Have these new tools and practices fundamentally changed politics or is their impact just a matter of degree? This clear-eyed guide steps back from hyperbolic hopes and fears to offer a balanced account of what aspects of politics are being shaped by digital media and what remains unchanged. The authors discuss data-driven politics, the flow and reach of political information, the effects of communication interventions through digital tools, their use by citizens in coordinating political action, and what their impact is on political organizations and on democracy at large.

Provides academics, journalists, and general readers with bird's-eye view of data-driven practices and their impact in politics and media.

A humanistic account of the changing role of technology in society, by a historian and a former Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education at MIT. When Warren Kendall Lewis left Spring Garden Farm in Delaware in 1901 to enter MIT, he had no idea that he was becoming part of a profession that would bring untold good to his country but would also contribute to the death of his family's farm. In this book written a century later, Professor Lewis's granddaughter, a cultural historian who has served in the administration of MIT, uses her grandfather's and her own experience to make sense of the rapidly changing role of technology in contemporary life. Rosalind Williams served as Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education at MIT from 1995 through 2000. From this vantage point, she watched a wave of changes, some planned and some unexpected, transform many aspects of social and working life—from how students are taught to how research and accounting are done—at this major site of technological innovation. In Retooling, she uses this local knowledge to draw more general insights into contemporary society's obsession with technology. Today technology-driven change defines human desires, anxieties, memories, imagination, and experiences of time and space in unprecedented ways. But technology, and specifically information technology, does not simply influence culture and society; it is itself inherently cultural and social. If there is to be any reconciliation between technological change and community, Williams argues, it will come from connecting technological and social innovation—a connection demonstrated in the history that unfolds in this absorbing book.

British Politics provides a cutting-edge, analytical introduction to the subject, encouraging students to think about methods and theory, whilst building a fundamental understanding of the current debates shaping British politics and public policy.

Political communication has fundamentally transformed as digital technologies have become increasingly important in everyday life. Technology platforms have become powerful political instruments for world leaders, campaigns, social movements, journalists, and non-governmental organizations. Moreover, they are essential to how people communicate about politics, encounter and share political information, and take action to pursue their political goals. This is the first textbook to center digital platforms in understanding political communication. With global examples beyond the context of Western democracies, the text reveals how digital technologies such as social media and search engines are increasingly shaping political communication in countries around the world. It shows how the core processes of political communication are being reshaped by platforms, from how elections are contested to how issues make it onto policymaking agendas. Topics covered include public opinion, journalism, strategic communication, political parties, social movements, governance, disinformation, propaganda, populism, race, ethnicity, and democratic backsliding. Full of lively examples and pedagogical features, Platforms, Power, and Politics offers an exciting and innovative new approach to political communication. It is essential reading for students of political communication and an important resource for scholars, journalists, and policymakers.

The Elgar Encyclopedia of Technology and Politics is a landmark resource that offers a comprehensive overview of the ways in which technological development is reshaping politics. Providing an unparalleled starting point for research, it addresses all the major contemporary aspects of the field, comprising entries written by over 90 scholars from 33 different countries on 5 continents.

This element shows, based on a review of the literature, how digital technology has affected liberal democracies with a focus on three key aspects of democratic politics: political communication, political participation, and policy-making. The impact of digital technology permeates the entire political process, affecting the flow of information among citizen and political actors, the connection between the mass public and political elites, and the development of policy responses to societal problems. This element discusses how digital technology has shaped these different domains, identifies areas of research consensus as well as unresolved questions, and argues that a key perspective involves issue definition, that is, how the nature of the problems raised by digital technology is subject to political contestation.

Based on an extended empirical research project, this book advances the theoretical, normative and practical understanding of civil society under the conditions of digital mediatization and in relation to a set of particular historical and geopolitical circumstances. Digital Media and the Dynamics of Civil Society adds to existing knowledge of the democratizing role of digital media in communication studies by carefully tracing the trajectory of the emergent communicative and representational practices of civil society in a pair of new European democracies – Estonia and Bulgaria – facing distinctive socio-cultural and political challenges. The book combines macro and micro perspectives to illuminate the activities of civic activist and civil society organizations in the new media environment taking into account the social and cultural developments characteristic of each country. Have digital media contributed to the constitution of a new public space fostering the vitality and democratic potency of civil society in countries where it has suffered historical obstacles? The book addresses this question by traversing the whole range between personal, group and societal beliefs, lived experiences and actions unfolding in a concrete region at a time when civic activists around the world are grappling to understand and harness the powers of digital communication.

Challenging the often-hyperbolic claims that have been made around the use of data in election campaigns for voter manipulation and suppression, this book provides unrivalled evidence of how parties actually behave. It shows that data-driven campaigning practice is not inherently problematic or new, but neither is it uniform, rather systemic, regulatory and party level factors affecting the nature of campaigning. Providing detailed empirical examples from Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK and US, this book shows how parties campaign and explains why parties differ, thereby resetting prevailing understanding of the role of data in campaigns.

Big data and microtargeting steal the headlines about campaigning. But how important are they really to the way that political parties campaign? This book provides a fine-grained account of the campaign practices of three Australian political parties. It explores how prevalent data-driven campaigning is, introduces an original theoretical framework to understand these practices, and demonstrates that there is a disconnect between what Australian voters think about these issues and the way that parties campaign in the 21st century. Drawing on 161 interviews, participant observation and original survey data, it shows that the reality of contemporary campaigning is often different to what we are led to believe.