Social Media as Conversation: A Manifesto

This short essay discusses social media as spaces of conversation, ritual and prefiguration

Exploring the Role of the Internet in the “Movement for Alternative Globalization”: The case of the Paris 2003 European Social Forum

This paper attempts to explore the role of the internet in the processes of organization and mobilization of the ‘movement for alternative globalization’, which is often characterized as an ‘internet-based movement’. It reports the findings of a survey undertaken in the Paris 2003 European Social Forum (ESF), which asked 257 respondents about the contexts that mobilized them to participate in the ESF (political/voluntary organizations, friends/relatives, workplace/university, news media), as well as the modes and methods of communication that were used in each context. The findings question the claims about the internet-based character of this movement, as face-to-face contact seems to be the predominant mode of communication. The survey also challenges the much discussed potential of the internet to mobilize politically indifferent or marginalized individuals, as a comparison between users and non-users of the internet revealed that users tended to be mobilized for the ESF through political or voluntary organizations

Social Movements and Political Agency in the Digital Age: A Communication Approach

Digital media pose a dual challenge to conventional understandings of political agency. First, digital media destabilize long-held assumptions about the nature of collective action, about social movements and their capacity to effect change. This is because digital media are thought to facilitate more decentralized, dispersed, temporary and individualized forms of political action that subvert the notion of the collective as singular, unified, homogeneous, coherent, and mass. One way of resolving this challenge is to view the collective in looser terms, as a process rather than as a finished product, a conceptualization that can be influence our understanding not only of social movements, but also of other political actors and of society as a whole. Second, digital media highlight the need to take communication seriously in how we conceptualize both collective action and political agency. Placing communication at the centre allows us to develop this looser and more processual understanding of the collective by studying it as a process that is constituted in and through communication. Inspired by organizational communication and particularly the work of Taylor and van Every (2000), this essay proposes a conception of collective action as emerging in conversations and solidified in texts. This conceptualization allows for a more multiplex and variegated view of political agency that takes into account the specific context where agency is exercised and the power that different actors can exert in a communicative process of negotiation, persuasion and claim-making

Live Democracy and Its Tensions: Making Sense of Livestreaming in the 15M and Occupy

Drawing on one hundred interviews with activists, this article examines the relationship between livestreaming and the democratic cultures of the 15M and Occupy movements. The article investigates how the technical affordances of livestreaming – immediacy, rawness, liveness and embedded/embodied perspective – connect with the movements’ understandings of how democracy should be practiced, specifically in terms of political equality, participation and transparency. Our findings identify four sources of tension in the relationship between livestreaming and democratic cultures. Firstly, the use of livestreaming was associated with a radical interpretation of transparency as near-total visibility, which gave rise to tensions around self-surveillance. Secondly, the information overload created through the practice of radical transparency was in tension with the movement’s accountability processes. Thirdly, livestreamers attempted to offer an unvarnished access to truth by providing unedited and raw video from the streets. Yet their embodied and subjective first-person perspective was associated with tensions around their power to shape the broadcast. Finally, while livestreaming was used to facilitate equal participation in the movement, participation through the livestream took the meaning of equal access to the experience of the squares, rather than equal power in the decision-making process. Our research reveals that despite the national particularities of the contexts in which they arose, Occupy and the 15M were extremely similar in their interpretations and practices of livestreaming and democracy

The European Social Forum and the Internet: a case of communications networks and collective action

