Lexington Books
Pages: 182
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9
978-1-4985-3978-4 • Hardback • April 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
978-1-4985-3979-1 • eBook • April 2019 • $105.50 • (£82.00)
Carmit Wiesslitz, PhD,is lecturer in the Department of Politics & Communications at Hadassah Academic College, Israel.
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Internet as an Alternative to Traditional Mainstream Media
Chapter 2: The Internet as a means of public outreach
Chapter 3: Mobilizing the people: Online organizing and recruitment
Chapter 4: Online discussions: Is the Internet a deliberative and democratic platform for debate?
Conclusion
References
Appendix A
Appendix B
In her ethnographic study of civil society organizations’ Internet use in Israel, Dr. Wiesslitz cools down the media hype about the revolutionary power of new communication technologies. Instead of making social movements more democratic in their operations, or leveling the playing field with the agenda-setting power of traditional news outlets, the game-changing capabilities of new media communications are subdued by the organizations’ own features: for poor-resourced, horizontal radical movements, the Internet is vital; for more established, hierarchical groups, the Internet is just another tool for image-management.
Israel often makes the headlines because of sectarian conflict and the occupation of the Palestinian territories; it is refreshing to read a study that cares about the country’s often-overlooked civil society organizations. This book is innovative on several fronts. Internet use is observed in the context of the social movements’ other activities, rendering findings that, far from fetishing technology, show that a simple e-mail list can mobilize more supporters than a Facebook group. Civil society organizations are researched holistically and systemically, in relation to other agents in the public sphere such as Government and the media, going beyond the usual limitation of looking at groups by their particular area of advocacy (environment, civil rights, women’s issues, etc.). It offers a unique comparative look between the present social web-dominated Internet and the pre-social media Internet of the early 2000s, discovering that, still, the legacy media keep much of their intermediary role in the public debate, being the target of much of civil organizations’ actions, who adapt their rhetoric and mobilizing strategies to the journalistic logic.
— Francisco Seoane Pérez, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid