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Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization. By Beyer Jessica L.. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 192 p. $99.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.
For scholars of social behavior, the internet has remained a vast and largely unexplored continent—full of unusual and isolated tribes with their own languages, customs, and rituals. Jessica Beyer’s Expect Us is a voyage into this strange land, with the author acting as a sort of online anthropologist—exploring the true meaning of “lulz,” decamping on dragon raids with World of Warcraft guilds, and deciphering profanity-laden, barely-intelligible message boards like ancient hieroglyphics. (It is certainly refreshing to read a book that explicates “The Internet Fuckwad Theory” in its opening pages.)
Like any good ethnographer, Beyer wants to explain what motivates these groups. The book examines four popular online communities, seeking to explain why two of them (Anonymous and The Pirate Bay) became real-world political actors, while two others (World of Warcraft and IGN.com) remained politically aloof despite their potential for mass mobilization. Member anonymity, she argues, was the main factor in shaping the level of political engagement. Namely, the ability to remain anonymous increased political mobilization by promoting openness, collaboration, and creativity. Having a persistent online identity, on the other hand, creates interpersonal relationships and social hierarchies, which “thwart political organizing in online spaces” (p. 9).
Two factors shape the level of anonymity—the number of formal rules for participation, and the availability of small-group interaction. Communities bound by formal rules are less anonymous and more constrained in their ability to mobilize politically. Similarly, online spaces that foster small-scale interaction decrease anonymity and thus discourage political involvement. When online communities cannot fragment into smaller...