Alice Mattoni

Media ecologies and protest movements: main perspectives and key lessons

ABSTRACT Studies adopting the media ecology metaphor to investigate social movements form a promising strand of literature that has emerged in the last years to overcome the communicative reductionism permeating the study of the relation between social movements and communication technologies. However, contributions that apply ecological visions to protest are scattered, and only seldom connect their analyses to more general media ecological frameworks. The article critically reviews and classifies the diverse strands of scholarship that adopt the ecological metaphor in their exploration of activism, and connects them with the more general literature on media and communication ecologies. Moreover, it extracts the constitutive elements of this literature that can help scholars to better address the complexity of communication within social movements, and it articulates four key lessons that a media ecology lens brings to the understanding of media and protest. Finally, the article further demonstrates the strengths of this approach through an illustration of the preliminary findings of an ongoing investigation on the 15M movement in Spain.

Toward a Visual Analysis of Social Movements, Conflict, and Political Mobilization

The news of recent mobilizations in Arab, European, and North-American countries quickly spread across the globe. Well before written reports analyzing the unfolding mobilizations, images of protests circulated widely through television channels, print newspapers, internet websites, and social media platforms. Pictures and videos of squares full of people protesting against their governments became the symbols of a new wave of contention that quickly spread from Tunisia to many other countries. Pictures and videos showing the gathering of people in Tahrir square (Egypt), Puerta del Sol (Spain), and Zuccotti Park (United States) quickly became vivid tools of “countervisuality” (Mirzoeff, 2011) that opposed the roaring grassroots political participation of hundreds of thousands people to the silent decisions taken in government and corporation buildings by small groups of politicians and managers. The presence, and relevance, of images in mobilizations of social movements is no novelty. Encounters with social movements have always been intrinsically tied to the visual sense. Activists articulate visual messages, their activities are represented in photos and video sequences, and they are ultimately rendered visible, or invisible, in the public sphere. Social movements produce and evoke images, either as a result of a planned, explicit, and strategic effort, or accidentally, in an unintended or undesired manner. At the same time, social movements are perceived by external actors and dispersed audiences via images which are produced both by themselves and others.

Tra consenso e conflitto. Pratiche mediali nei movimenti italiani contro la precarietà del lavoro

Between consensus and conflict. Media practices in the Italian movements against precarity of work This paper aims to explore the relationship between social movements and the media during the recent Italian cycle of struggle against precarity. Starting from two significant protest events related to the contentious issue at stake, the paper takes into consideration activists’ media practices developed in a complex mediascape. From such a perspective, the paper examines empirically the quadruple A model proposed by Dieter Rucht (2004), partially revisiting its four main dimensions: abstention, adaptation, alternative and attack attitudes towards the mainstream media. The paper suggests that in a complex mediascape different kind of media practices intertwine and that: 1) a certain degree of abstention is also possible with regard to the more established independent media; 2) face-to-face interactions frequently mix with temporary, protest-related media; 3) activists could use the same media texts to communicate with disperse and different audiences. The main data sources consist of primary documents produced by activists and in-depth interviews with the activists themselves. Keywords: Social Movements; Mainstream Media; Information and Communication Technologies, Precarity; Media Practices.

A situated understanding of digital technologies in social movements. Media ecology and media practice approaches

Abstract The article tackles two main aspects related to the interaction between social movements and digital technologies. First, it reflects on the need to include and combine different theoretical approaches in social movement studies so as to construct more meaningful understanding of how social movement actors deals with digital technologies and with what outcomes in societies. In particular, the article argues that media ecology and media practice approaches serve well to reach this objective as: they recognize the complex multi-faceted array of media technologies, professions and contents with which social movement actors interact; they historicize the use of media technologies in social movements; and they highlight the agency of social movement actors in relation to media technologies while avoiding a media-centric approach to the subject matter. Second, this article employs a media practice perspective to explore two interrelated trends in contemporary societies that the articles in this special issue deal with: the personalization and individualization of politics, and the role of the grassroots in political mobilizations.

Politics, Participation and Big Data. Introductory Reflections on the Ontological, Epistemological, and Methodological Aspects of a Complex Relationship

This editorial defines big data as an inherently political object and then briefly discusses its ontological, epistemological, and methodological implications in the social sciences. Furthermore, it addresses these issues in connections with the realm of politics, political participation and political mobilization. Finally, it addresses three main emergent themes related to big data in the broad realm of politics. First, big data as a methodological conundrum - something that can possibly empower or completely bias research activities and results. Second, big data as an object of study in its own right, a contested research and political terrain characterized by strong power dynamics between private and public actors and entwining with governance processes at all levels - from the national to the transnational one. Third, big data as research catalyser that can leverage our understanding of participation and contentious dynamics.

The Many Frames of the Precarious Condition. Some Insights from Italian Mobilizations against Precarity

This chapter analyses the different frames that emerged during the mobilizations of precarious workers that occurred in Italy in the early 2000s, involving hundreds of thousands of protesters all over the country. In the past, workers’ movements had been rather homogeneous, representing workers who experienced very similar working and living conditions. In this sense, it was possible to speak about a rather homogeneous working class that developed mostly in the urban environment, around factories whose workers shared similar visions about themselves and their role in society. In advanced capitalistic societies, workers’ movements progressively lost their centrality in the struggles towards a more just society. At the same time, the trade unions, the institutional political actors that once represented them — also an outcome of workers’ movements — severely shrank in membership, with union density collapsing in the last decades. Workers, though, did not disappear from contentious politics. And neither did workers’ organizations, broadly conceived. Rather, they changed the way in which they engaged in protests, the organizational forms they selected to mobilize, and the discourses they elaborated around labour issues. This happened also because, despite the relevant heritage of unionism for workers, the very structure of the labour market changed dramatically in the past few decades.

Prima e dopo la crisi. L’evoluzione delle mobilitazioni dei lavoratori precari in Italia e Grecia

Il saggio presenta una comparazione attraverso il tempo e lo spazio delle mobilitazioni dei lavoratori precari, confrontando le lotte contro la precarieta in Italia e in Grecia prima e dopo la crisi finanziaria ed economica. Il saggio parte da una analisi dei cambiamenti che hanno caratterizzato il contesto piu ampio in cui si sono sviluppate, negli ultimi anni, le mobilizationi in questione. Si concentra, in seguito, sulle trasformazioni che hanno caratterizzato le lotte dei lavoratori precari prima e dopo la crisi economica nei due paesi. Dall’analisi svolta nelle sezioni del saggio emergono tre punti rilevanti, ripresi anche nelle conclusioni: in primo luogo, il significato che il luogo di lavoro ha per i lavoratori precari e le loro lotte, sempre meno centrale per l’organizzazione delle mobilitazioni; secondo, i cambiamenti nel repertorio della protesta, che si e ampliato andando oltre l’azione collettiva conflittuale soprattutto dopo la crisi finanziaria ed economica; e, infine, il significato che i sindacati tradizionali, i suoi concetti e le sue pratiche, hanno per i lavoratori precari.