Open or just Fragmented? Mobilization through Open Source Action Repertoires in the Blockchain Social Movement

The Blockchain social movement not only opposed the economic system in the post-2009 financial crisis years, it provided a tangible technological alternative, built in computer code and using Open Source (OS) principles. The social movement mobilized using familiar OS structures and activities as action repertoires. Although this openness encouraged mobilization, this ran the risk of losing control, as individuals used the OS code for their own purposes, outside the scope of the social movement. The use of OS action repertoires provided ways to coordinate, vent and build consensus. Further, the resulting dissent, when it occurred made the movement more relevant by extending the movement and mobilizing individuals in complementary areas, driven by economic incentives. The OS repertoire of open entrepreneurship also facilitated mobilization, making the movement more influential

Communication in progressive movement parties: against populism and beyond digitalism

In this article, I discuss the conceptualization of movement parties and bridge it with that of communication practices. In particular, I show how the analysis of communication practices within movement parties allows going beyond the technological determinism implicit in concepts such as online populism or digital parties. At different moments in history, social movements entered institutions by forming political parties. When this happened with progressive movements, movement parties were characterized by an appeal to broaden participation through the inclusion of new groups among the population within representative institutions. This general trend is to be kept in mind when addressing the latest wave of movement parties, in particular, the progressive ones, that build upon the history of left-wing party families. Based on these reflections, I critique analyses that, with a specific focus on the core subject of this special issue, have addressed communication strategies, depicting movement parties–including those on the Left–as online populist parties or digital parties. Considering alternative (less technological and more political) explanations, I suggest instead that the effects of the technology are filtered through activists’ agency, the movement parties’ evolution being influenced by movements’ dynamics and competition in the party system. In particular, the concept of communication practices, as developed in social movement studies, will be referred to in order to move beyond some stereotypes coming from either mass media or digital media studies, and so allowing for an historical account of the evolution of movement parties’ communication

Tactics and Strategic Action

We discuss the dominant approaches to the analysis of social movement tactics and strategies. If there is broad agreement among scholars about their importance to the performance and understanding of collective action, there is considerably less consensus on how best to explain the decisions over tactics and strategy that social movements make, the extent to which decisions reflect individual or group preferences, or the importance that should be accorded to the micro and macro levels of analysis. The debates concerning these questions provide the main focus of our discussion, from contentious politics to actor-centered and interactionist approaches

Reinventing Media Activism: Public Interest Advocacy in the Making of U.S. Communication-Information Policy, 1960-2002

This report is a long-term analysis of citizens' collective action to influence public policy toward communication and information. The work discusses in greater detail what is meant by communication and information policy (CIP) and why we think it is worthwhile to study it as a distinctive domain of public policy and citizen action. The report concentrates on citizen action in the United States and looks backwards, tracing the long-term evolutionary trajectory of communications-information advocacy in the USA since the 1960s. We focus on the concept of citizen collective action and explain its relevance to CIP.Research supported by the Ford Foundation's Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom Program. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, or the Ford Foundation

Digital platforms and the reconfiguration of politics: the formation of new political actors in the United States

Existing approaches to studying digital platforms and politics in the context of the American landscape have focused on how “fringe” actors on the far-right and left sides of the spectrum have used social media to gain wider publicity for their ideas and values (Daniels 2018; Barnes 2020); the economic imperatives underlying the construction of platforms (Terranova 2004; Couldry and Mejias 2019); or the need for digital platforms to be regulated by lawmakers in order to protect American democracy (Hawley and Cruz 2019). However, this thesis will argue that each of these perspectives is only giving a glimpse of the overall picture. Digital platforms such as Twitter and Facebook cannot be viewed as passive tools for human actors to make use of, nor are they neutral infrastructure through which social relations are channeled. While platforms are owned and operated by private corporations for profit, the relations they give rise to exceed the relationship of user data exploitation and extraction. Furthermore, a closer examination will show both platform users and platform owners do not make sense of this relationship in solely economic terms either, but in terms of political governance. Finally, debates about how best to regulate social media miss the question of what exactly is to be regulated. This thesis will argue, using key tenets of actor-network theory as put forth by Bruno Latour, that digital platforms fundamentally reconfigure the materiality of politics, giving rise to new techno-economic formations that human actors must struggle to make sense of

Communicative Figurations

This open access volume assesses the influence of our changing media environment. Today, there is not one single medium that is the driving force of change. With the spread of various technical communication media such as mobile phones and internet platforms, we are confronted with a media manifold of deep mediatization. But how can we investigate its transformative capability? This book answers this question by taking a non-media-centric perspective, researching the various figurations of collectivities and organizations humans are involved in. The first part of the book outlines a fundamental understanding of the changing media environment of deep mediatization and its transformative capacity. The second part focuses on collectivities and movements: communities in the city, critical social movements, maker, online gaming groups and networked groups of young people. The third part moves institutions and organizations into the foreground, discussing the transformation of journalism, religion, politics, and education, whilst the fourth and final part is dedicated to methodologies and perspectives