Santos, M. & Valenzuela, S. (en imprenta). Changing Media Landscapes and Political Participation.

En

Grasso, M. & Giugni, M. The Oxford Handbook of Political Participation. Oxford University Press.

Changing Media Landscapes and Political Participation

Marcelo Santos, Universidad Finis Terrae – CIDOC

Sebastián Valenzuela, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile,

and Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD)

Abstract: This chapter discusses how a constantly changing media landscape affects political

participation. After pointing out the affordances brought forward by digital communication

technologies, six game changers are identified: information overload, changing habits of

media use, crisis of media business, the shift from audiences to content creators, the

emergence of new agents of information sharing and user cues. The chapter then discusses

how and to what extent such game changers influence the different dimensions of political

activity, from electoral to protest participation and then discusses the public role of private

platforms. The final section concludes the chapter by highlighting the importance of

critically assessing changes in media communication when examining political participation.

Specifically, a call is made for adopting an innovative, dynamic attitude towards digital media

research, while maintaining the focus on political deliberation.

Keywords: media landscapes, digital media, audiences, social media, news media, media

consumption, media production, media circulation, media habits, political participation

For most citizens, politics is a mediated experience. Television, online news sites, and social

media are central to how people learn about the political world. Thus, any review of

contemporary trends in political participation requires an analysis of current media landscapes

and how these impact on political participation patterns, dodging utopian and dystopian

accounts of technological determinism. In a quantitative review, Boulianne (2018) analyzed

more than 300 published studies on the relationship between digital media and political

participation, covering a 20-year period, 50 countries, and survey data from more than

300,000 respondents. Her results show a positive, albeit weak, relationship between the

diffusion of digital media and political participation, both off and online. To understand

current forms of political participation, then, one must consider the contemporary media

landscape, in which digital media and social media platforms have become central to citizens

around the world.

The purpose of the current chapter: to critically review how recent changes in media

landscapes intersect with different dimensions of political participation. To do so, we begin

by discussing the transition from mass, traditional media to networked, digital media. Then

we focus on three dimensions of media systems—consumption, production, and circulation

of content—and present six game changers triggered by the digital revolution. We then link

such transformations with potential effects on political participation, and close with a

discussion of future developments in this area.

From Mass Media to Digital Media

For most of the 20

th
century, the relationship between media and political participation followed a rather

hierarchical, top-down logic. The power of the media over citizens was signaled by a

plethora of effect theories that conceived a one directional influence from the mass media to

the public, including gatekeeping, framing, priming, agenda setting, spiral of silence,

cultivation, two-step flow, and so on (see, e.g., Oliver et al. 2019). The power of the media

was a consequence of mass communication, which Greenberg and Salwen (2014: 62)

defined as “the diffusion of messages from a seemingly powerful, single source to a large,

heterogenous audience; the public nature of the messages; and the lack of (or delayed)

feedback from receivers to the mass communication source”. While the contemporary digital

environment has rendered this description outdated, it highlights three dimensions of media

landscapes that are still relevant: consumption, production, and circulation.

Digital, in turn, means binary, programmable data (Manovich, 2005). This

fundamental change on the material nature of the structures behind digital communication

technologies brings forward affordances such as: (i) reproducibility of content, as opposed to

analogous data contained in physical media, such as books, disks and so on; (ii) data storing

and processing, which allows for the creation of multiple, dynamic, significant relations

between data points; (iii) interoperability, meaning data can be accessed and manipulated

from different devices, remotely accessed; and (iv) interactivity, which refers to the

“reciprocal communication or information exchange, which afford interaction between

communication technology and users, or between users through technology” (Bucy and Tao

2007: 647).

