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Introduction: Political Communication in the Platform Era

The opening chapter provides an overview of this book. It introduces the relationship between technology and political communication and provides an overview of media and politics during the platform era. The chapter also defines a number of core terms used throughout the book, including media, digital media, the Internet, social media, platforms, and technologies. Finally, the chapter provides chapter descriptions and an overview of the pedagogical features of the book.

OBJECTIVES

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

• detail the relationship between media, technology, and political communication
• provide working definitions of key terms used in this book
• understand how to use this book
• know the content that will be covered in this book.

1.1 Introduction

After serving as German chancellor for four consecutive terms, from 2005 to 2021, Angela Merkel gave a long farewell interview just before leaving office. In addition to discussing many other things, she reflected on how digital platforms have changed politics and political discourse during her 16-year chancellorship:

Interviewer: When you think about Germany, what worries you?

Merkel: That the political climate in the country has become harsher. When I became chancellor, there was no smartphone. Facebook was a year old, Twitter wasn't invented until a year later. We live in a completely changed media world, and that has something to do with it, too.

Interviewer: What does that mean for politics?

Merkel: It changes political communication. We have to ask ourselves: How do we reach people? How do we ensure that there are discourses in which different opinions are respected and not everyone hides in the opinion corner where they feel confirmed? Today, you can have your personal opinion confirmed by many more people than you even know. I'm afraid that we're increasingly running into problems when it comes to compromise-building, which is essential in a democracy.

(Gammelin et al. 2021)

Merkel's observations are a great starting point for the journey we will embark on in this book. The long-serving German chancellor is not alone in worrying about the "harshness" of political discourse, the distorting effects of social media on public opinion, and media bubbles as a barrier to compromise. While politics has never been a place of harmony and joy, and hate and so-called "fake news" are as old as humankind, the former chancellor is certainly right that digital platforms have impacted what political information people see and how they receive it, how citizens discuss politics and with whom, and how political leaders interact among themselves and with the public. At the same time, many popular perceptions and much common wisdom about social media and their impact on politics and social life are more mythical than reality. For example, people have long bemoaned "filter bubbles" and "echo chambers" - broadly, the idea that the Internet and social media lock people into impenetrable clusters of like-mindedness. However, social science research shows that these ideas do not capture how people actually engage in politics and encounter political information online. Indeed, to the contrary - and perhaps counter-intuitively - social media, and the Internet more generally, provide environments where citizens encounter, sometimes by accident, more diverse opinions and sources of information, as well as political contestation, than in their lives "offline."

This book is about the fears, and hopes we have about platforms and social media and their effects on politics and democracy. It provides a survey of the things we know, the issues we have to reconsider, the things that are less of a problem than we thought, the problems we are just beginning to think about, and the many, many things we do not know (yet!). We draw our discussion primarily from the vast, complex field of political communication research, and especially the research on platforms and their relationship with politics that has been going strong for the past 15 or so years. This research will help us map the threats to and opportunities for democracy that platforms give shape to, and help us think in more nuanced and critical ways about the intersection of platforms, power, and politics.

1.2 Technology and Political Communication

Technologies are central to political communication, as they are to all social life. The forms of debate, storytelling, evidence, conversation, and public address that are central to human societies have long grown up alongside, and been shaped by, technologies. While we tend to think of "technology" narrowly in terms of things such as cars, virtual reality sets, or social media, in its broadest definition technology means knowledge, skills, processes, methods, and tools. Take political communication, for instance. Before writing, oral cultures developed extensive technologies to extend human memory. These included things such as songs and poetry that helped codify and accumulate knowledge and pass it between people and across generations. With the development of forms of writing - for example, on parchment - the rules and eventually laws of societies became more durable, specified, and the basis for institutions.

The codex (bound volumes that preceded the modern book) and the printing press helped make knowledge and information more portable, widespread, and, ultimately, accessible beyond religious and political authorities (Blair et al. 2021; Eisenstein 1980). The development of post offices, mail, and telegraph networks played key roles in knitting regions and nascent states together during the nineteenth century, including through the circulation of the newspapers and pamphlets that helped give rise to the imagined political communities of nation states (Anderson 2006; John 2009). The middle of the nineteenth through the dawn of the twenty-first century witnessed the refinement of point-to-point communication, including the telegraph and early radio, and the explosion of truly mass media-facilitated communication over increasingly greater, and even global, scales (Crowley & Heyer 2015). In many countries around the world, political communication during the second half of the twentieth century was structured around a set of mass media technologies - especially television - and routinized ways in which political and media elites could communicate with, create, mobilize, and shape local, national, and global publics.

Enter the Internet. The Internet grew to increasing prominence in social, cultural, economic, and, indeed, political life by the turn of the twenty-first century. The origins of the global Internet lay in the US and Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, but it reached widespread popular adoption in many Western democracies only in the mid to late 1990s (Benjamin 2019; Mailland & Driscoll 2017; Turner 2010). The Internet was primarily accessible through computer labs, desktop computers, and then laptops, during this time. With the boom in mobile phones and smartphones globally in the early and mid-2000s, especially in many regions of the world outside of the Global North, the Internet became central to social life and political communication around the globe. In political contexts, during this time elected leaders, parties, and candidates, as well as many other political actors, began a slow, unsteady, and often halting process of increasingly using the Internet through multiple different devices to do things such as address the public and campaign for office. Journalism outlets were also experimenting with ways to engage audiences in new ways, from dedicated internet sites to the adoption of new multimedia styles of storytelling.

The rise and explosive growth of social media, and technology platforms more generally, in the mid-2000s through the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century in turn brought much debate - and sweeping social, political, and economic changes. By 2010, "platforms" had grown to truly global proportions. Many of those most familiar to audiences around the world - American companies such as Meta (Facebook) and Google, and their subsidiaries such as WhatsApp and YouTube - have extended far beyond their national origins to become fundamental infrastructure for much in the way of commercial, political, and social life in countries around the world. The commonly referred to "Arab Spring" of the 2010s appeared to reveal the Internet's new, democratizing power, when anti-government protests and uprisings organized in significant part online swept through countries such as Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain and deposed a number of political leaders. It seemed to many researchers (Boulianne 2015; Diamond & Plattner 2012; Howard & Hussain 2013) that social media were fueling a new wave of political participation, helping citizens exercise accountability over political leaders in countries around the world, and facilitating democratization efforts in authoritarian countries.

And yet the "Arab Spring" ended with generally failed democratic revolutions. Meanwhile, the 2016 UK European Union Membership Referendum (commonly known as "Brexit") and the election of former US President Donald Trump, amid concerns over...