17,833 research outputs found

    15 years of protest and media technologies scholarship: A sociotechnical timeline

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    This article investigates the relationship between the invention of new media technologies and scholarship concerning protest and political engagement. Building on an innovative approach that moves beyond a systematic literature review, this article contributes to our understanding of scholarship concerning digital communication technologies and how they may have been adopted and shaped protest movements and political engagement. Based on visualizations, we draw a sociotechnical timeline of protest and media technology scholarship within three dimensions: technological development, methods and techniques, and the social phenomena under investigation. The article concludes by identifying major trends in protest and media technologies scholarship over the past 15 years. The sociotechnical timeline enhances our understanding of academic discourse at the intersection of protest and media technologies by highlighting shortcomings and potential for future research

    Social Media Networks and the Discourse of Resistance: A sociolinguistic CDA of Biafra Online Discourses

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    This study focuses on how Social Media Networks (SMN) have been used in recent times to champion social protests and resistance against oppression and political power abuse. Hence, ‘discourse of resistance’ takes a cue from the current waves of resistance and political revolutions in North Africa and the Arab world, which have been largely attributed to the vibrant SMN. In Nigeria, SMN have been used to mobilize support and active participation in popular efforts to achieve socio-political reforms. The corpus comprises mainly blogs and discussion forums hosted by the Biafra Online Campaign Groups (BOCG). The BOCG consist of persons and groups of the Igbo ethnic group of Nigeria, living in and outside of the country, that advocate a separate nation for the Igbos and accuse the government of Nigeria of marginalizing them. The study applies a sociolinguistic-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to investigate how sociolinguistic issues such as virtual community, identity, language variations and social interaction are used to project self-determination and the struggle for political independence. It further examines how ideology is reflected in this context via the discourses produced by BOCG in relation to the Nigerian state

    An analytical tale of the social media discursive enactment of networked everyday resistance during the #feesmustfall social movement in South Africa

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    Social media are a space for discussions, debates and deliberations about personality, culture, society, and actual experiences of social actors in South Africa. They offer an unexpected opportunity for the broader consideration and inclusion of community members’ voices in governance decision making and policy processes. They also offer opportunities to engage, mobilise and change people and society in impressive scale, speed and effect: They have mobilising and transformative powers emanating from their interaction with the impetus of the agency of community members seeking better conditions of living. The magnitude of the effects of these powers makes it imperative to have a better understanding of their workings. Social media have been used in numerous social movements as the medium of communication to mobilise, coordinate, and broadcast protests. However, social media were never a guarantee of success as most movements using them did not achieve significant results. Yet, governments in developed and developing countries tend to engage inadequately with social media supported movements. The research problem is that the contribution of social media to the transformation of the social practice of discourse, which causes SSA community members’ agential impetus (collective intentionality for action) to generate a discourse of resistance on social media during social movements, is not well understood. The main research question is: Why are South African community members using social media to enact online discursive resistance during social movements? The aim of the research is to explain, from a critical realism point of view, Sub-Saharan African community members’ emergent usage of social media during social movements, by providing a contextualised social history (a tale) of South African community members’ practice of online discursive enactment of resistance. The emergent usage of social media of concern is conceptualised as “discursive enactment of networked everyday resistance” within a dialectical space of interaction conceptualised as “space of autonomous resistance”; an instance of a communication space allowing for transformative negation to occur. The research follows Bhaskar’s Critical Realism as a philosophical paradigm. Critical Realism seeks to explain phenomena by retroducing (retrospective inference) causal explanations from empirically observable phenomena to the generative mechanisms which caused them. The research was designed as a qualitative, processual and retroductive inquiry based on the Morphogenetic/Morphostasis approach with two phases: an empirical research developing the case of South African community members’ emergent usage of social media during the #feesmustfall social movement, looking for demi-regularities in social media discourse; and a transcendental research reaching into the past to identified significant events, objects and entities which tendencies are responsible for the shape of observed discourse. In the first phase, a case study was developed from data collected on the social media platform Twitterℱ, documents, and in-depth interviews of South African community members. The data collected were analysed using qualitative content analysis (QCA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to unveil demi-regularities; moving from the observable individual strategic orientation of messages to discourses, thus to the tendencies of relational emergent properties of systemic magnitude which structure local discourses and are transformed by them. Then, the social mediainduced morphogenesis or transformation of South African community members’ discursive action was postulated in an analytical history of emergence (or analytical tale) of their usage of social media within a “space of autonomous resistance” during social movements. The findings of the research suggest that South African community members authored 3 discourses of resistance on Twitterℱ: #feesmustfall discourses of struggle, identity and oppression. They identified as “student qua black-child” stepping into the “Freedom fighter” role against the hegemonic post-apartheid condition curtailing their aspirations. It was found that social media socio-cultural embeddedness and under-design (Western European socio-cultural globalising underpinning features and functional features of the platforms) which interaction with the local socio-cultural mix (postapartheid socio-cultural tendencies for domination/power, spiral of silence, and legitimacy/identification) resulted in misfits and workarounds enhancing individual emotional conflict and aligning towards a socio-cultural opportunistic contingent complementarity integration in the deployment of discourse. That integration was actualised as a mediatization emergent property through asignification/signification of mainstream discourses of liberal democracy, colonial capitalism, national democratic revolution, free and decolonised education, black consciousness and Fallism. That mediatization through re-signification of the struggle for freedom created a communication “space of autonomous resistance” where networked freedom fighters enacted discursive everyday resistance against the hegemonic forces of students’ precariousness. The contribution of the research includes a realist model of social media discursive action (ReMDA); an explanation of South African community members’ deployment of discourse over social media during social movement and telling the tale of the transformation of discursive practices with the advent of social media in South Africa

