Getting a grip on the Internet's emerging role in public life is not easy. Since electrification at least, new technologies have been greeted with a fanfare that alternates between hopeful strains of democratic salvation and discordant expressions of moral peril and social disintegration. Decades later, scholars pore over the details and find, lo and behold, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Power remains concentrated, discrimination endures, and the bulk of the population rollicks along largely detached from public affairs.

The three works under review employ a wide range of methods to assess the public functions of the Internet. Digital Citizenship uses survey data to show that being a regular user of the Internet is positively correlated with a number of desirable attributes, such as income and political participation, and that the digital divide persists even as it must be redefined. The Myth of Digital Democracy confronts political Internet utopians head-on with a range of discouraging evidence, most notably a detailed use of commercial Internet traffic data that show how people actually use online media (hint: not much for politics). Networked Publics brings an interdisciplinary group of scholars together to write critically about an array of digital issues, from a range of perspectives.These books address the state of affairs at a time when large numbers of people remain offline or suffer poor access to the Internet. Judging by historical patterns of media technology diffusion, decent access will be widespread comparatively soon. So one way to consider these texts is with respect to how well they identify issues and marshal arguments likely to transcend this transitional phase, and remain central when the Internet itself can no longer be thought of as a new exogenous force acting upon social affairs.

As well written and researched as it is, Digital Citizenship fares the least well in this regard, in part because talking about “digital citizens” will eventually make as much sense as talking about “telephone citizens” or “horseless carriages.” Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert, and Ramona S. McNeal open the book with a definition of “digital citizenship” as “the ability to participate in society online,” and they build a persuasive core argument that Internet access and skills are becoming baseline requirements for full participation in American society. They describe three “traditions of citizenship” outlined previously by Rogers Smith and Rodney Hero—liberalism, civic republicanism, and ascriptive hierarchy—and map these normative models, two good and one bad, to concerns about the relationship between Internet use and economic opportunity, civic and political participation, and social bias and discrimination. As a practical matter, “digital citizen” is operationalized as “daily Internet user,” since this level of activity is a good proxy for the level of usage and skill required to benefit significantly from being online. Throughout the rest of the book, the authors muster multivariate analyses of survey data from the 2003 Current Population Survey (CPS) and several waves of Pew Internet and American Life Project surveys, along with some American National Election Studies (NES) and other Pew data, to look at how individual-level Internet use is related to measures of economic well-being and political participation, as well as categories of race, gender, and ethnicity.

The economic analysis finds a significant positive association between wages and workplace Internet use, controlling for job categories and a range of socioeconomic variables. The authors discuss evidence for the Internet's salutary effects on productivity and conclude that, particularly for less-educated workers, Internet use contributes strongly to a worker's value, hence wages. An objection to this interpretation is that productivity gain is not the only way to explain the findings. An economic sociologist might point out that differences in technology use among firms in similar sectors, and employing workers in similar categories, might influence profitability and wages in a number of ways. And Wharton economist Betsey Stevenson, also using CPS data, found that the Internet increases between-job worker flows by tilting the dynamics of job matching to the advantage of workplace Internet users, who boost their wages in more frequent job changes. While it is not hard to see how those using the Internet at work are likely to be swimming in more lucrative waters than those who do not, for making policy arguments it is important to know what part of this is really due to individual-level effects, and even at the individual level what is due to productivity gains, with clearly beneficial externalities, and what is due to more zero-sum job market games.

The authors find that consumption of online news is positively associated with political knowledge, discussion, and interest, and that consumption of online news, use of e-mail in mobilization efforts, and participation in online discussions are associated with voting. While the authors do a good job of relating their findings to the relevant debates about political information effects, efficacy, and so forth, the usual concerns with inferring causality from cross-sectional survey data apply.

