[Air-L] New Book: The Citizen Marketer

[Joel Penney]

Dear AoIR colleagues,


I’d like to let you know about my new book that’s out this week from the
Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series, edited by Andrew Chadwick. I
hope some of you will find it interesting and relevant to your work.


“The Citizen Marketer: Promoting Political Opinion in the Social Media Age”


Joel Penney


Oxford University Press




Description


>From hashtag activism to the flood of political memes, grassroots
circulation of opinion online is changing the landscape of political
communication. By exploring how everyday people promote messages to
persuade their peers and shape the public mind, Joel Penney offers a new
framework for understanding the phenomenon of viral political
communication: the citizen marketer. The discussion is grounded in
testimony of citizens who have changed their profile pictures to protest
symbols, tweeted links to articles about select issues, or displayed
anything from slogan T-shirts to viral videos that promote favored
politicians. In contrast to the “slacktivism” critique often leveled at
these media-centered forms of activism, Penney argues that they enable
citizens to take on the role of viral political marketers as they
participate in the networked spread of ideas. Furthermore, Penney examines
the risks that these practices pose for increasing polarization and
partisanship, the trivialization of issues, and manipulation by political
elites.


Like the citizen consumer, the citizen marketer is guided by the logics of
marketing practice, but, rather than being passive, actively circulates
persuasive media to advance political interests. Citizens view their
participation in such activities not only in terms of how it may shape or
influence outcomes, but as a statement of their own identity. As the book
argues, these practices signal an important shift in how political
participation is conceptualized and performed in advanced capitalist
democratic societies, as they casually inject political ideas into the
everyday spaces and places of popular culture.


While marketing is considered a dirty word in certain critical circles --
particularly among segments of the left that have identified neoliberal
market logics and consumer capitalist structures as a major focus of
political struggle -- some of these very critics have determined that the
most effective way to push back against the forces of neoliberal capitalism
is to co-opt its own marketing and advertising techniques to spread
counter-hegemonic ideas to the public. Accordingly, this book argues that
the citizen marketer approach to political action is much broader than any
one ideological constituency or bloc. Rather, it is a means of promoting a
wide range of political ideas, including those that are broadly critical of
elite uses of marketing in consumer capitalist societies. The book includes
an extensive historical treatment of citizen-level political promotion in
modern democratic societies, connecting contemporary digital practices to
both the 19th century tradition of mass political spectacle as well as more
informal, culturally-situated forms of political expression that emerge
from postwar countercultures.




Table of Contents


Chapter 1: The Citizen Marketer Approach to Political Action


Chapter 2: The Historical Lineage of the Citizen Marketer


Chapter 3: Self-Labeled and Visible Identities


Chapter 4: Political Fans and Cheerleaders


Chapter 5: News Spreaders and Agenda-Setters


Chapter 6: Towards a Critical Literacy of the Citizen Marketer Approach





“This is a must-read book for anyone looking to understand the ways that
citizens are taking up the marketing of political candidates and causes in
the social media era.”


- Daniel Kreiss, Author of *Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive
Campaigning and the Data of Democracy *




“*The Citizen Marketer* helps us dig into real campaigns and real
campaigners whose work sometimes proceeds in the spirit of democracy, and
sometimes degrades democracy. Understanding modern political communication
means getting to know the varied forms of computational propaganda that we
all produce and consume.”



- Philip Howard, Author of *Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May
Set Us Free or Lock Us Up*



“Joel Penney provides a compelling, nuanced, and rich exploration of how
marketing logic and civic self-expression are morphing and combining in the
digital age. It is an essential book for all interested in politics,
marketing, and public life.”

-David Karpf, Author of *The MoveOn Effect and Analytic Activism*





About the Author


Joel Penney is an Associate Professor at the School of Communication and
Media at Montclair State University. He received his PhD in 2011 from the
Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.



www.citizenmarketer.org