Distinguished by its transnational scale, non-hierarchical organizing, and diverse composition, the 'movement for alternative globalization' is thought to partly derive this combination of characteristics from its use of the internet. My research is an attempt to explore this relationship by investigating the use of email lists for the preparation of the European Social Forum (ESF) in London in October 2004, one of the largest gatherings of the movement in Europe. Focusing on the processes of organizing, decision-making and collective identity formation, my study employed a combination of methods, including a preliminary survey, in-depth interviews, as. well as content analysis of the main ESF email lists. In terms of organizing, my thesis revealed that email lists are instrumental in constructing a flexible and polycentric organizing structure. They were also used extensively to widen up participation to the face-to-face organizing meetings, but also to legitimate the decision-making system and conceal its asymmetries of power. Furthermore, every list constituted a different 'site of identization' whose affordances for identity construction depended on its size, scale, and composition. In that respect, email lists constituted an infrastructure for the development of multiple identities within the movement. However, the lack of physical proximity and the limited capacity for conveying emotive content constrained the potential of email lists to foster relationships of trust and shared opinions which were instead facilitated by face-to-face communication. Overall, my thesis has identified a series of mechanisms and dynamics whose point of equilibrium determines the state of the movement at any point in time. In that respect, email and email lists tend to foster opening, divergence, multiplicity, and individuality, while face-to-face communication tends to generate closing, convergence, unity, and collectiveness. It is therefore the combination of these two forms of communication that helps the movement to have seemingly contrasting characteristics: to be united in difference or to be a collective that affirms individual subjectivity. However, my study has further shown that the capacity of the internet to foster such dynamics also depends on the specific cultures of organizing, political priorities, and ideological backgrounds of the people using it

Social Media Battles: their Impact during the 2014 Greek Municipal Elections

The purpose of this study is to examine the use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube by candidates running for the 2014 Greek Municipal Elections by addressing the following questions: (1) which factors affect social media adoption by municipal candidates?, and (2) whether social media usage along with the popularity of candidates' social media pages influence candidates' vote share. Results indicate that social media are not very popular campaigning tools among municipal candidates in Greece. This implies that Greek candidates still rely on traditional ways to lure their voters. Furthermore, findings reveal that candidates running in large municipalities are more likely to utilize social media (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) as means of political marketing. In addition, challengers seem to prefer Facebook and Twitter as campaign tools while males tend to focus on YouTube to attract voters. Despite the low adoption rate, results suggest that candidates who made use of social media won more votes compared to candidates who were not social media users. Moreover, it was found that a candidate's Facebook page and YouTube channel popularity are good indicators of the candidate's vote share

Creating the collective: social media, the Occupy Movement and its constitution as a collective actor

This paper examines the process through which Occupy activists came to constitute themselves as a collective actor and the role of social media in this process. The theoretical framework combines Melucci's (1996) theory of collective identity with insights from the field of organizational communication and particularly from the ‘CCO’ strand – short for ‘Communication is Constitutive of Organizing’. This allows us to conceptualize collective identity as an open-ended and dynamic process that is constructed in conversations and codified in texts. Based on interviews with Occupy activists in New York, London and other cities, I then discuss the communication processes through which the movement was drawing the boundaries with its environment, creating codes and foundational documents, as well as speaking in a collective voice. The findings show that social media tended to blur the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the movement in a way that suited its values of inclusiveness and direct participation. Social media users could also follow remotely the meetings of the general assembly where the foundational documents were ratified, but their voices were not included in the process. The presence of the movement on social media also led to conflicts and negotiations around Occupy's collective voice as constructed on these platforms. Thus, viewing the movement as a phenomenon emerging in communication allows us an insight into the efforts of Occupy activists to create a collective that was both inclusive of the 99% and a distinctive actor with its own identity

The New Instantaneity: How Social Media are Helping us Privilege the (Politically) Correct over the True

The recent sacking of the eminent scientist Tim Hunt from one of the UK’s leading research institutions is only the latest in a series of cases where public individuals have been derided for comments made in jest on social media, with serious consequences for their professional and personal lives. This article discusses the case of Tim Hunt as an example of the extent to which the privileging of the correct over the true which has long pervaded media discourse is taken to the extreme by the instant-response culture of social media. It points to the emergence of a new form of instantaneity enabled by these networked forms of communication that serves to reinforce systemic inaction rather than the change widely associated with these technologies. It draws on philosophy and Critical Theory as useful conceptual frameworks for highlighting the ways in which Twitter & co. increasingly call us to action but crowd out thought, thereby passing over opportunities for real social change