Matthew Hindman

 Another edited volume to which I've contributed has made it to press.  The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age, edited by Joe Turow and Lokman Tsui , has come out from DigitalCultureBooks, a new imprint of the University of Michigan Press.  

 My contribution is entitled "What is the Online Public Sphere Good For"? My very short answer: scandals and fact-checking, but NOT giving ordinary citizens greater voice in politics.  I am particularly critical of what I term "trickle up" theories of online discourse.  Scholars like Yochai Benkler , Daniel Drezner , and Henry Farrell are right about many things, but I argue that their vision of an accessible, bottom-up political discourse doesn't fit with the available evidence.  

Governance and Information Technology: From Electronic Government to Information Government, the collected volume edited by David Lazer and Viktor Mayer-Schöenberger , is now out from MIT Press.  

The volume includes my chapter "'Open Source Politics' Reconsidered: Emerging Patterns in Online Political Participation." My previous discussion of the chapter can be found here ,  and while you can find a preprint version of my chapter here .

Better yet,  click here to buy the book from Amazon.

APSA on the air

There is a strange omission in these debates.  In calling for political science to have a "stronger public presence" (in Putnam's words), scholars have ignored the historical period when the public presence of political science was at its zenith.