Affordances alter the consumption, production, and circulation of media content, thus

transforming political participation, too. Data reproducibility impacts content circulation

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 because information can now be seamlessly stored, copied, edited, and so on. Data

storing also translates into trackability, as every user interaction is a potential data point that

can be accumulated and then processed by algorithms for different purposes, from

customized news feeds to contextualized advertising, affecting both political information

circulation and consumption. Interoperability means that different devices have access to the

same sources as content adapts to the device, also affecting consumption. In addition,

interoperability suggests that content can be created by different media platforms than the

platforms used to consume it—for instance a mobile phone video stream feeding a live TV

newscast. When combined with interactivity, these practices have an impact on both content

outputs (as digital media allow for production, circulation and commentary by myriads of

sources) and inputs (as digital consumption practices may include different forms of

feedback), especially as digital platforms become more user-friendly.

In the next section, we highlight six game changers in media landscapes, followed by

a discussion on how they transformed political participation.

Six Game Changers

1. Information Overload

Digital media accelerated the transition from an environment of information scarcity to one of

information overload. The diversity of information sources, which was initially celebrated as

a step forward in the democratization of the public sphere (Shirky 2008; Castells 2009;

Zuckerman 2014), has become a challenge in terms of access to reliable, high-quality,

political information (Lewandowsky et al. 2017). Information disorders such as

misinformation and disinformation have grown exponentially, contaminating the media

environment and challenging the ability of online users to find accurate political information

(Wardle and Derakhshan, 2017).

Information overload is one of the many consequences of a high-choice media

environment. Others include increasing the fragmentation and polarization of political

attitudes, factual relativism and inequalities in political knowledge (Van Aelst et al. 2017: 19).

2. Changing Habits of Media Use

Media habits have changed dramatically in the 21st century. These changes have operated at

the level of devices employed—from electronic mass media to digital computers and mobile

devices—as well as forms of information exposure. While the latter has always ranged from

purposive to incidental (Kligler-Vilenchik et al. 2020), the rise of algorithms created by

private platforms such as Facebook has altered information exposure. Designed as tools for

user engagement, algorithms allow us to carry our content preferences with us. Thus, the

popularity of platforms has led to a growing “Matthew Effect” (Kümpel 2020), where people

who are already politically interested become more exposed to political information both

incidentally and intentionally, whereas those that have little to no interest are less exposed to

political content. Consequently, political inequalities on social media have grown (Kümpel

2020; Thorson 2020).

Adding another layer of complexity, mobile instant messaging services (MIMs) are

becoming modal platforms for political information (and misinformation), informal political

discussion, and collective action co-ordination, particularly in countries of the Global South

(Goel et al. 2018; Milan and Barbosa 2020; Valenzuela et al. 2019). Though MIMs were

designed originally as interpersonal communication tools, specific affordances such as

 Telegram’s channels and WhatsApp groups have enabled one-to-many broadcasting

and bipartite networks to spread political content to peripheral groups (dos Santos 2018).

A consequence of changes in media use is the risk that citizens’ political decision-

making processes rely less on institutionalized sources of information. As the boundaries

between professional news media and social media contacts blur, it is becoming increasingly

difficult for most users to distinguish high-quality information sources from low-quality ones

(Qiu et al. 2017).

3. Crisis of Media Business Models

In terms of content production, the digital revolution triggered a crisis in the economic model

of news media organizations, which still produce most of the political content consumed by

users. Although traditional media have appropriated social media as outlets to attract traffic

and publicize their content, Google, Facebook and Amazon get most of the advertising

revenue (Sterling 2019). News media companies have struggled to adapt to a platform logic,

where speed and virality of content often prevail over verification and quality. Additionally,

several countries have witnessed a long-term decline in public confidence in the news media,

especially in Europe and the Americas (Newman et al. 2020; Tandoc et al. 2018). To the

degree that low trust reduced news media use, the viability of journalistic organizations that

have historically provided the bulk of political information remains perilous.

