If Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase “the media is the message” still holds true today, politics is not just communicated via the new digital media, but it is also profoundly transformed when it encounters the digital world. This new quality of mediatized political life, promising greater participation of the grassroots, increasing importance of the dialogue and self-presentation, orientating towards producing and spreading media content, has been in the focus of the volume Social Media and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Paweł Surowiec and Václav Štětka.

The volume includes two parts, broken down into nine chapters. The first part is a group of five chapters, closely knit together by the same focus on established actors such as politicians and political parties, and a strong leaning towards quantitative methods in the social sciences. Chapter 1 by Alena Macková, Václav Štětka, Jan Zápotocký, and Radim Hladík inquires into the motives and strategies of digital media usage among Czech political figures. The authors bring up the question of striking the balance between professionalization in media usage and the urge to maintain at least a semblance of the “human touch” and authenticity in politicians’ self-presentations in social networks. The next chapter, authored by Monica Pătruţ, shows that a highly professional level of mastery of digitalized political communication gave a decisive edge to Klaus Iohannis, who ran for the Romanian presidency in the 2014 elections. In his chapter, Norbert Merkovity concludes that media logic significantly transformed the behavior of Croatian and Hungarian politicians who chose to act like journalists and producers of media content. At the same time, in spite of high levels of engagement with digital media, their usage follows old patterns of one-way communication, which aims primarily at spreading information among passive recipients. Tomaž Deželan, Alem Maksuti, and Jernej Prodnik focus on strategies of digital brand management among Slovenian political figures and parties. Their chapter demonstrates high levels of intensity in using digital media in Slovenian politics and argues that although political newcomers may be quicker to jump at the personalizing affordances of Twitter, established actors, wielding larger resources, have a palpable advantage at the end of the day. Finally, Chapter 5 by Ognyan Seizov deals with Facebook campaigning in Bulgarian elections. The author shows that Facebook is used as a “loudspeaker” for those in power, who pragmatically decide to reach out to the wider audiences via digital media, while underestimating the importance of dialogue and interactivity.

The second part of the collection shifts the focus from established political actors towards grassroots, dissenters, minorities, and journalists. Likewise, the social science perspective of the first part gives way to the “softer” approaches of the humanities, used for studying hegemonies, identities, and ideologies. Alina Ryabovolova's chapter points to the predominant rhetoric of difference and disagreement among participants of oppositional Russian Facebook groups, who tend to exaggerate internal divisions instead of targeting Putinism in general and resort to a safer modus of irony instead of taking a stand as representatives of the population. Dmytro Hubenko and Melissa Wall home in on the usages of social media by Ukrainian journalists, who jumped at the possibility to reach out to their readers online and became more independent from their employers. The chapter, however, adds to the generally pessimistic picture presented by this volume by arguing that social networks tend to amplify voices of those who have already had a say in politics, rather than engaging with the passive grassroots. Paweł Surowiec and Magdalena Kania-Lundholm authored a chapter on digital nation branding, devoted to the online debates on the new Polish logo. The chapter addresses the problem of “clickivism”: the superficial and weak political engagement of the audience, which creates a semblance of interactivity but in actuality does not provide for greater participation of the people in shaping state policies. The final contribution to the volume is written by Galina Miazhevich, who investigated media activism among Lithuanian sexual minorities. The chapter shows that in a country pursuing a conservative and religiously-motivated political agenda, formation of digital pockets of dissidence does not necessarily lead to the consolidation of sexual minorities offline or to the improvement of their relations with society as a whole.

The volume provides a sober, balanced view of the transformative capacity of digitized social networks. The bad news is that mediatized politics is unlikely to bring us the ultimate triumph of democracy, but the good news is that digital concentration camps are not on the doorstep as well. The book demonstrates that the actual communicative affordances of the social networks online have not been fully used by political figures and journalists, who instead prefer to do old things by new means. This conclusion generally agrees with the instrumental interpretation of digital technologies, seen as a power amplifier rather than a hotbed for off-line civic activism. The editors, however, chose not to overdo with the dark hues. In non-democratic environments, new media can provide a platform for resistance for the opposition, but likewise, they can be used by the repressive regimes for propaganda, prosecution of dissidence, or even for spoiling democracies outside their borders. Recent investigations implicate Russian cyber professionals, allegedly connected with the Kremlin, in hacking the US election campaign. This latter, darker side of the new media's penetration into politics has not been explored in this collection.

The editors and authors of this book have made a praiseworthy attempt to place east central Europe on the global map. They argue that the processes of mediatization of politics in this region generally follows the common pattern, whereas their deviations from the canon could be explained by the shared historical legacies of hegemonic socialism, state-controlled media, and traditions of samizdat. However, this idea has not been fleshed out, precisely because the political culture and history of media in these countries faded into the background of the volume. So, the book tends to appeal more to scholars of media and politics, rather than to the area specialists, who would probably expect more daring questions from the volume, such as does digitalization in east central Europe display any new pattern, or work as a testing ground for unorthodox usages of digital tools, or help us to redefine our very understanding of mediatized politics? For the rest, the book taps into the most topical and controversial problems of contemporary politics, and is likely to find a receptive audience across multiple disciplines and geographic areas.