The citizen marketer: Promoting political opinion in the social media age

Abstract

Joel Penney made an innovative, interdisciplinary intervention into the scholarship on political participation with The Citizen Marketer: Promoting Political Opinion in the Social Media Age. By melding modern marketing frameworks with democratic theory, Penney offered a timely heuristic for rethinking citizens’ engagement with politics on social media. The “citizen marketer approach” developed in the book considers low-cost, redistributive forms of online participation—such as changing one’s profile picture on Facebook or retweeting a politician’s message on Twitter—to be persuasive practices of peer-to-peer communication that enact contemporary citizenship. “Such efforts,” wrote Penney, “call on citizens to act as microlevel agents in a networked circulation of ideas, disseminating symbolic packets of opinion and ideology as a means of influencing various segments of the public” (p. 5). Tackling the slacktivism debate head-on, Penney stressed the participatory and agential qualities exhibited by citizens when they share political content online. Rather than treating rebroadcasting practices as passive or perfunctory, Penney asserted that citizens assume a “curatorial agency” in their “selective forwarding” of media to peers (p. 31). Indeed, it is precisely this cognitive process of selection that separates humans from bots. The sharing practices of networked citizens, collectively, can increase their influence as gatekeepers and upend traditional power relations by “democratiz[ing] the field of persuasive political communication that has been historically dominated by elite interests” (p. 7).