    Slava Ukraini: a psychobiographical case study of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public diplomacy discourse

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    Volodymyr Zelenskyy\u27s public diplomacy during the Russo-Ukrainian conflict was examined in this dissertation. Zelenskyy’s discourse emphasized his action-oriented traits, Ukrainian identity, and nationalism. The study employed LTA, and LIWC-22, for natural language processing analyses of Zelenskyy\u27s public speeches and diplomatic discourse. Zelenskyy demonstrated agency, adaptability, collaboration, and positive language patterns, suggesting confidence and optimism, according to the data. In addition, the research emphasizes how domestic and international factors influence state behavior, as well as how political demands, cultural, historical, and political factors influence Zelenskyy\u27s decision-making. This dissertation sheds light on a global leader\u27s psychobiographical characteristics, beliefs, and motivations during a crisis, thereby advancing leadership and conflict resolution. By incorporating transformational leadership theory into LTA, researchers can gain a better understanding of effective leadership and how it develops strong connections with followers. LTA, LIWC-22, and qualitative coding were used to identify themes and trends in Zelenskyy\u27s speeches. The findings show Zelenskyy\u27s linguistic and leadership traits in public diplomacy, emphasizing the importance of understanding leaders\u27 traits in foreign policy decision-making. Psychobiographical profiles aid scholars in understanding a leader\u27s political views on conflict, their ability to influence events, and how they accomplish their objectives. As a result, perceptions of the state as an actor, as well as foreign policy decisions, must consider the effect of individual leaders. Conclusions include the Brittain-Hale Foreign Policy Analysis Model, based on a heuristic qualitative coding framework; HISTORICAL

    Cyber-feminism and facebook: A comparative study of Arab Women\u27s Organization activity in Tunisia, Lebanon, and Egypt

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    “[The Internet] encourages each of us to communicate and connect—not only with women who seem like us, but with those who are unfamiliar. And, in the process of opening our eyes, minds, and hearts to new horizons, we can help shape a future of understanding, acceptance, and peace” (Queen Rania of Jordan, 2007) (Wheeler, 2008). Displaying women’s current access to social media platforms such as Facebook, the study employs a comparative study on a number of Women’s Rights organizations in diverse Arab countries from the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia) by identifying, monitoring and focusing on the differentials in: interactivity and issues tackled on the SNSs (Social Networking Websites) such as Facebook

    Twitter and Research: A Systematic Literature Review Through Text Mining

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    Practitioner perceptions: critical junctures and the global emergence and challenges of fact-checking

