Communicating Politics Online: Disruption and Democracy Hardcover - 2023

From the rear cover

"This is an impressive book that threads the technology of disruption through a comprehensive assessment of historical and recent changes in media communications. In Communicating Politics Online, Chapman Rackaway raises timely questions about what these changes mean for American politics and democracy, including news coverage, political polarization, voting behavior, and the tribal mentality of the digital world."

--Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, University of North Texas, USA

This second edition explores the relationship between politics and media, with a particular emphasis on the significant disruptive changes to media and technology that have faced journalists, campaigners, and the public in recent years. The first edition, in 2014, described the earliest elements of social and online media: Web 2.0, the 'information economy, ' and the changes from traditional broadcast media to the early online world. With the rise of TikTok, the 'fake news' claims ofDonald Trump, the decline of local news, and the anti-democratic impulses that drove the January 6, 2021 coup attempts, the last decade has provided a rich and sometimes confounding set of disruptions to political communication that deserve attention. Technology has disrupted political communication in the online environment exceptionally quickly over the last decade, and this book provides a framework for understanding the intersections of these disruptions and their effect on an already-fragile democratic circumstance in the United States.

Chapman Rackaway is Chair and Professor of Political Science at Radford University, USA.