2. Booknotes

Abstract

Sweden as an informal mode of civic engagement. She uses the multisite narrative analysis to explore how protest activists connect the global and local dimensions of the movement and argues for deemphasizing the technological aspects and paying close attention to the contextual nature of the protest movement. Chapter 6 by Uldam argues that opportunities for informal civic engagement provided by social media are severely constrained by state and corporate surveillance and repression. She finds in a case study of BP’s effort to monitor and silence criticisms of its CSR activities as greenwashing. Chapter 7 by Husted dismisses the often-touted notion of the democratic potential provided by the social media platforms and examines the various challenges to civic engagement during the Occupy Wall Street movement. He argues that technological affordances of social media impede rather than enhance the participatory and collaborative structure of the Occupy movement. In his analysis of nearly 1,400 Facebook posts during the movement (2011–2012), he finds the hierarchical structure of the Occupy movement social media platforms where members turn from content generators to passive affirmers of content created by the leaders of the Occupy movement. The final chapter by Baines examines the community-driven printshops in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as alternatives to commercial print media and empowering capabilities of these print shops for local civil society. The book’s major strength lies in situating the role of social media in civic engagement in a broader context. It examines the nature of different types of civic engagement: formal and informal in different countries of the global north, the opportunities and constraints of social media platforms, and the discomforting problems of surveillance and silencing by state and corporate actors. The primarily qualitative studies capture the nuance and holistic picture of the paradoxical roles of social media in the complex civic engagement processes complementary to the overwhelmingly quantitative studies of social media effects research in the United States. The book also provides an expanding view of social media not merely sending and receiving social media messages but also mobilizing, organizing, and facilitating resources and movements. One minor limitation of the book seems to overplay the distinction between the formal and informal modes of civic engagement and exaggerate the importance of informal mode. For social media to make a meaningful impact in democratic governance, informal mode needs to transform into tangible results in the formal mode. Overall, the book is a great collection of case studies examining the nuanced role of social media in civic engagement in multiple settings.