Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg have crowned their longstanding interest in the role of digital communications in contentious politics with this dense, controversial, and important book. Combining careful empirical research with bold theorizing about the nature of “connective action,” they set a new standard for the systematic analysis of the role of digital communication in contentious politics. Between conservative (“There is nothing new here”) and utopian (“Digital communications have revolutionized everything!”) views of the new digital communications, they argue that while much contemporary activism still resembles the protest politics of the past, digital media—and especially social media—have come to share the work of mobilizing and organizing contention, and, in some cases, do more of this work than formal organizations do.

Like many scholars who have written on digitally enabled communication, Bennett and Segerberg think that the phenomenon is significant, but they wisely avoid overheated arguments with those, like Malcolm Gladwell (Reference Gladwell2010) and Evegny Morozov (Reference Morozov2011), who pooh-pooh the phenomenon. Avoiding hyperbole in this hyperbolic field as “unhelpful” (p. 12), and drawing deeply on network methods, they concentrate on the theoretical development of their own position and on the search for empirically meaningful methods for measuring different forms of digitally enabled networks. Most important—and most controversial—they argue that the logic of “connective action” is different from assumptions about collective action that they find in the literature. “Digital media,” they argue, “are enabling people to commit to an action and recommend it to others by sharing their personal participation stories, photos, or videos,” and “connect large populations across time and space” (p. 16). The logic of connective action, for Bennett and Segerberg, cuts two ways: It enables crowds to mobilize with little formal organization through communication platforms and informal face-to-face association, but it also pressures nongovernmental organizations and social movement organizations to change how they mobilize potential supporters who prefer more flexible forms of association.

The authors’ case is strengthened by the fact that they break contentious politics down into three types, along a spectrum of the centrality of both digital communication and what they call “personal action frames” to each type:

First, what they call “organizationally brokered collective action”: “large-scale action networks that depend on brokering organizations to carry the burden of facilitating cooperation and bridging differences when possible.” These networks can use digital media and social technologies, but mainly as a means of mobilizing and managing participation and coordinating goals (p. 46).

Second, “organizationally-enabled connective action”: These may be centered around prominent, resource-rich NGOs, but their constituent organizations employ impressive and broadly shared batteries of digital mechanisms for personalizing the ways individuals may engage with the issues and causes that matter to the network actors (p. 48).

Third, what they call “crowd-enabled connective action”: At the other extreme from the organizationally brokered type, these are organized largely without central or “lead” organizational actors, primarily through technology-enabled communication, and are subject to notable reconfiguring over time (p. 46). Their communications content centers on emergent, inclusive, personal action frames and personal expression shared over social networks.

Organizationally enabled collective action has not disappeared, but the content of the communication is progressively more “personalized” as the authors move from the first to the second and then to the third type of action networks. ^{Footnote 1}

This is no arid typological exercise, however: Each chapter in the book is based on a paired comparison of two examples from Western Europe and the United States that illuminate the typology and, to some extent, test its usefulness. The authors provide detailed descriptions of the campaigns they study, alongside the technology-assisted examinations of their communications patterns. This makes the book a difficult read, especially because each empirical chapter introduces a new method of comparison based largely on technologically based analysis of different pairs of campaigns or movements. That makes the study ingenious and rich, but it also makes it difficult to judge how valid the measures employed are for understanding the role of digitally enabled communications in general. For example, Chapter 5 on “Networks, Power, and Political Outcomes” is a fascinating paired comparison of the British “Robin Hood” campaign and the American Occupy movement, but it introduces measures of power that do not seem to connect to traditional understandings.

The book is worth reading carefully because it brings the language and the methods of communications research together with the study of contentious politics, and because the authors never lose sight of the fact that the phenomena they study are deeply embedded in their political contexts (pp. 92–95). This means not only that political opportunities and constraints are important but that innovations that can transform movement communication in one sector or type of political system may fall flat—or even provide regimes with opportunities for repression—in others (Hassanpour 2014, Hassanpour et al. Reference Hassanpour, Borra, Barbera, Jost and Tucker2013).

Nevertheless, The Logic of Connective Action raises several important problems, even for a sympathetic reader like this one. First, while Bennett and Segerberg do not dismiss traditional forms of “collective action,” their account of these forms rests peculiarly on the largely dismissed Olsonian account of the “logic” of collective action (Olson Reference Olson1965). Olson, as is well known, thought that in the absence of selective incentives or coercion, “rational individuals will free ride on the efforts of others” (p. 31). Although the authors are cognizant of the two generations of work that have moved students of collective action beyond Olson’s microeconomic approach, there is a flavor of a caricature regarding how organizationally brokered collective action actually works in their account. In particular, by attaching “personalized action frames” only to their second and third types of networks, they elide the significant evidence that personalization has become an important part of organizationally brokered collective action, particularly in the feminist, gay rights, and environmental movements that preceded the advent of digital communications. ^{Footnote 2}

A second problem results from the most central claim in the book. Bennett and Segerberg argue that personalized communication is no mere technological advance but emerges from the “separation of many (particularly younger) individuals from the integrative structures of society, such as class identification, church, party, union, and traditional family and career models” (p. 6). This produces a personalization of political action that dovetails with the new forms of digital media and social networks.

I do not want to be read as arguing that there is nothing new under the sun, but these nested claims raise a series of questions that the book does not answer:

First, the “separation of many . . . individuals from the integrative structures of society” is something we have heard before, among others, from Emile Durkheim, who famously gave a negative valence to this phenomenon (he called it anomie), in contrast to the largely positive one given it by Bennett and Segerberg. What is it that makes the separation of individuals from the integrative structures of society positive today when it was negative for Durkheim? Perhaps the immediacy and the availability of digital media lend this personalization a progressive tilt today? But even so, the authors do not demonstrate this claim.

Secondly, how new are the new forms of digital communications in relation to movement organization? New forms of communication have appeared before in modern history, and each of them has had a notable effect on the organization of social movements. Think of the role of the pamphlet in the run-up to the American Revolution, as revealed by Bernard Bailyn (Reference Bailyn1992), or the role of the movement press in the nationalist movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Anderson Reference Anderson1991). Digital communications are faster, spread information more broadly than these forms, and are more easily understood by the broad public. But this was equally true for the vernacular Bible, the penny press, hand-held radios, and television. What is it that makes digital communications so special?

One aspect of digital communication that Bennett and Segerberg do not spend much space on is its language. “Go 2 EDSA; wear blk” was the text message that helped bring down President Joseph Estrada in the Philippines in 2001 (quoted in Tarrow Reference Tarrow2013, p. 191). The condensed message was effective because everyone in Manila knew where EDSA freeway was, and in this traditionally Catholic country, wearing black could only mean the death of democracy. But did that message endure beyond the goal of bringing down a president? What did it communicate about why his actions supposedly threatened the death of democracy? And what did it project about the content of democracy that the protesters wanted to advance? I wonder whether the speed, the range, and the immediacy of the language of digital communication can be a substitute for the richer language of previous forms of movement communication.

These questions warrant further attention. At the same time, Bennett and Segerberg have done an exemplary job of bringing together the study of digital communications with the analysis of social movements. And they have produced a richly illustrated, theoretically insightful book that no scholar of either field can afford to ignore.