Seeing Spatially: People, Networks and Movements in Digital and Urban Spaces

Recent social movements have been figuratively and digitally ignited in digital media and yet these movements took form, materialised and claimed power in urban public spaces. Digital media and physical urban spaces have become interdependent dimensions of social movements. Together, they can provide ‘spaces' for people to interact for the establishment of the human agency and the expansion of social networks of the movements. By reading social movements spatially, this article offers to conceptualise the dialectical interplay between digital media and physical urban spaces in the making of contemporary social movements

The League of Thirteen: Media Concentration in Indonesia

This report details the state of media ownership and concentration in Indonesia

FINDING HER MASTER’S VOICE: THE POWER OF COLLECTIVE ACTION AMONG FEMALE MUSLIM BLOGGERS

Emerging cyber-collective movements have frequently made headlines in the news. Despite the exponential growth of bloggers in Muslim countries, there is a lack of empirical study of cyber-collective actions in these countries. We analyzed the female Muslim blogosphere because very little research attempts to understand socio-political roles of female bloggers in the system where women are frequently denied freedom of expression. We collected 150 blogs from 17 countries ranging between April 2003 and July 2010 with a special focus on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns for our analysis. Bearing the analysis upon three central tenets of individual, community, and transnational perspectives, we develop novel algorithms modeling cyber-collective movements by utilizing existing social theories on collective action and computational social network analysis. This paper contributes a methodology to study the diffusion of issues in social networks and examines roles of influential community members. We also observe the transcending nature of cyber-collective movements with future possibilities for modeling transnational outreach. Using the global female Muslim blogosphere, we provide understanding of the complexity and dynamics of cyber-collective action. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to address the lacking fundamental research shedding light on re-framing collective action theory in online environments

A CyberUrban Space Odyssey. The Spatiality of Contemporary Social Movements

The article scrutinizes the complex entanglement of cyberurban spaces in the making and development of contemporary social movement by analyzing its imaginaries, practices, and trajectories. This issue of New Geographies, “Geographies of Information” (edited by Taraneh Meskhani & Ali Fard), presents a new set of frameworks that refrain from generalizations to highlight the many facets of the socio-technical constructions, processes, and practices that form the spaces of information and communication. In addition to Lim, contributors of the issue include prominent thinkers and scholars in various related disciplines such as Rob Kitchin (critical data), Stephen Graham (urbanism) and Malcolm McCullough (architecture/urban computing)

Raising and Rising Voices in Social Media - A Novel Methodological Approach in Studying Cyber-Collective Movements

Emerging cyber-collective social movements (CSMs) have frequently made headlines in the news. Despite their popularity, there is a lack of systematic methodologies to empirically study such movements in complex online environments. Using the Al-Huwaider online campaign as a case to illustrate our methodology, this contribution attempts to establish a rigorous and fundamental analysis that explains CSMs. We collected 150 blogs from 17 countries ranging between April 2003 and July 2010 with a special focus on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns capturing multi-cultural aspects for our analysis. Bearing the analysis upon three central tenets of individual, community, and transnational perspectives, we develop novel algorithms modeling CSMs by utilizing existing collective action theories and computational social network analysis. This article contributes a methodology to study the diffusion of issues in social networks and examines roles of influential community members. The proposed methodology provides a rigorous tool to understand the complexity and dynamics of CSMs. Such methodology also assists us in observing the transcending nature of CSMs with future possibilities for modeling transnational outreach. Our study addresses the lack of fundamental research on the formation of CSMs. This research contributes novel methodologies that can be applied to many settings including business, marketing and many others, beyond the exemplary setting chosen here for illustrative purposes

Sweeping the Unclean: Social Media and the Bersih Electoral Reform Movement in Malaysia

In this article author investigate how social media was utilized and appropriated in the electoral reform movement in Malaysia called Bersih. By identifying and analyzing roles of three dominant social platforms in the Bersih movement, namely blogging, Facebook, and Twitter, author reveal that social media is both the site and part of the contestations of power Social media is integral to the shaping of Bersih movement's imaginaries, practices, and trajectories. As a social and material artifact, every technological platform such as blogging, Facebook, and Twitter has its own socio-political properties that postulate distinctive roles and limitations for its users

From war-net to net-war: the internet and resistance identities in Indonesia

For decades following independence, informational media in Indonesia developed parallel with the interests of the state that made use of the media as a means to legitimize and maintain its identity as a progressive "developmental state". The Internet, which came to Indonesia during the early phase of the political crisis in the 1990s, economically and politically has risen to become an alternative media that is no longer under state control, thus bolstering civil society in its resistance to state and corporate domination. Based on Indonesia's experience, this paper describes how the Internet provides means for popular resistance to the dominant paradigm