Faculty Spotlight: Joel Penney

Over the past 15 years, digital politics has exploded over every form of online media and social media available. Everyday people engage in a battle of wits and minds for the legitimacy of their beliefs online through long and effort-filled posts on forums and Facebook, short blasts of topical wit on Twitter, carefully crafted infographics shared to provide factual context, and hashtag movements to cross platforms. Nowhere was this more readily apparent than during the 2016 USA presidential election. The use of social media in politics, however, is not new.  Barack Obama is credited with being the first politician to ride the digital waves into the White House.  But, it has been our new president, Donald Trump, who has elevated the use of social media to a new strata – communicating directly with the public as president.  Trump consistently uses his Twitter account to react to media and political issues quickly and send his opinion out to his stunning 26.8 million followers. While these are just two examples of very well-known politicians using media to promote their positions, this is not unique to the elite. Average folks do the same thing on a much smaller scale every day for the same purpose, without the aspect of self-promotion or the intention to take down enemies. This current social and political trend has been studied and written about in a soon to be published book by Montclair State University’s very own Dr. Joel Penney.

Dr. Joel Penney is an assistant professor with the School of Communication and Media who has published articles in The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, the International Journal of Communication, and The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Drawing some inspiration from his Ph.D dissertation on the uses of political t-shirts in the digital age and his later publications on politics and protest culture through media, Dr. Penney is the author of the upcoming book “The Citizen Marketer – Promoting Political Opinion in the Social Media Age.” Dr. Penney utilizes his specializations in new media as well as political communication and theory to help make sense of online political speech in its various forms as well as the logic behind such acts by the average person.

The book analyzes the political memes, profile picture changes, infographic sharing, hashtag activism and ‘slacktivism’ as they relate to the current political and cultural theater in the forms of the 2016 election, Black lives matter, and other movements through a lens of marketing. Dr. Penney examines how people become “citizen marketers,” actively participating in media through various means to advance their political interests or protests as grassroots movements. The book shows these citizen marketers are not simply trying to further their ideas and movements, but how participating in such action becomes a statement of identity for them as political speech can then be located in the common spaces of everyday life. Penney’s book goes on to show that citizen marketing isn’t unique to one side of the spectrum of politics either or even just a modern occurrence; it is used by the elite and the destitute, it is used by the left and the right, and it has been used in both modern contexts and as far back as the early 19^th century.

With “The Citizen Marketer,” Penney investigates the logic and motivations of those that follow its approach and how activism has evolved over time. Penney states that viewing through a lens of marketing can help one understand the issues and politics, but that it is not without its own pitfalls – such as people sharing information without any sort of knowledge or disseminating misinformation or propaganda which can lead to further political and social polarization.

The Citizen Marketer is being published by Oxford University Press on May 31^st 2017 and is available for pre-order now here.