4. From Audiences to Content Creators

As the economic and cultural context that shapes digital media incorporate the user as a

content creator (Wunsch and Vincent 2007), such technologies become pervasive in what

Ganesh and Stohl (2013) call digital ubiquity. In such context, audiences interchange roles,

sliding from content consumers to commentators to producers, publishers, advertisers and so

on (Ridell 2012). One outcome of these changes is the exponential growth of user-generated

content (UGC) through platforms such as social media. Though UGC is more limited in

reach (Santos 2018), it may still have greater aesthetic appeal (Pantti 2013) and be perceived

as more authentic (Allan 2014). Because differs markedly from professional media narratives,

it challenges the prevailing forms and practices of the so-called mainstream media.

UGC usually presents little or no contextual information regarding the creation of the

content and its transmission (Mortensen 2015), presenting challenges to validate or verify the

claims made around the content: its location, timestamp, authorship and so on. UGC may be

verified by journalists and fact-checking organizations, but the evidence regarding the impact

of such work on correcting misperceptions is mixed (Walter et al. 2019).

5. New Agents of Information Sharing

Within the dimension of content circulation, information technologies have become politically

contested. Debates about internet neutrality and algorithmic accountability are two poignant

examples. The current state of affairs is diverse around the world: while Chile has the first

law in the world that allegedly protects net neutrality (Santos 2012) and Europe has advanced

in protecting citizens’ data with the General Data Protect Regulation (GDPR), there are no

established global standards. Furthermore, the ability of national and supranational institutions

to enforce such type of regulation is debatable (S. Livingstone, personal communication,

November 16 2020).

Digital and social media seem to operate with a “Wild West” logic where the same

platforms have become the auditors of its business operations (Hintz 2015). The problem

 generated by the absence of some sort of accountability of algorithms that mediate

users’ access to their content feeds has been highlighted in the past few years. This became

manifest after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when as many as 87 million users had their

data mined in unauthorized ways by a private company to orchestrate several political

propaganda campaigns (Lapowsky 2018). As a consequence, platforms have gradually shut

down access to their data by third parties, including researchers (Bruns 2018).

6. User Cues

As platforms harvest users’ interactions and process them with algorithms that personalize

content display dynamics, newsfeeds and dashboards have become individually customized

information systems. These systems are based on the information introduced by users,

combined with cues and signals interpreted by the platforms’ algorithms when users interact

with them.

While there is vast criticism of social media algorithms, the practice of “gaming” such

algorithms for commercial or political purposes has led to a quick growth of non-human

users, managed to boost, challenge, praise or loathe content. Networks of bots (automated

systems) and cyborgs (humans doing repetitive tasks with fake users) work to manipulate the

systems in order to pave the way to the content or ideas they work or praise for –

alternatively, they may work against a set of users, issues and so forth, in what Treré (2016)

called “algorithmic manufacturing of consent”. Public opinion founded on the salience of

issues that circulate on social media might, thus, be compromised. Platforms’ response for

such forms of manipulation of content diffusion dynamics are, to date, tepid. Additionally,

users tend to share content that they have not read (Holmström et al. 2019), which may help

 the spread of false claims and rumors.

Influence of Media Changes on Political Participation

To properly engage in political activities, citizens need relevant, opportune, and reliable

information (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). Historically, informal conversations, first, and

the news media, later, were the main sources of political information for citizens. In

developed democracies, the history of news-making is typically divided into an initial period

where news content was predominantly partisan, mingled with propaganda and

advertisement, and a second moment where news became gradually professionalized, and

organizations became predominantly profit-oriented and politically moderate (Schudson

1998). Of course, the news media took a different path in regions such as Latin America,

where media systems remain ‘captured’ by economic and political elites (Guerrero and

Márquez-Ramírez 2004), or in countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia—perhaps most

notoriously perceived in China—where autocratic regimes hold a tight control over the news

media. Despite these cross-national differences, the rise of digital technologies has

transformed news media systems across the globe. With it, the relationship between media

use and political participation has changed, too. In this section, we review this relationship as

it changes according to different participation forms.

