Social Media and Democracy: Innovations in Participatory Politics

Contrasting with elite communication media, social media is financially, technologically and legally accessible to millions of ordinary people living in advanced societies and has enabled new opportunities for the production and communication of ideas, social meaning and culture. Increasingly citizens can use social media to communicate and exchange information between each other rather than only with political institutions. This edited collection brings together a range of international scholars to explore how social media has the potential to reconfigure social relations of production, community and power; and its potential consequences for networking democracy. They examine both the salience of the network as a metaphor for understanding our social world but also the centrality of the Internet, that vast mosaic of interlinked networks, as its most prominent manifestation in contemporary life. Providing the most up-to-date analysis of social media, citizenship and democracy, this book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of Political Science, Social Policy, Sociology, Communication Studies, Computing and Information and Communications Technologies.