How Social Networks Reshaped Society and Politics

In recent years, the media has been saturated with stories about the effects of social media on our social, political, and personal lives. Commentators have warned us about everything from echo chambers deepening polarization to algorithms fueling extremism.   

In "El Vuelco: Historia personal y política de cómo las redes han cambiado el mundo para siempre,” ("The Upheaval: A Personal and Political History of How Networks Changed the World Forever"), a new Spanish-language book by Carolyn Marvin Professor of Communication and Sociology Sandra González-Bailón and El País journalist Jordi Pérez Colomé examine these questions through research and personal experience to challenge popular narratives about social networks and society.

We spoke with González-Bailón about the book, which is available now from Deusto.  

Can you provide a brief description of the book's argument?  

The book examines how online technologies (from social media to AI) transformed political power over the last three decades. We challenge the idea that algorithms alone control what we see. Networked minorities are the real drivers of change because of their disproportionate impact on content creation and visibility.  

Your co-author, Jordi Pérez Colomé, is a journalist. What was it like to work with someone outside of the social sciences? How do your expertise complement one another?  

Academics and journalists have a very different way of looking at the world, but we share a commitment to truth. Writing a book across time zones and about technologies that change every day is not easy, but our collaboration pushed us to write more clearly about complex issues and to stay alert to our own blind spots. In this era when everyone talks about the productivity gains of working with AI agents, we chose instead to rely on the human experiences we’ve built over our careers: mine as a researcher, his as a journalist. It may not have been the most efficient way to write a book, but it was certainly the most enriching.    

How did you and Jordi Pérez Colomé connect and what made you write the book?  

We first connected in 2023, when Jordi, who covers technology for El País, reached out to interview me about one of my articles. What was meant to be a brief conversation turned into a two‑year exchange, the time it took us to write this book. We were driven by a shared frustration with how metaphors are used and misused to describe the social impact of technology, from social media to AI. So we decided to write a book that strips away the clichés and looks at the underlying evidence.  

The majority of your scholarship is in English — what was it like to write in your native language?  

It wasn’t easy, but it was revealing: it reminded me that the connotations of language matter, and that many clichés or analogies used to make sense of technology simply don’t translate well, an indication of how little they actually explain. Take, for instance, the idea of “rabbit holes” as shorthand for radicalization dynamics. The metaphor just doesn’t work the same way in Spanish. The difficulty of translating it makes you realize that sometimes you don’t fully know what you mean when you use certain words. Working with a journalist who often acted as an editor made us pay close attention to the words we use to describe the technological world, especially in light of existing research, and we hope that clarity comes through in the pages we wrote.