Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace “Revolution”

Chasing the Digital Wave: International Perspectives on the Growth of Online Campaigning

“…One of the debates that has regularly featured the literature on Web campaigns has been the so-called normalization versus equalization argument. Put simply, this refers to the use of new media increasing the power of the minor players and strengthening the role of the grassroots as opposed to simply reinforcing the power of the major parties and existing elites (Foot & Schneider, 2004;, 1999Margolis & Resnick, 2000). Again the articles here, particularly those of Marcinkowski and Metag, Hansen and Kosiara-Pedersen, Vedel and colleagues, and Koc-Michalska, Lilleker, and colleagues update our understanding of this perennial question.…”

Comparación del valor democrático de las discusiones de Facebook entre perfiles de candidatos políticos españoles a las elecciones generales de 2011

“…Some conceptualized the impact of the Internet as that of a simply symbolic revolution (Mazzoneli 2001), limited to esthetic aspects of political communication but unable to engender a transformation of political practices. Others argued that the revolutionary potential of the Internet would be normalized by the socio-political reality leading to politics as usual (Margolis and Resnick 2000).…”

“…Researchers have been divided from the early nineties into those who emphasized the potential of the Internet to improve democracy and revolutionize politics (Rheingold 2002;Lévy 2002;Jenkins 2006) and those who held rather prudent and skeptical stances: either predicting that digital technologies would just be normalized by the particular socio-political contexts in which they were deployed (Davis 2005;Margolis and Resnick 2000) or warning against the different threats to democracy that the Internet entailed (Sunstein 2001;Precht 2010).…”

“Backstage moments during the campaign”: The interactive use of Instagram by Spanish political leaders

“…However, research suggests that the interactive potential of SNSs has been exaggerated. In addition to data indicating that interactively communicating with citizens is contra-productive in increasing the politician’s network size (Vergeer, 2017), several studies have suggested that the new media represents a continuity with that of the traditional sort and, as a result, offline power structures are mirrored online—namely, the so-called normalization hypothesis (Ahmed et al, 2017; Klinger and Svensson, 2015; Lilleker et al, 2011), which holds that, since the Web is shaped by the traits and structures of offline, “real-world” society, the political use of any technology merely reflects power relationships, and represents “politics as usual” (Margolis and Resnick, 2000). Consequently, electoral inequalities are reinforced by the Internet, political parties use online resources to replicate offline patterns, and, more generally, ingrained procedures prevail in communication practices (Parmelee et al, 2018).…”