The Digital Citizen(ship) (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021) by Luigi Ceccarini is a timely and informative book. As internet is now a potential instrument of active citizenship (p. 152), Ceccarini reflects on the opportunities (and the risks) connected with this instrument for the society at large. The importance of discussing the impact of the digitalization process is testified by its spread in the world. The data provided by Ceccarini (p. 22) show how relevant internet is and also its potential in non-Western areas such as Asia and Africa, where only 55.1 and 39.3% of the population uses it, compared, for example, to the 94.6% in North America or the 87.2% in Europe. The growth in the internet usage has been accompanied by the diffusion of social networks, which in few years became the most relevant media companies in the Western World and whose owners are now global political players. In particular, what Ceccarini highlights is that the digital citizens, despite the information abundance that characterizes the internet era, have relatively few alternatives when it comes to social networks, whose market concentration is very similar to a monopoly. In 2009, there were 17 leading social networks in each country considered, in 2017 the figure had fallen to five (p. 24). Despite this concentration, in chapter 6 Ceccarini shows that, unsurprisingly, social network users in Europe went from 18% in 2018 to 48% in 2019, meaning that digitalization has heavily affected daily habits of citizens. Yet, social networks are not merely entertaining tools. Social networks and websites in very few years almost reached television among the most relevant sources of information among European citizens. The gap between television (82%) and social networks and websites (41%) was more than 40% points in 2014 and it has reduced to 14 percentage points in 2019 (76 vs. 62%). Beyond descriptive data analysis, the book merges political science and sociological literatures to show how the advent of the digital revolution re-shaped the important concepts of the two disciplines. One of the main merits of the book is that it aptly connects what at first sight might be considered old theoretical and conceptual tools provided by the classics with the new theories (such as the newly formulated logic of connective action or the individualized collective action). The first parts of the book delineate the boundaries of the analysis, detailing the classic approaches to citizenship and political participation and the first relevant transformations caused by the advent of the liquid society. Ceccarini, in line with the traditional literature on political participation, shows that the civil society has markedly changed in the last few decades: citizens are less attached to traditional values and traditional organizations and are now more critical, more individualistic – one of the paragraphs (p. 70) recalls the famous work by Putnam ‘Bowling Alone’ – and more inclined to participate following different logics compared to the traditional collective action. Moreover, citizens (in globalized countries) are much less deferential than in the past and much more self-realized (p. 122), so that the classic vision of a dutiful good citizen constantly participating to elections (citizen-voter), has been replaced by a more critical citizen, who mobilizes for having those in power accountable (citizen-watchdog) (p. 118). In this regard, Ceccarini shows (p. 128) the difference between the ideal types of the collectivist collective action and the individualized collective action, the latter being the type of action that is typical of the digital citizenship. Contrary to the collectivist collective action, the individualized one is (a) self-assertive and less oriented towards delegating responsibility towards the leaders and (b) less attached to grand narratives and structured organizations. In this context, internet plays a crucial role ‘by making the sharing of information on the network of “individualised” communities or citizens less costly’ (p. 79): in a nutshell, internet, rather than revolutionizing the concept of citizenship, deepens already existent trends, such as those associated with by-now well-known adjectives (monitoring and critical citizen). Furthermore, internet makes political mobilizations more efficient in terms of time and of financial resources required. Yet, Ceccarini acknowledges that it also lowers the threshold for cognitive mobilization, thus favouring low-cost (and less impacting) political actions (see below). One important aspect that emerges by reading Ceccarini's book is that digitalization processes are not detached from the society in which they take place: rather, they are a quintessential evolution of old trends. To be sure, Ceccarini clarifies that the fragmentation of the public opinion space (p. 82), the technology-intensive campaigns (p. 83), the disintermediation between the leadership and the electorate (pp. 84–85) and the transformation of citizens as ‘prosumer’ (p. 101) are all phenomena that the digital revolution has further exacerbated. Accordingly, ‘DIY politics’ and direct democratic procedures have exponentially grown in the last few years, whereas classical forms of participation (party membership) have reached their lowest peak. Ceccarini, thus, concludes that ‘citizens are moving in the wake of a post-democratic politics, such that the evolutionary trend is inevitably also reflected in the change in the sense of “citizenship”’ (p. 96). Critical citizens in the Web era have now more opportunities than ever before to control and evaluate leaders in power: again, monitoring the activities of those in power is not a novelty. Rather, it is an old-established function of a working (counter)democracy, in which internet works as a surveillance function (p. 110) at local, national, and supranational levels (p. 118). Finally, Ceccarini warns the reader about the dark side of the internet: not merely the circulation of false-crafted information or the growth of political polarization, but also the saturation of different forms of low-cost participation in the Web (clicktivism or slacktivism), which nonetheless might have some positive sides (pp. 151–152). In conclusion, in Ceccarini's view, the ‘good’ citizen has gradually assumed ‘the traits of a figure dealigned with respect to the traditional elements of anchoring to the political sphere. S/he has taken on critical and monitoring orientations towards the power institutions. The practices of digital citizenship do not lead, however, to the materialisation of that ideal and ideal-typical figure of the “omni-competent” citizen in the sense discussed by Walter Lippman. […] But a citizen with a higher degree of attention and distrust […] than in the past emerges: one who is not only critical but also sensitive and open to civic surveillance involvement’ (pp. 161–162).