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Recommended reading

• Benkler, Y (2006) The Wealth of Networks, Yale 
• Castells, M (2009) Communication Power, Oxford University Press 
• Macnamara, J (2010) The 21st Century Media (R)evolution, Peter Lang

Social media and politics

Web 2.0 applied to democracy (Chadwick 2008)

Principles are:

• the Internet as a platform for political discourse
• collective intelligence emergent from political web use
• the importance of data over particular software and hardware applications
• perpetual experimentalism in the public domain
• the creation of small scale forms of political engagement through consumerism
• the propagation of political content over multiple applications

If markets are conversations, then so is democracy

Approaches to public sphere (Habermas)

• Liberal: privileges individuals
• Republican: representative democracy
• Deliberative: direct democracy 

'All models of democracy recognize some level of citizen engagement and participation as important' (Macnamara 2010 p157) 

The internet is 'a more crowded, noisy, chaotic, competitive, and rancorous communications space than was envisaged for the modernist public sphere' (McNair cited in Macnamara 2010 p173)

Government and citizen interactions

1. political promotion
2. information and service delivery
3. public consultation and participation

(Macnamara 2010 p175)