A New Republic of Letters?

Advances in information and communication technology seem to promise a revolution in politics. Social media appear to overcome the perceived limitations of representative democracy, allowing more direct and democratic politics less influenced by “elites.” In this chapter, the authors note the nature of this promised revolution, arguing that e-democratic politics and its hopes of democratizing political authority have in large measure not succeeded. Social media have, however, inaugurated a different form of e-politics, one that attempts to democratize knowledge or perhaps wisdom. Blogging, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter all provide new forms of communication and seem to promise a new Republic of Letters with revolutionary potential. Will the new Republic of Letters prove to be more successful than e-democracy? The chapter examines the nature of the old Republic of Letters and its fate, and in the light of that, assesses the promise of technological innovations in communication to alter the nature of modern politics.

Civic Cultures and Skills in European Digital Rights Campaigning

Technical skills are increasingly necessary to successfully intervene in policy-making, especially when dealing with technical matters such as Internet or telecommunications regulation. Skills are rooted in experience and cultural practices. Dahlgren's concept of civic cultures is used in this chapter to investigate the cultural underpinnings of the emergent European digital rights movement that has repeatedly targeted EU legislation on copyright enforcement, software patents, and the Internet. The values and identity of the movement are investigated along with the way knowledge and information are processed and trust established through repeated practices in a variety of online and offline spaces. The analysis illustrates how digitally skilled actors can substantially affect policy-making by disrupting the course of parliamentary law-making at the European level. However, technical skills need to be complemented by social and political competencies to gain access and provide convincing input to political institutions that increasingly rely on extra-institutional expertise.

Corruption in the Public Eye

What role is there for publicity in the global anti-corruption debate? This chapter introduces the concepts of “transparency” and “publicity” as analytical tools that account for differentiated channels through which the availability of information can induce social change. Two case studies provide insights into the role of traditional media in comparison to new social media. The first case analyzes the role of Western news coverage during the negotiations of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention in the mid-1990s and the threat of publicity as a negotiation strategy. The second case investigates the role of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in the success of the anti-corruption strike carried out by Indian social activist Anna Hazare in 2011. By introducing and further applying the conceptual toolkit of “transparency” and “publicity” to both cases, this chapter argues that transparency requires publicity or in the case of the OECD negotiations—the threat of publicity—in order for the anti-corruption campaign to be successful. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ramifications for transparency and publicity as tools for social change.

The Language of Threat in our Political Discourse

This chapter is a report about negotiating the boundaries of appropriate political discourse via Twitter. The instance looked at in depth is the communication about the shooting of Representative Giffords in 2011. The first month over 400,000 messages referred to Giffords and substantially more referred to the controversy about the campaign rhetoric of targets and reloading. The authors tracked the communication in 6 ongoing collections of streams of messages and 2 that resulted from the shooting and controversy. One stream was about how “terrorist” was used in characterizing the shooter. The major controversy was about the use of targeting or gun references in campaign rhetoric. Palin released a video using the phrase “blood libel” leading to opposing interpretations of the appropriate use of the term. The authors look in less depth at the controversy in early 2012 about Rush Limbaugh's characterization of a student who testified to a committee of the House of Representatives. That controversy reinforced points found in the communication about the Giffords shooting. It also reminds us that the boundaries of appropriate political rhetoric are continuously negotiated in a free speech society and that there is now a new domain for the negotiation in the new media.

Politics 2.0 with Facebook

Analyzing publicly available content on various social media sites such as YouTube and Twitter, as well as social network sites such as Facebook, has become an increasingly popular method for studying socio-political issues. Such public-contributed content, primarily available as comments, let people express their opinions and sentiments on a given topic, news story, or post, while allowing social and political scientists to extend their analysis of a political discourse to the social sphere. This new age political process, which involves political agents reaching out to their audiences through social media and common folks using social media to express their opinions and sentiments, are here referred to as “Politics 2.0.” Recognizing the importance of Facebook in studying Politics 2.0, the chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the research work in social and political science domains that use Facebook as a tool for analyzing various socio-political issues. Several popular approaches for collecting and analyzing data from Facebook are provided, and their applications to understanding public opinion and sentiment around various issues of interest are discussed. The chapter also introduces a couple of handy tools that could help the researchers and practitioners gather and analyze a large amount of Facebook data easily and effectively. The chapter concludes with a discussion on opportunities and challenges for understanding Politics 2.0 with Facebook.

