Anastasia Kavada

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 Meluccis (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 Occupys 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.

EMAIL LISTS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN OPEN AND MULTIFACETED IDENTITY

Known for its internal plurality, the ‘movement for alternative globalization’ regularly comes together in events such as the European Social Forum (ESF), which are integral to the process of networking and cross-fertilization among its diverse participants. Yet apart from physical meetings, ‘alter-globalization’ activists also meet in a variety of online spaces. This article investigates the role of such spaces in the communicative process of collective identity construction by examining three email lists devoted to the organizing of the London 2004 ESF – a European list, a national and a national-factional. Considering collective identity formation as a communicative process, the article has focused on the design of the selected lists and the social context or ‘we’ that each one helped constitute. It also explored the communicative affordances of the lists for the process of collective identity formation by looking at bonding, trust-building and interactivity. The results show that depending on their purpose, accessibility and geographical scale, the email lists served as distinct but overlapping loci of collective identity. These settings displayed varying degrees of breadth and heterogeneity in terms of their themes and focus, their types of author, as well as the language in which messages were written. They also exhibited different degrees of interactivity with the factional list helping the formation of a cohesive collective identity for its members, while the European one allowed the emergence of a much looser, open and fragmented sense of the collective.

Email lists and participatory democracy in the European Social Forum

The Global Justice Movement burst into the public consciousness in Seattle in late 1999. Since then ‘almost every summit of a transnational (economic) organization has led to street mobilizations’ (van Aelst and Walgrave, 2004: 102), attracting thousands of activists and extensive media coverage. Targets include international economic institutions, such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, which are considered as the main regulators of the neoliberal globalization project. Apart from protests and demonstrations, global justice activists have also launched another type of convergence space, the social forums. These ‘have largely eclipsed mass protests as the primary vehicles where diverse movement networks converge across urban space to make themselves visible, generate affective attachments, and communicate alternatives and critiques’ (Juris, 2005: 255). According to its Charter of Principles, the World Social Forum (WSF) constitutes ‘an open meeting place’ that is meant to operate as a ‘public square’ for actors to meet and network (Whitaker, 2004: 113). The WSF was founded in 2001 as an alternative to the ‘World Economic Forum’ (WEF), an independent organization consisting of the 1000 leading businesses in the world (Patomäki and Teivanen, 2004: 145). The WSF idea met with such success that, since its inception, regional or even national and local social forums have swiftly started to crop up around the world, in Asia, Europe and the Americas. The first European Social Forum (ESF) took place in Florence in October 2002, drawing around 60,000

Between individuality and collectiveness: email lists and face-to-face contact in the global justice movement

Decentralized and internally diverse, the Global Justice Movement (GJM) is thought to be influenced by its use of the internet. Operating in an environment characterized by the conditions of globalization and late modernity, the movement strives to be a collective that accommodates individual difference. Focusing on the organizing process of the European Social Forum, this article examines the role of email lists and physical meetings in realizing this ‘unity in diversity’. Based on interviews with movement activists and a content analysis of three email lists, this article examines how online and face-to-face communication practices engender different dynamics in terms of individuality and collectiveness. While communication on email lists tends to afford divergence, diversity, and individual autonomy, face-to-face contact enables convergence, unity and the affirmation of the collective. Thus, it is the combination of those two modes of communication that helps the movement to fuse seemingly opposing dynamics.

Social Media as Conversation: A Manifesto:

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

Debating Big Data

‘Big Data’ has become a flashpoint in conversations in a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. As advances in computational methods expand the terrain of the measurable, the identifiable, and the knowable, they also raise thorny questions around the politics and ethics of academic research. In an era marked by the thoroughgoing digitalization of virtually every domain of our lives, changes in how information about human behavior is gathered, circulated, and made sense of both unsettles and reinforces existing power dynamics. This Special Crosscurrents Issue aims to spark a debate on ‘Big Data’ from the disciplinary location of ‘media and communication studies’ and more specifically, the emergent field of digital media studies. Our starting point is danah boyd and Kate Crawford’s (2011) important article, ‘Critical questions for Big Data’, in which they reflect on ‘what all this data means, who gets access to what data, how data analysis is deployed, and to what ends’ (p. 3). We asked our contributors to draw on their own research on different aspects of digital and global media as a way to respond to one of more of the issues that boyd and Crawford identified – the definition of knowledge, claims to objectivity and accuracy, context and meaning-making, access to data, and ethics and accountability. Moving well beyond the domain of social media, this collection of essays shows that the story of Big Data is part of a long-standing debate about methods and approach in

The Role of Facebook in the 2014 Greek Municipal Elections

The purpose of this study is to examine the use of Facebook by candidates running for the 2014 Greek Municipal Elections by addressing the following questions: (1) which factors affect Facebook adoption by municipal candidates?, and (2) whether Facebook usage along with the popularity of candidates’ Facebook pages influence candidates’ vote share. Results indicate that Facebook is not a very popular campaigning tool 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 who hadn’t been elected before are more likely to utilize Facebook as a means of political marketing. Despite the low adoption rate, results suggested that candidates who made use of Facebook won more votes compared to non-Facebook candidates. Moreover, it was found that a candidate’s Facebook page popularity is a good indicator of the candidate’s vote share.

Editorial: media and the ‘populist moment’:

References to populism have suffused the media coverage of recent political events. From the election of Donald Trump to the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, Podemos and the Five Star Movement, populism is set forth as the common denominator that explains the appeal of a disparate set of politicians and political formations. Populism has also become, quite predictably, a fervently debated topic within academic research. Many of these debates focus on the role of the media in this ‘populist moment’ and particularly in the circulation of populist discourses and fake news, in the emergence of a new type of computational propaganda, as well as in fuelling ‘people power’ and grassroots sovereignty. Still, debates on the relationship between media and populism, and indeed on whether a ‘populism moment’ is actually upon us, are not yet settled. The fact that populism is a vague and slippery concept, which becomes invested with contradictory meanings in different political and national contexts as well as academic schools of thought, does not help in this regard. On the one hand, populism can refer to demagogy and propaganda, to manipulating the people in support of leaders and policies that are presented as if they are serving the interests of the many. Populism also creates unity by bringing people together against a common enemy. Thus, in its darker manifestations, populism can include the ‘othering’ and repression of specific ethnic, religious or political groups. On the other hand, populism can also be defined in more positive terms, as an effective strategy of uniting the people for progressive social change. In his provocative essay for this special Crosscurrents section, Paolo Gerbaudo considers populism also in this more positive light by drawing on the work of Laclau (2005) and particularly on his view of populism as ‘a political logic that involves an appeal to the entirety of the political community against a common enemy, and in particular against unresponsive political elites’. Gerbaudo critically interrogates the ‘elective affinity’ between social media and populism. Built with commercial interests in mind, ‘social

Editorial: IP, copyright and cultural production

This editorial outlines the important role that IP issues are increasingly playing across the media industries. It identifies some of the key sectors discussed in this issue of the journal and why particular media industries face specific IP challenges even in an age of converging media.