The book next grapples with the evolution of the “digital divide,” finding that while the gender gap has mainly disappeared (and even reversed among African Americans and older Americans), race and ethnicity are still significant predictors of Internet use, even controlling for the main correlates of Internet use: age and socioeconomic variables. The authors push back against “cultural” explanations that attribute a lag among African Americans and Latinos to lower estimations of the Internet's value, noting that, in fact, self-reported motivation data show the opposite, and they conclude that “this contradiction between aspirations and results lends credence to claims that inequalities online replicate traditions of ascriptive hierarchy in U.S. citizenship” (p. 121). However, while biased allocators may distribute finite resources (jobs, housing, wages, etc.) unequally on the basis of ascriptive categories, the Internet is not so plainly a finite resource brokered by external agents, but rather appears at first blush to be generally available via a moment of pure consumer choice. This poses challenges for the authors' insistence on mechanisms of discrimination. They seem aware of these challenges and cite research that attempts to meet them. But they are not fully convincing.

The remainder of the book argues that broadband home access is an important promoter of effective digital citizenship, and that public policy interventions are thus warranted to advance the spread and equality of Internet use. These claims are sensible, though they are likely to become superfluous as digital access expands. A clearer view of how digital citizen means anything more specific than “member of society” should focus not simply on access to the Web but on what it is that “wired” people are actually doing politically online. This is exactly what Matthew Hindman offers up to bracing effect in The Myth of Digital Democracy.

Hindman convincingly challenges seemingly sensible claims that online communications are expanding public voice, weakening gatekeeper power, and engaging broader swaths of the citizenry in politics. He opens with an excellent summary of the debates about the Internet's political potential, and zeros in on a functional definition of “democratization” as the redistribution of political influence away from traditional elites and toward a broader share of the public. His core arguments are that politics comprise a very small part of what Internet users are actually doing, that political voice is every bit as concentrated online as it is offline, and that the new voices actually taking the stage (as opposed to auditioning for parts) online are even more socially elite than those holding the megaphones of the mainstream print and broadcast media. He backs up these uncomfortable claims using multiple methods that include a case study of Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, a large-scale textual and hyperlink analysis of political Web pages, and several analyses of commercial Internet traffic data that show what people are actually doing online, as opposed to what they report to survey researchers.

Hindman concedes that the Internet is affecting the practice of politics but shows that the important changes are not where democracy enthusiasts have been looking for them. He observes that the Internet's main impact on politics has been similar to its impact on business, reorganizing the “back-end” and “supply chain” more than the “retail” side. Power and initiative do not actually move from political elites to the people, but, rather, elites find themselves in a new competitive landscape, armed with Internet-based tools for raising money, mobilizing supporters, messaging to the public, and so on. The effect of the Internet is substantial, but it is the campaign manager rather than the average citizen who actually enjoys new powers. Certainly, blogs, chat rooms, and other web site genres enable individuals to speak their minds to the world, but there is a big difference between speaking and being heard. Hindman takes the view that being heard is what counts, and he spends the rest of the book showing that online political voice remains sharply concentrated among elites.Casting doubt on whether “digital citizen” is the most felicitous term to apply to heavy Internet users, Hindman uses Website traffic data to explore how online politics compares to other uses of the Web. Visits to adult Websites, the top category, account for 10.5% of all Web traffic, whereas visits to political Websites account for 0.12%, nearly two orders of magnitude less. While “news and media” sites garner 2.9% of traffic, this category is entirely dominated by the same commercial media outlets and news services that supply news via print and broadcast, and thus represent no democratization of political voice. Taking on the blogosphere, Hindman finds that “only a few dozen political bloggers get as many readers as a typical college newspaper” (p. 103), and furthermore, that influential bloggers (who are often trained journalists) are in the main more socioeconomically elite than professional journalists. The blogosphere looks more like an alternative soapbox for chattering-class alpha dogs than for typical citizens.

Hindman's final bucket of cold water outlines the implications of what he calls the “missing middle,” characterized by the division of nearly all Web traffic between a relative few major sites and a boundless scatter of tiny ones. He takes on some key models, saying that the accumulated traffic to the “long tail” is insufficient to support the theories of aggregated niche value ascribed to it by Chris Anderson and the online marketing industry, and that the relative lack of midlevel sites with modest traffic undercuts “trickle-up” models of the networked public sphere espoused by Yochai Benkler and others. Scandal appears to be the main type of issue/story that actually trickles up from blogosphere to mainstream media, and scandals are the opposite of the kind of deliberative encounters that democracy theorists are eager to see flower online. Pondering a pluralist view of the matter, Hindman concludes by noting that the Internet thus far has mainly amplified the voices of white, upper-middle-class, highly educated professionals, not society's disadvantaged.