Identifying Hyperlink Strategies as a Tool to Discover the Connections between Offline and Online Politics

This chapter sheds light onto theoretical and empirical debates regarding the nature hyperlink as a political tool: whether the hyperlink is part of the “offline world” or should be considered as a new and separate form of practice, mainly due to its low cost and easy construction. The chapter contributes to the present literature in two innovative ways: First, based on link analysis between 90 Websites of protest Israeli NGO, a classification of link strategies was made, and 4 different linking strategies were found: Isolation, Introversion, Neighborliness, and Generalization. Furthermore, this chapter analyzes 15 protest issues and is not focused only on a single issue network. Second, 29 in-depth interviews were conduct and enable a sketch of the “offline link analysis map” and a comparison of the online policies with the offline policies. In order to understand the choice of the organization linking strategy over the others, and the decision to which exactly other organizations/Websites link to, one must remember that the Web is only one arena where the political actors operate. Therefore, the in-depth interviews not only reveal the causes affecting the hyperlinks selection and strategy in each organization but also reveal similarities between the organizations with overlap linking strategy.

Interaction of Incivility and News Frames in the Political Blogosphere

The political blogosphere is replete with uncivil discussions and is apt to examine the influence of incivility on news frames. This chapter brings in literature from incivility and framing effects to examine the influence of incivility on news frames for several outcomes such as willingness to participate, online participation, attitude certainty, news credibility, and political trust. The chapter is an extension of the first two studies, which indicate the detrimental effects of incivility causing more attitude certainty and less political trust and open mindedness. At the same time, incivility caused more willingness to participate, online participation, and higher news credibility. However, the initial studies were unable to explain why the detrimental effects of incivility were observed. A third experiment examined the psychological mechanisms involved in these incivility effects.

Conceptualizing Network Politics following the Arab Spring

This chapter defines a new field called network politics. Network politics refers to politics and networks. These networks include the Internet, private networks, cellular networks, telephone networks, radio networks, television networks, etc. Network politics includes the applications of networks to enable one or more individuals or organizations to engage in political communication. Furthermore, network politics includes government regulation of networks. Finally, network politics includes the accompanying issues that arise when networks are used for political communication or when there is government regulation of networks. The domain of network politics includes, but is not limited to, e-politics (social networking for driving revolutions and organizing protests, online petitions, political blogs and vlogs, whistleblower Websites, online campaigning, e-participation, virtual town halls, e-voting, Internet freedom, access to information, net neutrality, etc.) and applications of other networks in politics (robocalling, text messaging, TV broadcasting, etc.). The definition of this field should significantly increase the pace of research and development in this important field.

Memory, National Identity, and Freedom of Expression in the Information Age

New Media and Information Technologies (NICTs) are increasingly becoming central in facilitating freedom of expression especially in repressive countries. In addition, the burgeoning diaspora community coupled with these NICTs have offered populations in these communities alternative public spheres where they can debate issues without government control. The chapter argues that through the Website, www.newzimbabwe.com, Zimbabweans have found for themselves a platform where they debate otherwise taboo issues that are not easily discussed in Zimbabwe: ethnicity and the heroes' acre debates. The conclusion of this the chapter is that the Internet has revolutionised the way Zimbabweans know freedom of expression.

The Potential of Political Changes in the Information Age

In non-democratic societies new media social networks have played a significant role in changing political and social positions, not necessarily through real life but, instead, through cyber life. This chapter examines how Saudi activists challenge the political authority and how Saudi citizens took advantage of publicity by demanding political change. All of this happened due to social networks and new media, which allowed citizens to mobilize information for the sake of transparency. This was a new phenomenon in Saudi Arabia. The current young generation of Saudis, who use the Internet and social networking sites, played a significant role in the public sphere by making use of the space available to them within cyberspace. This chapter discusses the potential of political information to flourish in Saudi Arabia. It examines how and why citizen activism in Saudi Arabia can be effective. The chapter also shows that social networking activities have the power to change political decisions and society.