The Neopopular Bubble, published in the end of 2016 after several years of research, is my starting point in exploring the key themes of this website: political populism, social media news algorithms, the “missing middle”, academic speculation. These themes are all closely connected to the key argument of the book, namely that the mediatization and popularization of politics (and the model of “mediatized populist democracy” that has emerged in the footseps of these transformations) inevitably trigger a detrimental process of collective speculation on popularity, on popular media and popular audiences.
In the book I have theorized “neopopular speculation” as a process of collective myth-making around overhyped new concepts and models and tools of “popular control” (either top-down or bottom-up control) in a mediatized political environment. Key to speculative “bubble blowing” is that protagonists lose sight of the popular “fundamentals” they hope to connect and control: democratic procedures to articulate popular demands into popular will shrink, elites lose touch with social reality, social visibility conditions dramatically deteriorate, people feel to be unseen and unrepresented.
The book’s cover text:
The common critique of media- and ratings-driven politics envisions democracy falling hostage to a popularity contest. By contrast, the following book reconceives politics as a speculative Keynesian beauty contest that alienates itself from the popular audience it ceaselessly targets. Political actors unknowingly lean on collective beliefs about the popular expectations they seek to gratify, and thus do not follow popular public opinion as it is, but popular public opinion about popular public opinion.
This book unravels how collective discourses on “the popular” have taken the role of intermediary between political elites and electorates. The shift has been driven by the idea of “liquid control”: that postindustrial electorates should be reached through flexibly designed media campaigns based on a complete understanding of their media-immersed lives. Such a complex representation of popular electorates, actors have believed, cannot be secured by rigid bureaucratic parties, but has to be distilled from the collective wisdom of the crowd of consultants, pollsters, journalists and pundits commenting on the political process.
The mediatization of political representation has run a strikingly similar trajectory to the marketization of capital allocation in finance: starting from a rejection of bureaucratic control, promising a more “liquid” alternative, attempting to detect a collective wisdom (of/about “the markets” and “the people”), and ending up in self-driven spirals of collective speculation.
Blurbs
The book has received endorsements from world leading scholars.
Zygmunt Bauman, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the U of Leeds:
“This is a truly eye-opening, trailblazing study. Péter Csigó sets the commonsensical idea of the ‘mediatization’ of contemporary politics in an entirely new perspective. Misinformation, miscomprehension, and misadaptation—too often downplayed as occasional lapses or mere ‘work accidents’ of political procedure—are revealed in this thorough, meticulously documented study as pivotal, all but defining features of the emergent politics-media tandem. Their summary effect is a self-enclosed universe conjured by that tandem and operated from within it, in a deepening separation from the daily life of targeted political subjects and media consumers. Csigó’s study is a powerful insight into the mechanism of the widely noted, but still poorly understood breakdown of communication between the political elite and the society it administers.”
Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications & Social Theory at LSE:
“This is a very original, witty, and thoughtful book, most particularly in its development of a double critique: first, of the media industries themselves for creating and reinforcing the myths associated with media’s supposed resonance with their audiences; and, second, of the academic field of media and cultural studies for not distancing themselves sufficiently from these industry myths. This is a genuinely original and rich line of analysis, which forcefully hits out against the self-fulfilling interpretative bubble in which industry and academic commentary lives. The field of media and communications—and wider cultural sociology—does not see many attempts to integrate cultural and media analysis with wider social and cultural theory of the sophistication this book offers, that has the potential to have major impact.”
Download parts of the book:
Introduction: Collective Speculation in Mediatized Populist Democracy
Conclusion_(section 9: The Elitism and Crisis of Liquid Politics)
Online appendices
Appendix 1 The enigma of control: the fuel of modernist myth-making on popular media
Appendix 2 The “overlapping reversed narratives” of neopopular media research
Appendix 3 The four mythical rules of “popular connection”
Appendix 4 The Tropes of Neopopular Discourse in Commercial Marketing
Appendix 7 Statistics of discriminance analysis
What this book can add to the understanding of contemporary crisis
My conviction while writing the book was that to build a valid theory about a “speculative” present it is vital to avoid the hype which surrounds today’s most thrilling phenomena that urge for immediate explanation. It is essential not to fall prey to the hunger for immediate answers to the most actual “big questions”, for these questions are the direct triggers of the collective speculative process. Too many actors want reassuring evidence immediately, and turn instinctively to the only available source of such evidence, the answers of other actors – blinding themselves to the fact that these others are not a bit less disoriented and other-dependent and willing to jump on the bandwagon of plausible speculative explanations.
To understand the “popular-speculative” media and political system in which we live today, I have chosen to focus on the half-past, the formative first two decades of this system, which now can be analyzed from a certain distance and with a certain immunity from the cacophonic reflexive noise that surrounds the newest and most puzzling mysteries of mediatized political life. Thus, my book’s case of how a speculative “neopopular bubble” is being blown in today’s political system has been deployed with reference to polls-based politics, and marketing, and segmentation, and spin doctors, and tabloidization and TV campaigns and media spectacle. These are clearly the most established and formative factors of today’s speculative media and political system, where public actors and experts and commentators lose themselves in the web of myths on popularity they commonly weave.
In the past 10 years, of course, new developments have shaken the world of politics – the world economic crisis, the crisis of the European polity, the rise of social media and the upsurge of populists. These developments have deliberately not been dealt with in the book. The book does not mention Facebook, the Greek crisis, Trump, fake news, the most immediate questions of today that so irresistibly urge for immediate answers. Now, having unraveled in “The Neopopular Bubble” the cornerstones of the popular-speculative system that shapes politics and media today, I feel I am well-armored to address the most immediate problems of today’s media and politics. This blog and website will interpret the filter bubbles and fake news on social media news platforms, or the populist rebellion as the newest emanations and logical culmination points of the speculative processes that have strained the popular media and political system in the past decades.