Introduction: We Are the Uninvited

ProQuest LLC eBooks, 2012

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have empowered non-state social actors, notably, social movements. They were quick to seize ICTs in the past (printing presses, television, fax machines), which was a major factor in their successes. Mass email campaigns, blogs, their audio-and video-variants (the podcasts and the videocasts), social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and other tools, such as Twitter, are increasingly popular among the movements and their activists. The extremely rapid diffusion of new technologies has raised a lot of questions about their impact on many areas of life from macroeconomic consequences to interpersonal relations, including much comment on their impact on social movements. Social historians are even rethinking the whole history of media. However, up to this point, we have no broad view of how social movement organizations are making use of the media. What types of movements are making use of new media? In what way are they using them and for what purposes? Are they more common in younger organizations, or in organizations that operate on larger geographic scales? Does their use lead to a sense of democratic empowerment? iv To answer these questions, this study analyzes an internet-based survey of four populations of social movement organizations ranging from the local to the international in geographic scope (four specific populations analyzed are: Pittsburgh (USA), Poland, the international movements, and the movements with high visibility online). This dissertation explores the use (and the non-use) of ICTs in the first broad survey on their use by modern social movements. It provides a broad overview of the movement's demographics (location, range, goal) and their membership (size, activity). It details the diffusion and use of over twenty ICTs, analyzing the success stories of email, static websites, phones and social networking, as well as the relatively poor performance of blogs, podcasts and faxes. Primary research questions revolve around the blurring boundaries between members and non-members (unofficial supporters and volunteers), the use of new media (by whom and for what), and the consequences of those trends (such as opposition to professionalization, or the empowerment of activists).

Interface Journal, 2015

While somewhat neglectful of the politics embedded within the development of new communicative technologies, Social Movements and Their Technologies opens up new conversations regarding the socio-cultural embeddness of contemporary social movements by providing a useful overview of the relationship between social movements and ‘liberating technologies’ that demystifies the communications infrastructures that have made possible some of the major protest events of the past 15 years. To do so, author Stefania Milan centres her analyses around what she terms ‘emancipatory communication practices’ (ECPs), repertoires of collective action and social organisation that seek to create alternatives by challenging existing media and communications infrastructures.

New Media and Society, 2013

Social Movements and their Technologies explores the interplay between social movements and their 'liberated technologies'. It analyzes the rise of low-power radio stations and radical internet projects ('emancipatory communication practices') as a political subject, focusing on the sociological and cultural processes at play. It provides an overview of the relationship between social movements and technology, and investigates what is behind the communication infrastructure that made possible the main protest events of the past fifteen years. In doing so, Stefania Milan illustrates how contemporary social movements organize in order to create autonomous alternatives to communication systems and networks, and how they contribute to change the way people communicate in daily life, as well as try to change communication policy from the grassroots. She situates these efforts in a historical context in order to show the origins of contemporary communication activism, and its linkages to media reform campaigns and policy advocacy.

International Review of Information Ethics, 2012

"The use of the Internet and new media for political activism has been researched and debated on since the 1990s. In countries under authoritarian rule in particular, the new public sphere and scope for political organisation provided by the Internet and social media offer great potential for political and cultural democratisation and for resistance against authoritarian rule. While it is widely agreed that this potential exists, there are warnings not to get caught up in the spirit of early Internet euphoria and hope that the dissemination of new media will make democratic political and cultural change happen by virtue of some sort of technological determinism..."

2019

In this graduate-level independent study, we will explore the increasing digital mediation of social movements over the last two decades. How has this shift impacted users and the communities they build, corporate platforms and their business models, and governments and their relationships with dissent? Organized around three keywords—publics, platforms, and infrastructure—we will pay special attention to the digital mediation of social movements in the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on the unusual geographic and political position of Turkey. We’ll particularly examine how the increasing digital mediation of social movements in Turkey has interacted in complex ways with major national political shifts over the same twenty years.

