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Today, political leaders and candidates for office must campaign in a multimedia world through traditional forums—newspapers, radio, and television—as well as new digital media, particularly social media. Electoral Campaigns, Media, and the New World of Digital Politics chronicles how Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, email, and memes are used successfully and unsuccessfully to influence elections. Each of these platforms have different affordances and reach various audiences in different ways. Campaigns often have to wage different campaigns on each of these mediums. In some instances, they are crucial in altering coverage in the mainstream media. In others, digital media remains underutilized and undeveloped. As has always been the case in politics, outcomes that depend on economic and social conditions often dictate people’s readiness for certain messages. However, the method and content of those messages has changed with great consequences for the health and future of democracy. 

This book answers several questions: How do candidates/parties reach audiences that are preoccupied, inattentive, amorphous, and bombarded with so many other messages? How do they cope with the speed of media reporting in a continuous news cycle that demands instantaneous responses? How has media fragmentation altered the campaign styles and content of campaign communication, and general campaign discourse? Finally and most critically, what does this mean for how democracies function?

Essential reading on a hard-to-study but dominant communication tool, encrypted messaging apps—WhatsApp, Signal, and their kin—showing their promise and dangers.

Pundits have long pointed to social media’s power to catalyze or end political movements—and to strengthen or weaken democracies. But this power is shifting from social media platforms (such as Facebook and YouTube) to lesser-studied encrypted messaging apps (such as WhatsApp and Signal). This urgent book explains how these technologies work and how they differ from their predecessors, outlining their strengths and vulnerabilities at a crucial stage in their evolution.

While many Facebook users have at least heard of propaganda and the algorithms used to filter and highlight content on that platform, they are more likely to trust messaging apps as sources of authentic and secure information. Paired with a growing distrust of traditional media, more people are joining large groups on these apps and using them as news sources, even when those groups include relative strangers. This makes these apps particularly vulnerable to political propaganda—and even government espionage.

Security studies scholar Inga Kristina Trauthig and propaganda scholar Samuel Woolley consider both the role of these apps in spreading disinformation and as tools for maintaining free speech and civic discourse in the face of censorship. The same closed nature that makes these apps seem trustworthy has made them particularly difficult to research. And so this qualitative study draws on some 180 interviews with propagandists, activists, influence campaigners, and other users in fourteen countries. The book’s findings and the authors’ recommendations are crucial for understanding the future of online communication and safeguarding democratic speech.

A rigorous redefinition of opinion—doxa—as an emergent, relational force shaped by digital infrastructures and rhetorical entanglements.

Many urgent contemporary issues—from demagoguery to white ethno-nationalism—compel us to consider opinions seriously. Yet while clichés like “he tells it like it is” and newer imperatives such as #BlackLivesMatter seem straightforward, haptics, emoji, and “like” buttons belie unexamined collective assumptions about how opinions in the digital realm function.

Caddie Alford illuminates this function by deploying the ancient Greek term for opinions: doxa. Doxa translates to “opinion,” but the term can also signal seemingness and expectations. Doxa’s capacious meanings reveal opinions to be more than static or monolithic: With doxa, opinions become emergent, dynamic, relational, and pluralistic.

Masterfully combining rhetorical frameworks as well as scholarship on opinions and digital media entanglements, Alford puts opinions into conversation with such case studies as algorithms, infrastructure, digital illiteracy, virality, and activism. She shows how “doxa” reveals gradations of opinions, from more reputable to less reputable. She demonstrates that these gradations are multifaceted and susceptible to interventions.

Entitled Opinions sheds much of the baggage associated with opinions while opening up more fertile pathways of inquiry. In a world that says, “don’t read the comments,” this book reads the comments, taking seriously content that could be easily dismissed otherwise and alchemizing judgments into implications.

Though contributors write from a variety of methodological positions and address themselves to a range of archives, they share the primary conviction that the impact of Web 2.0 on literary practice is far-reaching, far from self-evident, and far more variegated and unpredictable than easy summations of social media’s influence suggest. Expressive Networks asks after poetry’s present and future by examining what poems themselves express about the social make-up of networked platforms.

Edited by Matthew Kilbane with contributions from Cameron Awkward-Rich, Micah Bateman, Andrew Campana, Sumita Chakraborty, Scott Challener, C.R. Grimmer, Tess McNulty, Michael Nardone, Seth Perlow, Anna Preus, Susanna Sacks, Carly Schnitzler, Melanie Walsh, and Samuel Caleb Wee.