Gil de Zuniga, Homero (Ed.). New Technologies and Civic Engagement: New Agendas in Communication.

Raphael, Chad

Gil de Zuniga, Homero (Ed.). New Technologies and Civic Engagement: New Agendas in Communication. New York: Routledge, 2015. Pp. vii, 240. ISBN 978-0415-71048-0 (cloth) $135; 978-0-415-71049-7 (paper) $52.95; 978-0-315-75092-7 (e-book) $37.14.

How are digital media influencing political communication and practices, indeed our very ideas of what constitute citizenship and the public today? What are the implications for enduring concerns about the viability of democracy, including citizens' capacities to care and learn about politics, unequal participation, and youth civic engagement? How should scholars research these developments and to what ends? Contributors to New Technologies and Civic Engagement help to shed light on each of these questions, albeit based almost exclusively on data from the U.S. context.

Essays in the first part of the book contribute to debates over how young people's online political practices spur us to reconceptualize citizenship today. This focus is warranted because youth are especially active experimenters with digital media, today's political socialization helps shape the future of democratic participation, and worries about youth engagement are often a proxy for concerns about all generations' involvement in politics.

Thanks to the Internet, youth are now armed with unprecedented amounts of political information and new ways to participate. Yet many young people do not regularly follow political news and lack traditional ties to organizations (such as parties, unions, ethnic organizations, and churches) that once ushered neophytes into political action. Most political candidates devote little or no attention to targeting youth supporters. As a result, the millennial or DotNet generation is often seen as rejecting norms of citizenship based on duty to others and the state in favor of a more individualized vision, in which politics is a smorgasbord of opportunities to express oneself on issues that concern one most. Some observers worry that young citizens' sporadic voting records and attention to public affairs, reluctance to join parties and political organizations, and engagement in "click here to save the world" online activism, leaves them ill-equipped to influence government. Others celebrate the new and creative ways in which youth are expanding the field of political action and using new media to dissolve barriers between private and public expression, by coming together online to protest and boycott products based on their environmental or social justice attributes and to circulate political messages and engage in issue campaigns on social media.

Drawing on the literature and her own interviews with American youth, Kjerstin Thorson wisely avoids the Manichean nature of the debate (youth versus elders, new versus old politics, good versus bad citizenship), instead concluding that these shifts increasingly pluralize participation in both promising and troubling ways. "The hallmark of contemporary youth civic cultures," she observes, "is 'it's up to you,' an ethos of self-reliance and perceived autonomy and tolerance for multiple ways of living that offers extraordinary possibilities for self-made policy experts and civic innovators but provides little guidance to those for whom politics is at best tangential and at worst irrelevant to daily life" (p. 5). Thorson argues that news and civic education should be redesigned to cultivate political interest and efficacy in regard to a broad field of political actions, not just voting in national elections.

Much depends on how civic activity and media usage are defined and measured, which is underscored by Rosanne Scholl's snapshot of 18-25 year old Americans in 2008. Her analysis of a nationally-representative survey finds that youth who spent more time consuming traditional news sources spent fewer hours on civic engagement--a finding that contradicts most prior research. The difference may be explained by the fact that Scholl's index of civic engagement is fairly nonpolitical (three of the five measures were of participation in any school clubs, arts, and sports) and she did not ask about online news consumption or social media usage during an election year in which unusually large numbers of young voters followed President Obama's campaign closely on the Internet and turned out at the polls. By 2008, traditional indicators were probably doomed to paint an incomplete and misleading picture of youth media usage and political engagement.

In her study of political socialization, Lucy Atkinson confirms that there is indeed a split between how new and old media influence youth political actions. Her surveys and interviews with American youth suggest that using traditional print and television news media (along with the influence of parents, schools, and churches) still predicts young people's plans to adopt traditional forms of engagement, such as voting, volunteering, or donating to a party. Yet following online news only boosts one's likeliness to use political values to guide one's purchasing decisions. Optimists about youth engagement often point to consumption as a significant arena in which youth are expanding traditional notions of political action. Unfortunately, Atkinson's respondents tend to see their own consumer activism as apolitical or ineffective. The fact that these youth have yet to acknowledge a new civic norm attributed to them may not bode well for their ability to connect new and old forms of action into a coherent politics and see it as powerful. Atkinson also finds that parents continue to be the most potent socialization agents for all kinds of political engagement. This should temper views of youth as rampant individualists who shape their own politics in a social vacuum, and perhaps also direct reformers' attention to boosting parents' civic engagement as a way to influence youth.

Use of social networks has been a particular flash point for debates over whether youth engagement is increasing or shrinking, substantive or shallow. Using structural equation modeling on a large sample of Americans, Homero Gil de Zuniga and Saif Shahin show that using social networks for news and information (but not for entertainment) helps to predict levels of social capital, which contributes to civic participation, and online and offline political participation. In addition, having a larger online network of discussion partners enhances civic participation more than having a larger offline network because social media allow youths to share and discuss political news with a broader range of people, including those outside one's circle of family and friends. These effects of informational social networking are small but significant, even after taking into account other factors known to influence political activity--such as gender, education, efficacy, and exposure to all forms of news. Marko Skoric finds similar links between informational social media use and social capital in a representative sample of Singaporean youth. However, in Singapore, where politics has been more constrained by governing elites, social capital did not contribute directly to civic participation but was mediated by youths' sense of efficacy. Taken together, these studies offer a useful antidote to simplistic generalizations about technology, reminding us that the political context in which citizens are socialized influences whether they choose to take advantage of the affordances of a new medium for political purposes.