Sociology Compass, 2008

This article explores the contention that social movements are a significant social force transforming societies through their engagement with new media, such as the Internet, Web 2.0, and digital communications, which are seen as capable of facilitating new power structures. Utilizing della Porta and Diani's framework, it considers how new media technologies may be shaping the structure, identity, opportunity, and protest dimensions of social movements. It concludes by suggesting that new media does offer important opportunities for cost-effective networking, interpretive framing, mobilization, and repertoires of protest action. However, their adoption does not represent the creation of entirely new virtual social movements but rather a new means of providing existing social movement organisations, local activist networks, and street-level protest with a trans-national capacity to collaborate, share information, and communicate with a wider audience. Such new media-enabled social action is both more congruent with a politics of identity but may also increasingly be competing within a media environment saturated by user-generated content.

in late 2010, a series of demonstrations, insurgencies, and revolutions demanding democratization-targeting both authoritarian and parliamentary regimes on six continents-took the concept of social protest to a new level. 1 In this process, the periphery has become the new center, as tactics and strategies initially developed and implemented in North Africa during the Arab Spring have diffused to major metropolises in the Global North, including London, New York, Athens, and Toronto. These new social movements have ingeniously incorporated the subversive use of Western technologies into a convenient way to build and sustain one's social networks. Protestors in North Africa and the Middle East-far from the core where these new networking technologies were developed-appropriated, redefined, and transformed them into effective tools for organizing definitively disruptive protests. While their efficacy was still being tested in North Africa, a global snowball effect carried both the organizing methods and the vocabulary of protest to every region of the world.

Social media becomes a world power by itself during the first years of the 21st century and with it come great cultural changes and clashes. Cultures and countries merge together in ideas and ideologies, aspire towards increasingly common goals and social media quickly becomes a tool of democracy, for democracy. I strive to identify what aspect of the social media makes it a feared and effective tool against tyrannic governments and how does the population at large use social-media in making themselves heard and more importantly, listened, by the whole world. Social media today makes it impossible to stand-by in ignorance while countries crumble. Leaving aside social media as a tool for democracy, I also focus on its impact on other similar movements such as the riots in Iran, although directed towards different goals, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. I decide to look at how social media became an enabling or catalytic factor in the movement and how it perpetuated the idea beyond the borders of conception, in a time when traditional media was ignoring, for unknown reasons, an event that proved to be the biggest social movement on the planet in the 21st century. Through the research done I manage to show that there is a direct correlation between the use of social-media in these events and the censorship of the Internet attempts that followed, and I also manage to show that a staggering number of protesters and activists in both movements relied heavily or in many cases solely on the use of social-media for information gathering and spreading.

How does the algorithmically mediated environment of social media restructure social action? This article combines social movement studies and science and technology studies to explore the role of social media in the organization, unfolding, and diffusion of contemporary protests. In particular, it examines how activists leverage the technical properties of social media to develop a joint narrative and a collective identity. To this end, it offers the notion of cloud protesting as a theoretical approach and framework for empirical analysis. Cloud protesting indicates a specific type of mobilization that is grounded on, modeled around, and enabled by social media platforms and mobile devices and the virtual universes they identify. The notion emphasizes both the productive mediation of social and mobile media and the importance of activists’ sense-making activities. It also acknowledges that social media set in motion a process that is sociotechnical in nature rather than merely sociological or communicative, and thus can be understood only by intersecting the material and the symbolic dimensions of contemporary digitally mediated collective action. The article shows how the specific materiality of social media intervenes in the actors’ meaning work by fostering four mechanisms—namely performance, interpellation, temporality, and reproducibility—which concur to create a “politics of visibility” that alters traditional identity dynamics. In addition, it exposes the connection between organizational patterns and the role of individuals, explaining how the politics of visibility is the result of a process that originates and ends within the individual—which ultimately creates individuals-in-the-group rather than groups.