In 1982, when Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder demonstrated the capacity of television news to shape the contours of what viewers thought about, the so-called agenda-setting capacity of television news, the average American home received about ten television channels (News That Matters: Television and American Opinion, 1987). At that time, only 21% of American homes had a VCR, and only about 2 million personal computers were in the country. And of course the Internet and mobile phones were, essentially, nonexistent to the average person (Bruce A. Williams and Michael X Delli Carpini, After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment, 2011).

In 2014, there are almost as many mobile phone subscriptions in the United States as there are people (327, 577, 529). Even more remarkably, there are now approximately 7 billion mobile phone subscriptions globally. And the average number of television channels each U.S. home receives reached 189 in 2014. What are scholars in political science to make of these changes, especially for political processes such as elections, protest and advocacy organizations, and social movements?

Across several disciplines, including political science, sociology, computer science, data or information science, economics, and law (especially intellectual property rights) a vast literature has begun to address these developments. Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System is a valuable, thought provoking, and conceptually compelling addition to this literature. Rather than disregard television, newspapers, and even books as old-fashion and irrelevant (as some who speak of “new media” often do), Chadwick weaves together a hybrid model of information flows and political power. It is this mix of old and new media and unique organizational types and styles of operation that Chadwick is interested in explaining. In nine chapters, he illustrates his models with rich examples taken from British and American politics, campaigns and elections, and activist campaigns.

The book opens with an intriguing discussion of hybridity. Hybridity involves an ontology or “theoretical disposition that enables us to ask and answer some new and different questions about the nature of contemporary society” (p. 9). He argues that such an approach has the benefit of capturing complex interactive effects and relationships that might otherwise be obscured by “dichotomous, essentialist, or simply less flexible orientations” (p. 9). It requires the rejection of siloed conceptual structures, such as “new” and old media, and the embrace of fluid, sometimes chaotic-looking interactive effects across media and political entities—entities that are themselves often ephemeral. Chadwick calls on several disciplines in putting his explanation of modern media and politics together.

From political science, Chadwick points to the comparativist literature that attempts to account for states that display a messy mix of authoritarian and democratic characteristics (Larry Diamond, “Thinking About Hybrid Regimes,” Journal of Democracy, 2002). An important part of that literature places renewed emphasis on transitional phases between democratic and authoritarian rule (p. 10). In some cases, a blend of state and non-state institutions constitutes an integrated governance modality (see also Thomas Risse, Governance Without a State: Policies and Politics in Areas of Limited Statehood, 2011). Hybrid regime theory, organizational theory, and cultural studies also inspire Chadwick’s work. Insights on power and process drawn from these fields “offer some useful conceptual resources for studying a system of political communication in which there are ongoing struggles between older and newer media logics” (p. 12).

Rather than speaking of old and new media, media today constitute a hybrid system, an accretion of previous media systems with newer ones. The fusion is at times technological and even metaphorical, similar to when computer software relies on the convention of “documents” and “pages” taken from print. But more importantly, it is a sometimes contentious fusion among various media logics: “where logics are defined as technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms—in the reflexively connected fields of media and politics” (p. 4).

Newer media partially reconfigure social, economic, political, spatial, and temporal relationships among existing media elites, political elites, and publics. They do this by providing different normative contexts and terms of engagement for interactions among these groups (p. 24).

Power in this system is relational, fluid, and wrapped around information dynamics. Actors create information flows or leverage existing ones across and between a range of older and newer media settings to further their own goals or disadvantage opponents. Journalists in “old media,” for example, routinely borrow from the visual grammar of social media and mix them with preexisting professional practices to create hybrids. “Shepard Smith Reporting” on Fox News, for instance, is a blend of a traditional anchor news format with social media streaming displayed on oversize touch screens that are monitored by a variety of mostly silent staff, all of which is contained on a set that could easily double for the deck of the starship Enterprise. Similarly, older organizational morphologies, such as political parties and interest groups, blend standard issue campaign styles with the sort of mobilization repertoires associated with social movements. Older and newer practices, skills, expectations, and visual grammars form a mélange that defies fixed categorization.

One way this is discussed by Chadwick is by reference to the conceptualization of “assemblages.” First brought to prominence by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, assemblages capture the interactive complexity of modern media and politics. These assemblages are “composed of multiple, loosely coupled individuals, groups, sites, and temporal instances of interaction involving diverse yet highly interdependent news creators and media technologies that plug and unplug themselves from the news-making process, often in real time” (p. 64).

In turn, “political Information cycles,” an update to the older notion of news cycles, are assemblages in which the logics of newer digital technologies are hybridized with the logics of traditional broadcast media and newspapers.

Another important conceptual element of Chadwick’s book is the idea of “media logic,” the absorption of the assumptions, tropes, visual grammar, aesthetics templates, formats genres, and narrative styles of media by non-media fields, like politics, pedagogy, and other cultural institutions (David L. Altheide and Robert P. Snow, Media Logic, 1979). Non-media and entertainment institutions and practices absorb the entertainment ethos of television so that a good teacher, for example, is one who is lively and entertaining, irrespective of the value of the content of what he or she has to offer students. The same might be said of political leadership judged according to the politician’s telegenic qualities. Does a presidential candidate “look” presidential? Chadwick uses a more expansive and less deterministic understanding of media logic. Today, the media environment is too diverse and fragmented to speak of a single logic. Instead, “we can conceive of politics and society as being shaped by more complex interactions between competing and overlapping media logics, some of which may have little or no basis in, or are antagonistic toward, commercialism” (p. 21). Mediated politics involves traditional news organizations covering events and processes, but also members of “the audience” that actively engage with creating and shaping representations through their own logics and on their own digital platforms.

Given events since the book’s publication, one chapter stands out. Chadwick’s cogent analysis of the interplay between traditional news organizations and Julian Assange calls for a similar analysis of Edward Snowden and many of the same news organizations. Yet the book’s publication date simply did not allow for such an analysis. Similarly cogent chapters on hybridity and the 2008 Obama campaign (chapter 6) and on presidential politics more generally (chapter 7) add to the value of the book. Chapter 9 looks at hybridity and activist politics and political parties. Chadwick’s discussion of the importance of “actions” by 38 Degrees, the British activist organization modeled after MoveOn in the United States, is especially helpful. Based on interviews and close observations, he argues that the “actions” or issue campaigns pursued by 38 Degrees constitutes both what it does and what it is. The word “actions” has totemic significance “because it provides identity and collective meaning” (p. 189).

A bit of mental agility is required to understand the complex conceptual framework Chadwick develops in the book. Also, some readers might have preferred a sustained focus on media and politics in either American or Britain, but not both. Yet another element of the hybrid model is the interactive effects of transnational politics and media. One cannot understand the new found importance of candidate debates in British politics, for example, without the contextual influence of American presidential debates. In the end, the effort required to understand the model and track it on the rich examples pays off nicely.