Electoral Participation

Initially, digital campaigns followed the logic of broadcasting, using the new channels for the

diffusion of information. When the political world realized the potential of interactivity, new

forms of digital campaigning ensued, such as crowdfunding. The 2008 US election,

particularly Barack Obama’s campaign, was probably the best example of this second wave

of political digitization (Carr 2008). This rather optimistic perspective of digital media and

elections gave way, however, to a current, more pessimistic perspective on the role played by

digital technologies in elections. Thus, social media have been used for state-sponsored

campaigns of digital propaganda, unauthorized manipulation of personal data, inorganic

inflation of politicians’ followers and messages by automated or semi-automated agents, and

the channeling of official communication into alternative digital channels with the intent to

avoid accountability with traditional media. Brazilian right-winger Jair Bolsonaro, for

instance, gave his first speech as president elect via Facebook Live.

Another visible trend in the realm of electoral participation is related to how changes

in media landscapes have deepened the personalization of politics (Adam and Mayer 2010).

Social media “appear as a perfect reflection of the condition of individualization (Bauman

2001; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002) of contemporary societies, allowing us to deal with

others while not having to engage fully with them” (Gerbaudo 2012: 13). If citizens have

been paying more attention to the person, not the party, the possibility of being informed

directly by such person through individual channels allows bypassing scrutiny by traditional

watchdogs such as media or NGOs. Analogously, rather than following the media, users face

the possibility of following the journalist; instead of following the movement, follow the

activist (Santos and Condeza 2017).

Individualization also manifests in networked dynamics, for example when individual

overly intense activity become Bastos and Mercea’s “serial activists” (2016), or when a user’s

strategic position on the network that could lead her to a more relevant role on the diffusion

of information (Santos and Condeza 2017), at the same time obfuscating the agency of the

traditional institutions, such as media, parties, social movements. Additionally, self-expression

 mingles with political participation as an abundant production of personal imagery

pops on social media during protests (Santos 2018). It is part of what Theocharis (2015) calls

digitally networked participation, where the very act of communicating is a form of

mobilization; and such communication entails an important element of self-expression and

identity-related elements. As a young interviewee said to The Economist (2019), “Activism

has become one of the easiest way to project yourself as cool”, as young people attempt to

craft a political desirable self (Polletta and Jasper 2001) on their digital networks.

While enabling to engage directly with the “real” person of interest, there are

consequences for the excessive dependency on a personality rather than a representative

organization. Though the recent rise of populist politics is associated mainly as a result of a

cultural backlash after a few decades of progressive social advances and economic crisis

(Inglehart and Norris 2016), social media allows political actors to bypass journalistic

scrutiny, weakening accountability and dialogue not only by not engaging but also by

aggressively accusing professional media of being “fake” (Walter et al. 2019).

Protest Participation

The use of digital technologies has promoted decentralized forms of mobilization. Some

authors rely on the network metaphor as they refer to digitally networked forms of

participation (Theocharis 2015) or networked movements (Castells 2012), in which citizens

rely less on traditional organizations with a definite set of values and more on the horizontal

networks of peers. Bennett and Segerberg (2012) define the “logics of connective action”, in

reference to Mancur Olson’s ([1965] 2002) logics of collective action. For these authors,

there is a continuum from traditional social movements that rely on strong demands, agreed

by a closely tied group, to different levels of flexibility, where personal action frames, that is,

flexible, inclusive frames to the issues, are claimed by networked constituents, brought

together by low-to-intense mediation of technology. The low barriers, topic flexibility and the

intensive adoption of digital technology also enable the transnationalization of protest, leading

to phenomena such as the “serial activists” detected by Bastos and Mercea (2016) on Twitter

—probably generalizable to other social media platforms. The authors claim that regular users

that engage with a very high frequency with a variety of social issues, regardless of the

latitude where the issue takes place.

