Before the Internet, almost everything we did was through an intermediate agent. For example, to listen to music, we had to buy LPs, and later CDs, from a brick-and-mortar music store. To travel to other cities, we had to reserve our hotel rooms through a travel agent. To take a taxi, we had to call an operator for dispatching.

However, the Internet changed everything. First with Napster, and now Spotify, we can listen to whatever we like through the Internet in real time. Airbnb allows us to directly contact bed owners. Uber connects us to a nearby and available car. Although still through an agent--Spotify, Airbnb, Uber--we have a lot more control over the process.

Digital political participation, social networks and big data is about the effects of removing intermediate agents, called “disintermediation” in this book. As the title suggests, it focuses on the consequences of political participation once citizens can connect to politicians and each other directly. The book consists of two parts. In the first part, “The Framework: Towards a Disintermediated Politics?,” four chapters discuss how public opinion was formed in the old days versus how it is formed in the Internet era in general and in social networks in particular. It also discusses the side effects of current networked communication in politics, including homogeneity, homophily, polarization, and incivility.

The second part is “Disintermediation in Social Networks.” This part uses #UnidosPodemos (a Spanish left-wing political movement), #BlackLivesMatter, and #BringBackOurGirls (the 2014 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapping incident) as examples to illustrate the happenings of disintermediation. It also uses #Trump2016 and big data from Twitter as a negative example to explain what happened in the 2016 election.

For those who are interested in how public opinions are formed and shared in an Internet world, this is an interesting read. Though not submitting to any empirical study, the book assumes that disintermediation is a recurrent phenomenon in technologically developed communication contexts. Whether it is good or bad, time will tell.