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INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE

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INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL
ISSUE
a b
Gunn Enli & Hallvard Moe
a
Department of Media and Communication , University
of Oslo , PO Box 1093, Blindern , 0317 , Oslo , Norway
b
Department of Information Science and Media
Studies , University of Bergen , PO Box 7802, 5020 ,
Bergen , Norway E-mail:
Published online: 22 May 2013.

To cite this article: Gunn Enli & Hallvard Moe (2013) INTRODUCTION TO
SPECIAL ISSUE, Information, Communication & Society, 16:5, 637-645, DOI:
10.1080/1369118X.2013.784795

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 Gunn Enli & Hallvard Moe

INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE

Social media and election campaigns –
key tendencies and ways forward

Introduction
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The field of social media and political communication is currently surrounded by

hype. A shared interest between different academic branches, such as infor-
matics, social science, humanities, and marketing/PR-studies (e.g. Woolley
et al. 2010; Bruns et al. 2011; Scott 2011; Vergeer 2013), in addition to a
massive public interest in mainstream media and social media, have driven the
topic into the top league among researchers. The huge interest is largely a
result of couplings between the ‘social media and political communication’-
field, and hyped phenomena such as Barrack Obama and the Arab Spring,
which were widely interpreted in light of social media (Christensen 2011).
This special issue aims to bring the research in the field of ‘social media and
political communication’ a step further, by moving beyond the hype, by avoiding
the most eye-catching and spectacular cases. It looks at stable democracies
without current political turmoil, small countries as well as large continents,
and minor political parties as well as major ones. Investigating emerging practices
in the United States, Europe, and Australia, both on national and local levels,
enables us to grasp contemporary tendencies across different regions and
countries, and thus avoid an over-emphasis on the most obvious cases.
Online politics have, in line with former innovations of new media technol-
ogy, been expected to reduce the power of the elites, and to enable a more
democratic participation. The most idealistic expectations have largely resulted
in disappointment, and thus follow the pattern of previously new media technol-
ogies such as broadcast radio, cable television, and local media (Skogerbø 1996;
Loader & Mercea 2012; Larsson 2013 for discussion). We aim to move beyond
dichotomies such as innovation/normalization (Schweitzer 2008), optimist/pes-
simist (Bentivegna 2006), shift/enhancement (Jackson & Lilleker 2009). While
different social media are by now routinely ascribed key roles during election
campaigns by political actors as well as the mainstream media, it nevertheless
remains unclear to what extent they are used – by whom and for what purposes

Information, Communication & Society Vol. 16, No. 5, June 2013, pp. 637 –645
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.784795
 638 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

– and how they relate to the overall media landscape. Our ambition is to inves-
tigate how these dynamics are manifested in times when political communication
is at its most strategic, pre-planned, and intense: During election campaigns in
stable democracies across the world.
This special issue provides empirical insights into the diverse uses of different
social media for political communication in different societies. The articles look
at the ways in which novel arenas connect with other channels for political com-
munication, and how politicians as well as citizens in general use the services.
Presenting findings from studies in the United States, Switzerland, Germany,
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Australia, based on state-of-the-art methodo-
logical approaches drawing on a combination of qualitative and quantitative ana-
lyses, the issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers in order
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to address emerging practices of the mediation of politics, campaign communi-

cation, and issues of citizenship and democracy as expressed on social media
platforms.

Social media definitions and the aim of this issue

‘Social media’ is, as catchphrases tend to be, not easy to pin down. A widespread
approach is to list specific existing services (such as MySpace, Facebook,
YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Sina Weibo, and Cyworld), or more or less estab-
lished web genres (e.g. blogs or microblogs) (e.g. Hansen et al. 2011; Nah &
Saxton 2013 for discussion). Such an approach gives an impression of some of
the instances we are dealing with. Another approach is to link social media to
earlier buzzwords like Web 2.0 or user-generated content (UGC). In some
instances, this approach leads to quite sophisticated definitions. Within the
field of management studies, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010, p. 61) describe
social media as ‘a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideologi-
cal and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and
exchange of User Generated Content’, which they further classify according
to the richness of the medium and what degree of social presence the medium
allows for. The challenge with such an approach lies in its fundament, since
Web 2.0 and UGC are no less amorphous and difficult to define than social
media.
Yet other definitory attempts start from social network sites, often building
on boyd and Ellison’s (2007) definition of the latter. Social media is sometimes
used interchangeably with social network sites (e.g. Aalen 2013; Curran et al.
2012). Others describe social media as one step further from social network
sites, as technological advances made audio-visual content more important,
and the sites got connected to traditional media actors – e.g. in the case of
News Corp. acquiring MySpace (Mjøs 2012). This approach seems hard to
apply as a general definition, as it depicts a historical movement found in
 INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE 639