The tenuous nature of social movement frames and groups connected mainly via

digital social networks allow for a faster diffusion of calls for action while also to a loosening

of the original impulse for participation and the adoption of predominant frames. Porto and

Brant (2015) and Pinto (2017) argue that was the case during 2013 decentralized popular

mobilization in Brazil’s jornadas de junho (June events). As protests became more massive,

demands originally associated with the left (urban public free transportation) lost focus and

were co-opted by the opposition to spark a generalized discontent against PT, the ruling left-

wing party. As such, these protests might lead to contradictory outputs such as the

impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil in 2016 or the counter-revolution in Egypt after the

downfall of Hosni Mubarak in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. In the words of the formerly

techno-optimistic Wael Ghonim (2015) “I once said, ‘If you want to liberate a society, all you

need is the Internet.’ I was wrong”.

Still, it is difficult to measure the long-term effects of techno-centered forms of

political participation. For instance, the Chilean student movement of 2011 exhibited a strong

use of digital technology (Valenzuela et al. 2014) and was successful in bringing about a
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 major reform to educational policy. However, this movement also had a strong

presence on the streets, with massive demonstrations, and four of the student leaders became

elected to Congress as deputies. Gerbaudo (2012: 5-6), studying the Occupy movement in the

United States, concluded that digital media were instrumental to what he called

choreographies of assembly: “They are means not simply to convey abstract opinions, but

also to give a shape to the way in which people come together and act together” led by “soft

leaders [such as] influential Facebook admins and activist tweeps”.

In explicating how social media use might affect political participation, the literature

offers four prominent explanations (Boulianne 2015). One holds that digital networks

increase exposure to “weak ties,” augmenting users' likelihood of both learning about

opportunities to participate and being asked to participate in civic life (Gil de Zúñiga et al.

2012). Secondly, users learn about news from what other users post, and since they are

exposed to the news incidentally by their contacts, this type of information may be influential

(Bode 2012). Thus, social platforms may enable citizens to learn about political issues, which

facilitates participation in civic life (Xenos et al. 2014). Third, users in social media have

more chances to be contacted by political organizations, and through this contact, be asked to

participate on their behalf. And fourth, participation is contagious among users of social

media, as they are affected by contacts who post political opinions (Bond et al. 2012).

Existing research shows that social media can influence political participation through

several mechanisms, including cognitive elaboration, information gain, political discussion,

and group identity (Gil de Zúñiga et al. 2012; Valenzuela 2013). Research about political

uses of Twitter during election time has shown that this platform not only engages partisan

individuals that try to extend their offline political reach (Jungherr 2015), but also involves
1

 racial and secular minorities in the political process by either broadcasting information

on the campaign or having conversation with others, and these interactions mobilize and

acknowledge them (Graham et al. 2013).

The lowered costs of participation may seem attractive to democracy defenders as it

projects shiny images such as that “here comes everybody” (Shirky 2008), the “architecture

of participation” (O’Reilly 2013) or the “participatory” dimension embedded on Ethan

Zuckerman’s “new civics” (2014). However, while digital technologies reduce the cost of

joining causes and publicizing information, fostering the creation and enabling the

maintenance of connections, its adoption as a form of political participation has been

contemptuously labeled “slacktivism” (Morozov 2012). In other words, the slacktivism

hypothesis assumes that such new forms of political expression are naïvely perceived as more

impactful than they are, therefore discouraging offline participation. Though there is evidence

of a largely positive relationship between social media use and political participation

(Boulianne 2015), Kwak et al. (2018) suggest that such correlation is fragile as it is not

perceived in young people and neither in those with politically diverse networks.

Additionally, the lower barriers represent an opportunity also seized by other agents

with less strictly democratic inspiration, in what Quandt (2018) calls dark participation:

“negative, selfish or even deeply sinister contributions (…) to the news-making processes”.

As such, dark participation amalgamates: “(a) wicked actors, (b) sinister motives and reasons

for participation, (c) despicable objects/targets, (d) intended audience(s), and (e) nefarious

processes/actions” (Quandt, 2018: 41, emphasis on the original). Within this definition, many

recent examples qualify, such as ISIL infamous beheading videos that became viral on social

media thanks to botnets (Al-khateeb and Agarwal 2015), “Unite the Right” Charlottesville
1

 deadly rally (Fausset and Feuer 2017), 4Chan’s QAnon conspiracists (Moore 2018)

or Reddit’s misogynistic Red Pill community initiated by former New Hampshire State

Representative Robert Fisher (Bacarisse 2017).