Part 2 of the book turns to the theme of how digital communication may be helping to form new publics. Central themes include political polarization and extremism. Jennifer Brundidge raises familiar concerns that on the Internet we may be less likely to consider information and views that challenge our political perspectives, and therefore to deliberate over issues. She theorizes that more selective exposure to news online and simplistic partisan campaign communications may reduce our cognitive complexity. However, while the other essays in this section acknowledge important changes in a world of network communications, the authors offer evidence that fears about the Internet as a cause of polarization may be misplaced.

Hernando Rojas theorizes that while mass mediated publics once represented the people as whole, or helped form publics around particular issues, social media allow for "egocentric publics" constructed around an individual's interactions across multiple blogs, discussion forums, and social networking sites. These online personal networks provide individuals with an interpretive filter for information from the political system, such as official discourse and mass media news. Yet empirical studies suggest that interacting with one's egocentric public decreases personal extremism, even if it increases one's perception that others are polarized. Rojas attributes these seemingly paradoxical effects to the fact that we encounter greater diversity of viewpoints in online individualized publics than in our face-to-face personal networks (decreasing extremism) but we often find exemplars of the most extreme claims by political opponents on the Internet, which become the basis for inferring how others think (increasing perceived polarization).

Magadalena Wojcieszak adds more detail to the picture, based on data from three studies of Internet users in Colombia and the U.S. She finds that a narrow slice of political extremists emerge from interactions with their personal networks (on neo-Nazi sites, in this study) with even more radical opinions. People with weakly-held and moderate views can be swayed toward the dominant opinion in ideologically homogeneous online groups. But the views of the general population indeed become more moderate as they interact in their online publics.

Theories of polarization and extremism tend to think of us primarily as receivers of information online, based on the mass media model of passive audiences. Raymond Pingree reminds us that the Internet's interactivity should draw our attention more forcefully to effects that flow from our sending of political messages. The act of composing a message can complicate, reorganize, or coalesce our understanding of issues and ourselves. Publicly expressing our views can increase our commitment to what we have professed. Even anticipating future expression can shape how we attend to and process incoming messages. As Pingree notes, if we ignore these sender effects we are likely to underestimate the power of new forms of citizen expression online. One of his many helpful suggestions for future research is to study experimentally the effects of composing, releasing, and anticipating ideologically rigid and nuanced messages, or messages in which we have to give reasons for our views and those in which we do not. Each of these factors may help to explain how we may think more sophisticatedly, flexibly, or moderately in an interactive media environment.

The last part of the book turns to assessing organizational and economic structures. Chris Wells analyzes the repertoire of actions that American civic organizations solicit on their web sites and Facebook. Wells includes traditional membership groups often hailed as examples of the golden age of local and participatory democracy, the centralized managerial organizations that have arisen since the 1960s staffed by professional advocates and supported by citizen donations, and the new digital organizations that mainly encourage Internet activism, such as making and sharing media about social issues with one's online network. While these organizations' web sites indeed solicit actions that reflect their different models of activism, all now employ calls to digital activism on Facebook and other social media, giving up some control over messaging to sate contemporary citizens' hunger for forming and expressing their political identities more autonomously and individually.

Americans' relationship to the news media has also changed dramatically in the Internet era. Natalie Jomini Stroud, Ashley Muddiman, and Joshua Scacco summarize shifts in how journalism engages the public, using data from their study of local television news web sites' use of interactive elements such as polls, comment sections, and links. In the authors' framework, news sites embody tensions between appealing to users as a public that discusses matters of common concern or as a mass of individual consumers pursuing their separate interests, between presenting the news as the product of a unique local station and a homogenized parent corporation, and between journalistic and citizen control over editorial content and prominence. Matt Hindman follows up by focusing on a particularly important feature of online news: the use of filtering algorithms that recommend or determine what content we see based on our prior behavior and preferences. Hindman concludes that these algorithms play a big role in attracting and retaining site visitors and advertising dollars, and that they demand significant investment to develop and improve. Thus, the age of algorithms is likely to confer competitive advantage on the large aggregators of news content and personal data that have become the main gateways to online news, such as Google and Yahoo! Our main concern about online news filters should be that they concentrate power over audiences' attention, not that recommendation engines segregate us into our own echo chambers, because the highest-performing algorithms include diverse topics.

Bruce Bimber concludes the book with an insightful, big picture view of three challenges for online political communication research. Now that Internet technologies are thoroughly interwoven with older media and each quotidian moment of our lives, it may be more appropriate to study the effects of the political messages with which we interact than to keep searching for independent effects of particular technologies, or of how frequently or intensively we use them. Perhaps the medium is no longer the message after all. Second, the rise of Big Data poses both an opportunity and a barrier to the field. The proliferation of behavioral and transactional records-such as social media expression, GPS location data, and purchasing records--offer new and often more reliable bases for understanding civic engagement than surveys and lab experiments. But social scientists will need to overcome their methodological conservatism, be more open to inductive approaches to building theory from the discovery of patterns, ask questions that extend beyond what the most easily-accessible data can answer, and find ways to overcome corporate control of much of the data and expertise in analyzing it. Third, scholars trained to assume that social behavior is linear will need to recognize that outcomes can be more complex and disproportionate to causes if we are to explain phenomena such as viral communication online.

While it draws evidence mainly from the U.S. context, New Technologies and Civic Engagement offers a mix of theory and research that reflects multiple scholarly perspectives on major issues in the field, making it a useful addition to courses on political communication, media and youth, or cyberculture. References follow each chapter and there is an index.

--Chad Raphael

Santa Clara University