some cases, but far from all. In other takes on social media, it is ‘an umbrella
term that refers to the set of tools, services, and applications that allow
people to interact with others using network technologies’ (boyd 2008,
p. 92). This means social media not only predates social network sites, but
also the internet itself, and include email and other systems that facilitate one-
to-one communication.
Focusing on the perception of the users, Bechmann and Lomborg (2012) high-
light three characteristics to define social media. First, the ability each user has to
make, contribute, filter and share content means ‘communication is de-institutio-
nalized’ (Bechmann & Lomborg 2012, p. 3). Second, the user is seen as producer
and participant. Third, ‘interaction and networked’ describe the communication
between users and their shifting roles (Bechmann & Lomborg 2012, p. 3). For
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Bechmann and Lomborg, these characteristics open up a double-sidedness in

media studies approaches, since the user is empowered or exploited, depending
on whether one takes a user-centric perspective or an industry-centric one.
The contributions in this issue address this tension. All the articles assess the
degree to which different practices adhere to the characteristics of social media.
They ask to what degree communication on these new platforms is de-institutiona-
lized, who the users, producers and participants are, and to what extent they employ
the potential to contribute, filter and share, and in which ways this leads to interac-
tive and networked communication. Some of the analyses concentrate on specific
services, like Twitter and Facebook, while others look at bouquets of services,
some of which would be included in definitions of social media, and some that
would not. In these instances, the connections between new platforms and estab-
lished ones are scrutinized. A shared aim of all the contributions is to analyze emer-
ging practices to get a better grasp of how social the media are: to what extent the
uses of these novel platforms for communication adhere to their potential, and how
they fit in a wider media ecology.

The articles: three key tendencies

Individually, the contributions provide insights into varied practices. The articles
include studies of individual countries with quite different political system and
media landscapes: the United States, Australia, United Kingdom, Germany,
and Switzerland. In addition, the contributions present results from studies of
regions such as the Scandinavian, with a comparative approach to recent election
campaigns in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In the era of ‘big data’, the articles
show how a mix of methodological approaches and data sets – ranging from
qualitative interviews and qualitative content analysis, via quantitative survey
data to large-scale computer-assisted quantitative analysis of massive data sets
– are needed to yield a comprehensive picture of the emerging practices (see
also boyd & Crawford 2012).
 640 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

Together, then, the articles point to some tendencies in the emerging prac-
tices of social media and election campaigns:

Personalized campaigning
The studies discussed in this issue identify a tendency in which the personalized
relationship with the voters have been strengthened as a result of social media.
This tendency is identified in several contribution to this issue, including Enli and
Skogerbø’s study of Norwegian campaigning which pinpoint that social media
have strengthened the tendency of an increased personalization of the political
campaigning, meaning that sharing of private images and messages containing
non-political information have become more common in tandem with the
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spread of social media. Moreover, in their study of Danish politics, Van Dalen
and Skovsgaard find that the politicians used Twitter and Facebook to strengthen
their position in intra-party competition, and that communication directly with
the voters were among the key motivations for being active on social media.
Still, the increasingly personalized campaigning did not result in an extensive
amount of dialogue between voters and politicians. The politicians’ use of social
media might be motivated by a wish to establish a dialogue with voters, but in
practice, this form of communication is limited. As a result, broadcasting of pol-
itical messages is a more common tendency than to engage in dialogue with the
public. In the study from United Kingdom, Graham, Broersma, Hazelhoff, and
Van’t Haar found that even though the large majority of the tweets were defined
as broadcasting, a quarter of all tweets were reciprocal. Comparably higher, reci-
procal elements were found among the tweets in the analyzed Norwegian elec-
tion campaign. These numbers are explained by the fact that the active Twitter
users in the sample were fairly few, but nevertheless very engaged and com-
mitted to take advantage of the interactive potential of the new media technol-
ogy, and as such avoid the professional distance or the strictly political messaging.
This again implies that the sample of tweets included a share of fairly private
tweets, reporting on interests such as the politicians’ favorite football team,
and dialogue with users about other subjects than politics. As a result, we see
a strengthened position of the semi-private politician, which we also know
from television talk shows and other behind-the-scenes genres such as the politi-
cal biography and the interview with the gossip magazines. Still, election cam-
paigns in social media nevertheless has increased personalization, and enabled
a more individualistic and private, and less mass media-drive and gatekeeper-
influenced, political communication.

Beyond the hype

A second tendency demonstrated by the articles concerns what is beneath the
surface. Political communication is not revolutionized, and the degree of
 INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE 641

change is limited and modest. New digital communication technology has

imposed changes on political campaigns, but not to an extent that contradicts
traditional media campaign strategies. The hype surrounding social media in
election campaigns is largely a result of the media-friendly success story of Pre-
sident Barrack Obama’s use of Twitter and Facebook to communicate with young
people and hard-to-reach user groups. In this volume, Christensen moves beyond
the Obama case, and rather studies US minority political parties, and how they
include social media in their campaign strategy in a climate where the two main
parties dominate media coverage of politics in mainstream media outlets. Else-
where, the hype is contrasted by findings in the studies of less obvious cases than
the United States. Analyses of social media use during election campaigns in
small countries, such as Scandinavia and Switzerland, and during regional and
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local campaigns in Norway, Germany, and Australia, enable investigations on a

small-scale, yielding new kinds of insights.
Nielsen (2011, p. 759), in a US-based study, found that ‘[. . .] campaigns
depend on a wide range of internet tools in their relations with their surround-
ings, and most of these tools are increasingly mundane, not developed specifically
for political purposes, and equally available to staffers and volunteers’. Email is
Nielsen’s main example, and he contrasts such mundane services to emerging
and specialized ones. The articles in this issue show how new services grow
mundane. Twitter and Facebook are by no means lumped into the same category
as mass emails. Still, the insights offered across the contributions presented here
illustrate how the use of social media to a certain extent has moved beyond the
unstable, pioneering phase. As a consequence, the practices found and discussed
in the contributions describe a nuanced everyday-like use among diverse groups.

Context matters
As social scientists, we know, of course, that social, cultural, and political
context matters. Still, studies from various cultural and political setting bring
to light how social media use for political communication is not an isolated
phenomenon with a set of internal and deterministic rules. Rather, the impact
of social media on election campaigns is fairly diverse across different regions
and countries, depending on media environments, cultural practices, and politi-
cal systems. Even measures such as the size of the country, and the number of
inhabitants which the politicians relate to as (potential) voters, matter for politi-
cal communication, and its forms and intensity across platforms. This issue illu-
minates the variety of uses in countries of different size, but this is also
inseparable from other cultural and political factors, such as the political system.
As an emerging field, social media and political communication clearly
benefits from a combined social science and humanities approach, alongside
approaches from informatics and computer science. Indeed, studies paying due
attention to local contexts and cultural factors such as social divides, standards
 642 INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY

of living, educational level, and language and linguistics, should provide a more
fruitful and rich understanding of the phenomena at hand.
Because social media, as demonstrated in several of the studies presented
here, are part of the total campaign mix, discussions of media systems and
theoretical insights from the field of media studies have come across as a valu-
able strength in this issue. The articles each in their own way illuminate how
the surrounding media structures and systems impose on how the use of social
media. One example is how a media situation where a large share of the poli-
ticians only has limited access to mainstream media will increase the emphasis
on social media. The extreme cases are often found in regimes with restricted
or even censured media, but we should not ignore differences in media systems
also within the stable democracies, which are under scrutiny in this issue. For
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example, commercial and often large companies dominate the US media land-
scape, while a mix of public and private media companies characterizes the
British and the Scandinavian media cultures. These opposites point to the
importance of including social, cultural, political contexts in analyzes of
social media’s impact on election campaigns. This issue demonstrates the
importance of analysing smaller and less obvious countries than the United
States, in order to pinpoint how social media practices emerge differently in
various contexts.

Ways forward

Building on the individual articles and the overarching tendencies discussed here,
we can highlight three aspects, which will be of importance as the research on
social media and political communication move forward.
First, the articles pinpoint a potentially powerful dynamic between main-
stream media and social media, which, uncovers a research gap in the field of
social media and political communication. A mutual influence between user-
generated content and mass communication has evolved over time, and is not
exclusive for political media (Enli 2009). Still, inter-media dynamics has
become an increasingly important factor in political campaigning, which should
be addressed in research. One step in the right direction is inter-media agenda-
setting studies, which seeks to identify how new outlets such as social media
work with mainstream media as a communicative power in relation to the political
arena (Lee et al. 2005; Lim 2006; Wallsten 2007; Sweetser et al. 2008). Further,
with such a framework, one seeks to identify key patterns in a new, hybrid media
ecology, and to examine to what degree traditional power-hierarchies are chal-
lenged. We will suggest that classic insights and theories from the field of
agenda-setting studies are implemented and revitalized in the field of ‘social
media and political communication’, because the fast-paced dynamics requires
an updated, and theoretically grounded, methodological framework.
 INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE 643

A second consequence of the findings in the present contributions is that the

research on social media and political communication would benefit from more
studies of Facebook. As of now, the analytical focus on Twitter risks to oversha-
dow Facebook studies, not least because the methods for tracking and download-
ing Twitter data have made it the preferred social medium to study. Such
pragmatic reasons do not make Twitter data any less sound or rich, and the
need to continue Twitter studies seems evident. Nevertheless, we want to
make a point about the mismatch between the widespread uses of Facebook
both by publics/voters, and by politicians, and the limited research devoted to
Facebook as a tool for political communication.
This points to a third issue for the field, which has to do with methods and
data. There is a continued need to strengthen efforts of methodological inno-
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vations, for quantitative as well as qualitative analyses, and across specific emer-
ging and fading services. An important part of this effort should be to increase
the sharing of data and tools for data gathering. We should strive to avoid situ-
ations where replications of previous studies are made difficult for technical
reasons, or where technical issues hinder the fruitful combination of different
data sets (e.g. Bruns & Liang 2012; Moe & Larsson 2012). Such endeavors
will also make key ethical issues with studying internet use all the more evident.

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Gunn Enli is an associate professor of media studies at the University of Oslo.

Address: Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo,
PO Box 1093 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway. [email: [email protected]]

Hallvard Moe is an associate professor of media studies at the University of

Bergen. Address: Department of Information Science and Media Studies,
University of Bergen, PO Box 7802, 5020 Bergen, Norway. [email:
[email protected]]

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