Why the Left Is Losing the Information Age.

• Author: John, Richard R.
• Position: The Revolution That Wasn't: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives - Book review

The Revolution That Wasn't: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives

by Jen Schradie

Harvard University Press, 416 pp.

Liberals assumed digital technology would help their side. They forgot how power works.

Conservatives decry "shadow bans." Liberals bemoan Russian bots. The one assumption that everyone seems to share is that digital platforms matter. But how?

Sociologist Jen Schradie has an answer, and it will not sit well with the legions of academics who have been climbing the tenure ladder studying online political mobilization. For Schradie's arresting thesis is that digital activism favors conservatives. This conclusion may not seem particularly startling to political observers familiar with Breitbart News, President Trump's tweets, or the ubiquitous online harassment of women, Jews, and African Americans. Yet it runs counter to the techno-optimism that has long informed the research agenda of media scholars charting the influence of the internet in public life. Schradie's analysis suggests that the consensus view of the internet as a progressive, democratizing force overlooked a simple reality: building and sustaining an audience online costs money, and conservatives have more of it. "The reality is that throughout history, communications tools that seemed to offer new voices are eventually owned or controlled by those with more resources," she observes. Inequality, institutions, and ideas all matter; and, in the digital arena, each favors the right.

Schradie faults communications researchers for their preoccupation with the superficial indicators of online activity: tweets, hashtags, Facebook posts. To gain a more well-rounded perspective on how social media works, she adopted a different approach. Instead of studying an online organization, she focused on a particular battle around a controversial political issue: the legal status of public-sector unions in North Carolina. How, she wondered, did left-leaning and right-leaning groups use social media to advance their position? To answer that question, she studied thirty-four groups that mobilized in the 2010s on either side of an initiative to overturn North Carolina's ban on collective bargaining by public unions. An unabashed liberal, Schradie was not pleased with the outcome: the pro-union push failed, and the ban remains on the books.

While Schradie recognizes the quantitative dimension of online engagement, the primary strength of her book lies in her fine-grained ethnographic...