Social media and politics in Central and Eastern Europe

0490623 - FLÚ 2019 RIV GB eng M - Monography Chapter
Macková, A. - Štětka, V. - Zápotocký, J. - Hladík, Radim
Who is afraid of the platforms? Adoption and strategies of use of social media by politicians in the Czech Republic.
Social media and politics in Central and Eastern Europe. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018 - (Surowiec, P.; Štětka, V.), s. 23-44. BASEES/Routledge series on Russian and East European studies, 113. ISBN 978-1-138-10082-4
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : social media * Facebook * Czech * politics * politicians
OECD category: Media and socio-cultural communication

Social media, as the advanced successors of the first Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and internet discussion forums, have come to dominate the sphere of online communication, with Facebook gaining prominence as the world’s largest social networking site (SNS). SNSs offer new opportunities for politicians and parties to promote their ideas, programmes and self-images, mobilize supporters and communicate with voters, while sidestepping the traditional gatekeeping role of the news media. In this chapter, we attempt to contribute to this still relatively sidelined sub-domain of research on the role of social media – Facebook especially – in political communication by presenting a case study based on semi-structured interviews with fifteen members of the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament. In the study, we pursue two main goals: first, to explore the motivations of Czech politicians for their adoption of social media, as well as their general attitudes towards these technologies, and second, to examine the actual ways and strategies of their use, particularly with respect to the extent of personalization and professionalization. Through this exploratory probe we are hoping to add to the branch of international scholarship concerned with the actors’ own reflexivity in the political communication process in the age of social media, while at the same time we strive to further the understanding of the process of adoption of SNS by political elites in the Czech Republic.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0284809