New media, old politics? (Polis summer school paper)

New media is still a prisoner of old politics. Despite the claims for enpowering people, the evidence is that blogs, Twitter and online activism replicates rather than revolutionises politics. That is the argument of this paper by Vanessa Gottlieb, a Polis Summer School student. She describes the many ways that new media can enhance democracy but suggests that so far, it is still limited by the context it operates in. Indeed, new media communications themselves are still not open or democratic enough to challenge existing political structures.