Product Description: We live in a highly complex and evolving world that requires a fuller and deeper understanding of how modern technological tools, ideas, practices, and institutions interact, and how different societies adjust themselves to emerging realities of the digital age...read more

Product Description: Online platforms have widened the availability for citizen engagement and opportunities for politicians to interact with their constituents. The increasing use of these technologies has transformed methods of governmental communication in online and offline environments...read more

Product Description: Social media are now widely used for political protests, campaigns, and communication in developed and developing nations, but available research has not yet paid sufficient attention to experiences beyond the US and UK. This collection tackles this imbalance head-on, compiling cutting-edge research across six continents to provide a comprehensive, global, up-to-date review of recent political uses of social media...read more

Product Description: This book critically interrogates the relationship between social media and protest from an interdisciplinary perspective, examining the multiple ways in which we need to politicize and contextualise commercial social media platforms, in particular with regards to their use for the purposes of anti-systemic and progressive protest movements...read more

Product Description: The Occupy movement and the Arab Spring have brought global attention to the potential of social media for empowering otherwise marginalized groups. This book addresses questions like what happens after the moment of protest and global visibility and whether social media can also help sustain civic engagement beyond protest...read more

Product Description: The practices of world politics are now scrutinised in a way that is unprecedented, with even those previously – or conventionally assumed to be – disengaged from international affairs being drawn into world politics by social media...read more

Product Description: Media independence is central to the organization, make-up, working practices and output of media systems across the globe. Often stemming from western notions of individual and political freedoms, independence has informed the development of media across a range of platforms: from the freedom of the press as the "fourth estate" and the rise of Hollywood’s Independent studios and Independent television in Britain, through to the importance of "Indy" labels in music and gaming and the increasing importance of independence of voice in citizen journalism...read more

Product Description: Mediated Communities brings together a diverse, global cohort of academics and professional communicators to assess the current state of democratic mobilizing around the world and the ways in which protest movements are being transformed in the midst of a communication revolution...read more

Product Description: A volume in Adolescence and Education Series Editor Ben Kirshner, University of Colorado Social media and digital tools permeate the everyday lives of young people. In the early stages of commentary about the impact of the digital age on civic life, debates revolved around whether the Internet enhanced or discouraged civic and political action...read more

People use online social forums for all sorts of reasons, including political conversations, regardless of the site's main purpose. But what leads some of these people to take their online political activity into the offline world of activism?In Expect Us, Jessica L. Beyer looks at political consciousness and action in four communities, each born out of chaotic online social spaces that millions of individuals enter, spend time in, and exit moment by moment: Anonymous (4chan), IGN, World of Warcraft, and The Pirate Bay. None of these sites began as places for political organization per se, but visitors to each have used them as places for political engagement to one degree or another. Beyer explains the puzzling emergence of political engagement in these disparate social spaces and offers reasons for their varied capacity to generate political activism. Her comparative ethnography of these four online communities demonstrates that the technological organization of space itself has a strong role in determining the possibility of political mobilization. Overall, she shows that political mobilization rises when a site provides high levels of anonymity, low levels of formal regulation, and minimal access to small-group interaction. Furthermore, her findings reveal that young people are more politically involved than much of the civic engagement literature suggests. Expect Us offers surprising and compelling insights for anyone interested in understanding which factors and online environments lead to the greatest amount of impact offline.

Product Description: The future engagement of young citizens from a wide range of socio-economic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds in democratic politics remains a crucial concern for academics, policy-makers, civics teachers and youth workers around the world...read more

Product Description: This book critically investigates the complex interaction between social media and contemporary democratic politics, and provides a grounded analysis of the emerging importance of Social media in civic engagement. Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, have increasingly been adopted by politicians, political activists and social movements as a means to engage, organize and communicate with citizens worldwide...read more

Product Description: This book examines the state of print and electronic media in the United States of America, Europe, and China. The latest mass communication advances demonstrate that we live in an increasingly media-centric world. The chapters include theoretical and empirical studies that shed light on the meaning of this development...read more

Product Description: Social networking lies at the heart of a number of fascinating political questions and social concerns, including citizen competence, social movements, and voter mobilization. In The Social Basis of the Rational Citizen, Sean Richey provides an empirical analysis of the most important hypothesized effect of social network influence on politics: social cognition...read more

Product Description: Funktionen von Blogs und die Teilnahme in Internetforen - so scheint es - befeuern Umbruche und Veranderungen. Auch wenn die Revolution, wie am Beispiel des arabischen Fruhlings auf der Strasse stattgefunden hat, stellten die medialen Rahmenbedingungen einen entscheidenden Support fur den Umbruch dar...read more