Book Review: Retooling Politics: How Digital Media Are Shaping Democracy by Andreas Jungherr, Gonzalo Rivero and Daniel Gayo-Avello

Abstract

The aim of this book is surprisingly simple: To adjust our perspective on the impacts of digital media on politics toward a more moderate and conventional view. Jungherr, Rivero and Gayo-Avello offer a model of digital politics that steers a middle course between the poles of “nothing has changed” and “everything has changed.” Their premise is that political actors’ underlying needs have not shifted with the advent of digital media—only their means of meeting those needs. Politicians still need, as they always have, to enter public discourse and reach people with their messages, to persuade and to mobilize, and to leverage the coordinating power of organizations. Digital media simply offer new and often more efficient ways of achieving some of those ends. But digital media have not fundamentally transformed the underlying motivations of politics nor permanently transformed institutional power relations. The book thus seeks to “transcend the false dichotomy between transformation and stasis” (p. 6). In place of that dichotomy, Retooling Politics argues that the actual influence of digital media on politics should be measured by “the degree to which digital media structure communicative environments in politics and allow actors and organizations to systematically improve their relative position” (p. 9). One real effect is the way that digital media have disrupted the business model, normative standards, and gatekeeping power of legacy media; another is the fundamental structure of many-to-many rather than one-to-many information flows enabled by the Internet. In contrast, they argue, digital media have not radically disrupted campaign communication—in contrast to popular notions about Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns—nor radically improved the efficacy of protest politics, as many initially believed in the wake of the Arab Spring. In campaign politics, they argue, rather than transformation we see adaptation to new tools. In protest politics, we see the persistence of age-old challenges: While digital media make far-flung coordination easier, they do not solve for fundamental power imbalances between institutionalized insiders and insurgent outsiders. A strength of Retooling Politics is how well and explicitly it combines theoretical perspectives and findings from across the fields of communication and political Book Review