Latinas on the Line: Invisible Information Workers in Telecommunications

Abstract

and candidates, accidently or otherwise. Importantly, the authors find that these participatory boosts were not limited to ideological extremes, nor did they favor the center-left or center-right. The proverbial rising tide lifted all ships. Finally, they find that the national context has mixed results on the relationship between social media and political participation. For example, they find that the effects of electoral mobilization efforts via social media are larger on users’ participation in partycentric political systems than candidatecentric ones. However, they also find that the structure of the media system didn’t always influence political participation. In the concluding chapter of the book, the authors grapple with what their results mean for democratic theory and democracy. There are no easy answers here, and the chapter is worth a close read. The overriding message, however, is that we can exhale and perhaps wring our hands less vigorously. Social media aren’t just toxic bubbles filled with content that radicalizes the most politically extreme among us. For the average user, social media offer a diverse and rich political information ecosystem in which most users—one way or another—will be exposed to political ideas. If anything, there is reason to be optimistic about the role of social media in political participation because it reduces participation gaps by engaging the disconnected and giving them a voice in democratic processes. Hopefully, other researchers will follow Vaccari and Valeriani’s lead and focus less on the political extremes and more on average social media users, who constitute the bulk of the citizenry. Latinas on the Line: Invisible Information Workers in Telecommunications, by Melissa Villa-Nicholas. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. 158 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9781978813717.