Altogether, the book poses a serious challenge to even mild political cyberutopians and contributes empirical evidence to several debates that often roll along without it. There are questions of interpretation, particularly about what constitutes a lot and a little when handling logarithmically distributed data, and what traffic levels actually imply about the true significance of online activities, but Hindman moves the debate forward and forces the back end of the political system to the top of the agenda where it belongs. Even after diffusion of the Internet as a medium has run its course, this rewiring of elites will continue indefinitely, as the competitive landscape evolves in reaction to any number of political practices enabled but not “caused” by the Internet. Furthermore, the book helps elucidate why assessing the Internet in something analogous to a mass media frame, looking for individual-level “effects” via survey data, narrows our view and makes us miss the real action. The telegraph remade American commercial and political life by severing the relationship between time and distance with respect to communications, thereby resizing markets, expanding powers of central control for governments, armies and firms, and giving rise to the great wire services that continue to form the backbone of commercial news production, even in the Internet era. And yet it was all in the back end of society's institutions, with no direct presence as a medium in individual citizen's lives, save for the very occasional telegram. The Internet is a popular medium, yes, but many if not most of its implications for politics reside at higher levels of organization than the atomized public, even as measurable through questions about participation in campaigns, volunteer organizations, and so on.

At the individual level, debates about the Internet's role in politics can look a bit small-bore when viewed against all of the ways that contemporary life is being rewired by networked technologies. Many of these have implications for how we form publics beyond the political sense of the word: how we negotiate boundaries of public and private, how culture is created and participated in, how we construct and share our public spaces. Networked Publics aims to be a scholarly introduction to the bigger picture of how networked technology is fueling social change, rather than an empirical exploration of any particular hypotheses. It is the output of a year's collaboration (2005–6) among a dozen scholars, from various disciplines, brought together by the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication.

In the introduction, Mizuko Ito tells us of the special tools (including a group blog, wikis, and collaborative writing software) used to ensure that this edited volume would have coherence. The book does not fully succeed in this regard, but Ito's introduction nicely links the book's core themes: accessibility (the profusion and diffusion of networked technologies), peer-to-peer and many-to-many (the decentralization and extension of communication capacity across levels of social scale), value at the edges (production and innovation in niches and network overlaps, feeding back to the core), and aggregation (the accumulation and synthesis of vast amounts of common data, culture, and knowledge. The editor, Kazys Varnelis, also provides a useful conclusion on “the meaning of networked culture.” The volume as a whole nicely introduces readers to a wide range of key experts and ideas from an equally wide range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. Despite the critical focus, a lot of digerati common wisdom is introduced unchallenged, including virtually every idea about politics that Hindman's book undermines. The politics chapter does a good job, however, of putting normatively motivated academic preoccupations like “deliberation” in some real-world context before moving on to consider online politics as actually practiced. There are occasional stretches that may give pause to the empiricists among us, but the book's contributors broadly succeed in synthesizing an expansive array of discussion about both the Internet and network technologies more broadly. Of the three books, Networked Publics is most vulnerable to the charge of digital hypsterism. The authors of Digital Citizenship present a more empirically grounded analysis of the Internet's implications for public life, but in the end they rely on the premise that the quality of American democracy is meaningfully at stake because of the Internet, which they promote by rhetorically keying their analysis to a set of normative models, rather than to an account of things as they actually are and have been. The Myth of Digital Democracy is the one book here that displays full sobriety, if not downright irritability, toward contemporary digital millenarian tendencies. By bringing new data and methods to bear in a serious critique of what were becoming consensus views about the Internet's role in public life, Hindman offers more than just another set of volleys over the net of ongoing academic debates. He points toward the need to look more closely at how the Internet is at work in a dramatic reconfiguration of the back end of public life and politics. And as his book indicates, such an approach will proceed best by stepping outside of the usual academic neighborhoods and generating some productive friction among methods, data, and analytic frameworks from across disciplines.