Helen Margetts will speak about Political Turbulence on 26 April 2016 at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Cambridge. The talk, entitled “Social Media and Political Turbulence,” will be from 14:30 to 16:30 in Room SG2, CRASSH, 7 West Road, Cambridge. Full details are available at the link below.

The last few years have seen increasingly frenzied speculation about the role of social media in political mobilisation. In an important recent book Helen Margetts and her colleagues report on research drawing on large-scale data generated from the Internet and real-world events to show how mobilisations that succeed are unpredictable, unstable and often unsustainable. To reach a better understanding of this unruly force in the political world, the researchers have used experiments that test how social media influence citizens when they are deciding whether or not to participate. They conclude that a new kind of “chaotic pluralism” is the model of democracy that is emerging in our networked environment. …Further details