New Article: The New Crisis of Public Communication: Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research on Digital Media and Politics

I have a new article out, which I've published as a free O3C paper.

Titled ‘The New Crisis of Public Communication: Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research on Digital Media and Politics,’ this 8,000-word essay collects my thoughts from the last two years about where we've been and where we're heading (and ought to be heading) in research on digital media and politics.

If you’ve been to one of my talks over the last couple of years you'll recognize these ideas and how they’ve been important in the foundation of O3C at Loughborough.

I hope you find the piece interesting. Here’s the abstract:

As the post-2016 political context becomes embedded, there is profound uncertainty about the long-term impact of digital media on the civic cultures of liberal democracies. In this article, Andrew Chadwick argues that the legacy of research on digital media and politics has created four epistemological problems that have hindered attempts to make sense of what amounts to a new crisis of public communication. Research in the field has tended to select cases that are progressive or pro-liberal democratic and it has usually employed what he terms the engagement gaze. Research has underestimated the trade-offs between affective solidarity and rational deliberation and it has been driven by a rationality expectation that neglects the role of indeterminacy in digital culture. For more than twenty years, researchers have focused on whether online “engagement” was being sufficiently embedded in political or journalistic organizational settings, irrespective of the motivations and ideological goals of those who actually engage. This has often obscured problematic aspects of how digital media may be reshaping the formation of public opinion and behaviour in ways that contribute, alongside other factors, to the erosion of liberal democratic norms of authenticity, rationality, tolerance, and trust. Addressing these epistemological challenges—a project already underway across a range of research endeavours—will better equip the field for the future.

Download the article and read for free here.

If you want to view a (very) condensed and early version of these ideas, the talk I gave at ICA 2018, entitled Thinking About the Role of Social Media in the Formation of Public Opinion, is available online here. You can also download the slides with notes embedded here.

Chadwick, A. (2019). The New Crisis of Public Communication: Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research on Digital Media and Politics. O3C 2. Online Civic Culture Centre, Loughborough University. https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/online-civic-culture-centre/news-events/articles/o3c-2-crisis/