The Public Role of Private Platforms

As digital platforms have become a quintessential part of people’s communication

environment, they become also instrumental to citizen’s political activities. As previously

discussed, such activities include democratic as well as antidemocratic behaviors,

nevertheless they are regulated almost exclusively by the platforms, relying on their resources

and will to enforce their terms and policies. As digital media entrepreneurs self-label their

products as “platforms”, they attempt to dodge the responsibilities assigned historically and

legally to media outlets and position themselves as neutral entities (Gillespie 2010).

In spite of that, research shows plenty of politically motivated activity in the so-called

platforms. The messaging app WhatsApp, for instance has been used for social mobilization

(Treré 2020; Milan and Barbosa 2020), the dissemination of disinformation related both to

racism (Goel et al. 2018), and to electoral processes (Gragnani 2017). Another MIM,

Telegram, has been associated with terrorist practices (Karasz 2018) and Nazi propaganda

(Bedingfield 2020), while it is also widely recognized as the most important platform for

activism in Iran (Kargar and McManamen 2018; Akbari and Gabdulhakov 2019) and other

countries with more surveillant regimes. Gursky et al. (2020) called the systematic political

manipulation of messages through encrypted messaging apps “encrypted propaganda”, as

they unveiled influence operations in Mexico, India and United States.

Semi-public Facebook has been on the eye of the lawmakers particularly in the

 United States due to the Cambridge Analytica revelations related to 2016 elections in

that country (Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison 2018). After profiling micro-segments

following psychographic assessments built over leaked private Facebook user information,

the consulting company customized political messages for the Trump 2016 presidential

campaign, Brexit and others. While the magnitude of the effects of such strategies are an

ongoing debate, so are the ethical aspects of this kind of big data approach to politics, forged

on irregularly obtained data, appealing to emotional fragility of the users, detected because

her emotional cues are collected by a platform such as Facebook. One of WhatsApp’s

founders and former Facebook shareholder Brian Acton broadcasted on Twitter: “It is time.

#deletefacebook”.

These events reveal the other side of the personalization issue: not only user data is

analyzed to customize the content feed, recommendations and so on, it is also used to create

commercial, political or other sorts of advertising content in a sort of artisanal-massive

political communication practice, where micro-segmentation is combined with psychographic

profiling and messages are crafted for very specific targets with customized persuasive

messages either for commercial purposes or political propaganda (González 2017; Risso

2018). The effects of such practice are yet to be measured convincingly (Santos,

forthcoming), but as famous Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie said,

metaphorically: “There’s not a debate on how much illegal drug you took (…) If you’re

caught cheating, you lose your medal” (Amer and Noujaim 2019).

The lack of regulation on the infrastructural level also has an impact on the dynamics

of access to political information. Commercial practices such as zero rating promotions

 —and free, but restricted access to internet selected content in services—such as

Facebook’s FreeBasics, for instance, create siloes of “free” information from restricted

sources, while the rest of the internet is paid for.

As digital platforms step aside from their public role, an ongoing struggle emerges

between platform self-regulation, state regulation and growing pressure for enforcement of

citizen media literacies, such as the competencies to identify, scrutinize and avoid

disinformation. Amidst all those variables, it is no secret that digital divides will only increase

inequalities when considering the competencies needed to exercise political participation in,

through, or with digital media environments. It has become increasingly evident that

regulation is a complex but inevitable road, as the free market of digital mediators sink in

oceans of disinformation and operations of social manipulation.

The social role of digital technology is also visible in form of e-politics as technology

enables different approaches to deliberative processes. These may take advantage of

digitization to make decision-making and bureaucratic processes faster, more efficient and in

some cases even more inclusive, or may involve new dimensions of participation, such as

opening data to citizen scrutiny.