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    Since 2003 and the emergence of FactCheck.org in the United States, fact-checking has expanded both domestically and internationally. As of February, 2016, the Duke Reporter’s Lab identified nearly 100 active initiatives around the world. This research explores why fact-checking is spreading globally at this point in time. Seen as a professional reform movement in the journalistic community (Graves, 2016), historical research on reform movements suggest several possible factors influencing the emergence of fact-checking including a decline in journalism, easy access to technology for the masses, and socio-political strife (McChesney, 2007; Pickard, 2015; Stole, 2006). Using a phenomenological approach, two focus groups were conducted among fact-checkers during the 2015 Global Fact-checking Summit in London, England. Participants shared rich experiences about conditions and contexts surrounding the emergence and challenges facing their organizations. Ultimately, as the purpose of this research is to help future fact-checkers around the world become aware of the circumstances under which fact-checking is most likely to emerge and thrive (or fail), recommendations from current global practitioners are offered.Accepted manuscrip

    The Political Communications of Iranian Green Resistance Movement of 2009: A Critical Discourse Analysis

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    In 2009 Iran witnessed the Green Movement, a popular uprising that challenged the status quo of the socio-political structures of the Islamic Republic. In this research, I attempt to develop an understanding of the conditions that contributed to the demise of the movement. This study takes a Critical Theory approach, and the theoretical foundations of this work are the Theory of Structuration of Giddens and the Theory of Communicative Action of Habermas. The data is drawn from YouTube videos and analyzed through Critical Discourse Analysis. This research identifies the key stakeholders of the movement and investigates weather their aspirations regarding the uprising were aligned or stood in contrast. My investigation uncovers evidence of systematic communication distortion in the public discourse of the leaders of the movement which greatly impacted demobilization and led to its failure. The results of my study also disprove the viability of the Reform philosophy as a pragmatic political path to democracy

    Neutral or biased? The presentation of the Kyrgyzstan and Egypt uprisings by RIA Novosti

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    This article analyses the media coverage of the uprisings in Kyrgyzstan (February–April 2005) and Egypt (January–February 2011) by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti. It aims to identify the features of two frame dimensions, namely the promotion of a particular problem and its causal interpretation. Our analysis uses 184 articles published online by the news agency during the two events and differentiates between three types of articles (news stories, opinion articles and commentaries by experts). The results indicate how several nuances of this framing dimension could bias public perception towards protesters or incumbents

    The State of Female Activities in Iran and the Internet

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    The rapid development of Internet and communication technologies raises the question of what role these media and communication interfaces play in social and political movements and development in individual countries. Although activities in cyberspace, including blogging, participation in social networks and other facilities provided by the Internet for its users are a new phenomenon, they have profound effects on social and political relations in the communities involved. In the information era, Internet is an important part of social movements in democratic societies and local communities. When the government blocks other ways to mobilization, Internet may bring like-minded people together and help them to find support for action. Internet has provided a new space for social movements and the effect of the virtual activities of the users on the actions and, often on the lack of social movements is of high importance.Meanwhile, the Iranian women’s movement, like other social movements in contemporary Iran, realizes the impact and position of cyberspace and has made use of it. Many activists, for whom other ways for expressing their demands have been blocked, have entered this space and taken advantage of it for expressing their opinions and communicating information to other people. In fact, the dominant socio-political forces and the atmosphere of repression, and fear have led many Iranian women to use the virtual space to campaign for women’s empowerment and equal rights. They have realized that the Internet may inform the outside world of the movement’s goals and activities and facilitate maintaining contact with other members of the movement. In fact, the open space that provides a platform for sharing information and has given the chance to the Iranian women’s rights activists to perform their activities in a space with a decentralized structure where there is less pressure than there is in the real world. Campaigns formed following the cyberspace market boom indicate that cyberspace has indeed ushered in a new era in the history of the Iranian women’s movement. The present study, covers the period from 2005 to 2017, provides an analysis of the role of the Internet in the activities of the women’s movement and explores the extent to which cyberspace has been assisting the women’s movement in achieving its objectives. By interviewing 50 active women inside Iran, the article investigates whether there has been successful interaction between cyberspace and the Iranian women’s social movement resulting from a dynamic adaptation between functions of social and political groups in the real world and the virtual world. It also examines how factors such as social participation, increasing awareness, changing beliefs, traditional views of women and social mobility have been affected by the application of the Internet, and whether cyberspace has been able to make women’s voices heard in Iran’s patriarchal society
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