The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics By W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg Cambridge University Press. 2013. 251 pages. $29.99 paperback

Extract

In recent years, the world has been shaken by some of the largest and most persistent protests in history. A recent study that analyzed 843 protests that occurred between 2006 and 2013 in 87 countries found that since 2006 there has been a steady increase in the overall number of protests every year (Ortiz et al. 2013). These protests are particularly impressive not only due to the surge in the overall number of protesters, but also because of the increasing number of non-organizationally affiliated participants and the rise in engagement through diverse direct action repertoires (Ortiz et al. 2013, 6). Several other scholarly and popular accounts have discussed the impressive role that digital media play in organizing direct political action and public mobilization—especially after the popularization of social networking and microblogging sites after 2006. Amid a wave of enthusiastic accounts (some of which implied that social media had a causal role in these political upheavals) and pessimistic interpretations insisting that the political power of social media has been exaggerated, The Logic of Connective Action offers a rich and systematic account of digital media's role in large-scale mobilizations.