In the first case, pre-existing participatory processes such as consultations, petitions,

budgeting, voting are taken to the digital realm, where technology not so much changes their

shape, it changes their speed, accuracy, efficiency, efficacy, all as a function of the

populations access and skills related to technology. Such participatory processes are not

novel, and digital technology assumes a mediating role. We could say they are digitized

participative political processes.

In the second case, though, digital technology has a more prominent role since it
1

 enables unpredicted uses to information delivered by means of open government

initiatives. If the Watergate scandal was brought up by investigative reporters, today’s

watchdogs are more likely data social scientists, crossing data patterns, linking networks of

interest or visualizing epidemic dynamics – such as has been in the aftermath of the Covid-19

outbreak—or identifying far-right, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi individuals and

monitoring the success or failure of legal action against them (Levin 2020).

One way or the other, Iceland’s failure to institutionalize a crowdsourced grassroots

constitutional experience in 2011 (Landemore 2014) proves that political processes and

institutions are not to be substituted by technologies and alternative forms of organization;

instead, they should be integrated.

Conclusion

Communication history has shown that salvationist accounts of technology as a cure-it-all

solution are reoccurring (Marvin 1988; Pavlíčková 2012). It has also shown that the effects of

such technologies go beyond a simplistic interpretation of that technology in particular. The

emotional impact of such sort of innovation frequently exceeds its cognitive effects. For

example, the infamous tale that the display of “The Arrival of a Train” by the Lumière

brothers had people running away on fear that the train would come off the wall was

dismantled by Gunning (1985). Also, just after World War II, Lazarsfeld et al. (1948) proved

that media effects on political behavior are conditioned and limited, rather than the common-

sense, theory-non-theory perspective (as defined by Wolf, 1994) that the media operate as a

hypodermic needle or a magic bullet that has direct, uniform, short-term effects on

individuals.

 What seems to be the point of connection here is that new communication

technologies go as far as to bring upon changes. But what kind of changes? Changes on what

to achieve or changes on how to achieve them? There are definitely positive and negative

effects according to the predominant set of values and social norms of the times and

geopolitical region in which it is inserted – for instance, democratic liberal values in the case

of most western nations – or the macro variables such as political and media systems or

regulation and enforcement systems. This dialectical approach to changes in media

landscapes contrasting pros and cons is but a starting point to any research dealing with the

impact it may have on political participation.

Furthermore, the innovative environment into which digital media are inserted

demand a continuous follow-up by the researchers: technologies change, valid methods

change, means of social appropriation change, regulations change and so on, in a chain of

effects that turn digital media into a moving target. An integrated approach to the

relationship between those dimensions is bound to be beneficial to the research. For example,

one perspective may be too optimistic about the contribution by users on their social media

channels as to the democratization of media, fostering diversity of sources and pluralism of

perspectives. That is, because the same phenomenon has as diametrically opposed side-effect

the information overload, one of the foundational technological issues that help set the stage

to the disinformation pandemic we have been facing over the last decade or so.

Finally, though there are definitely a myriad of new instruments, techniques and

technologies in the current media landscapes as compared to pre-digital or even 10 years ago,

it remains a field in which political actors dispute the meaning or the framing of events, the

salience of issues, visibility of actors. Whether they are disputed with traditional public
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 relations firms, paid advertisement, image events (Delicath and DeLuca 2003), news

gatekeeping, or with streams of tweets, posts, memes, published by journalists, ordinary

users, bots or cyborgs and live streams of personal or professional mobile cameras, mediated

by human, algorithmic or mixed editors or—perhaps the most realistic option—all of the

above. As important as the pursuit for innovative interpretations of the relationship between

the new landscapes of media and political participation is to detect which are the

contemporary failed metaphors, the magic bullets of the XXI Century. “Are Filter Bubbles

Real?”, asks Bruns (2019). One thing is certain, though: Media landscapes may change

quickly, may change deeply, but communication will always remain a cornerstone of political

participation as it is imbricated in political deliberation.

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