Christina Neumayer

The mobile phone in street protest: Texting, tweeting, tracking, and tracing

This paper examines the role of information provision through mobile communication in mass street protest. The argument is based on two case studies: (a) the civic outrage of young people concerning the destruction of a youth centre in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2006 and (b) the use of mobile phones in antifascist protests in Dresden, Germany in 2011. The cases are analysed across three dimensions that are relevant to mobile communication tactics for providing information in protest: Actors, power relations between the actors, and goals. By identifying the affordances of the mobile phone for providing information across these dimensions, we argue that mobile communication can be appropriated to increase activists’ repertoire of actions, foster resistance, and shut down opportunities. The ways in which the affordances of mobile phones limit and empower resistance are located at the intersection of coordination, mobilisation, and the creation of counter narratives as well as of the surveillance and maintenance of existing power relations.

Activism and radical politics in the digital age Towards a typology

This article aims to develop a typology for evaluating different types of activism in the digital age, based on the ideal of radical democracy. Departing from this ideal, activism is approached in terms of processes of identification by establishing conflictual frontiers to outside others as either adversaries or enemies. On the basis of these discussions, we outline a typology of four kinds of activists, namely the salon activist, the contentious activist, the law-abiding activist and the Gandhian activist. The typology’s first axis, between antagonism and agonism, is derived from normative discussions in radical democracy concerning developing frontiers. The second axis, about readiness to engage in civil disobedience, is derived from a review of studies of different forms of online activism. The article concludes by suggesting that the different forms of political engagement online have to be taken into account when studying how online activism can contribute to social change.

Cloaked Facebook pages: Exploring fake Islamist propaganda in social media:

This research analyses cloaked Facebook pages that are created to spread political propaganda by cloaking a user profile and imitating the identity of a political opponent in order to spark hateful and aggressive reactions. This inquiry is pursued through a multi-sited online ethnographic case study of Danish Facebook pages disguised as radical Islamist pages, which provoked racist and anti-Muslim reactions as well as negative sentiments towards refugees and immigrants in Denmark in general. Drawing on Jessie Daniels’ critical insights into cloaked websites, this research furthermore analyses the epistemological, methodological and conceptual challenges of online propaganda. It enhances our understanding of disinformation and propaganda in an increasingly interactive social media environment and contributes to a critical inquiry into social media and subversive politics.

Platformed antagonism : racist discourses on fake Muslim Facebook pages

ABSTRACT This research examines how fake identities on social media create and sustain antagonistic and racist discourses. It does so by analysing 11 Danish Facebook pages, disguised as Muslim extremists living in Denmark, conspiring to kill and rape Danish citizens. It explores how anonymous content producers utilise Facebook’s socio-technical characteristics to construct, what we propose to term as, platformed antagonism. This term refers to socio-technical and discursive practices that produce new modes of antagonistic relations on social media platforms. Through a discourse-theoretical analysis of posts, images, ‘about’ sections and user comments on the studied Facebook pages, the article highlights how antagonism between ethno-cultural identities is produced on social media through fictitious social media accounts, prompting thousands of user reactions. These findings enhance our current understanding of how antagonism and racism are constructed and amplified within social media environments.

Digital Images and Globalized Conflict

As the number of digital images of globalized conflicts online grow, critical examination of their impact and consequence is timely. This editorial provides an overview of digital images and globalized conflict as a field of study by discussing regimes of visibility and invisibility, proximity and distance, and the multiplicity of images. It engages critically with these interlinking themes as they are addressed in the contributing articles to the Special Issue as well as beyond, asking how genres and tropes are reproduced, how power plays a role in access to images, and how the sheer quantity of conflict-related images raise issues of knowledge production and research.

15 Years of Protest and Media Technologies Scholarship: A Sociotechnical Timeline

This article investigates the relationship between the invention of new media technologies and scholarship concerning protest and political engagement. Building on an innovative approach that moves beyond a systematic literature review, this article contributes to our understanding of scholarship concerning digital communication technologies and how they may have been adopted and shaped protest movements and political engagement. Based on visualizations, we draw a sociotechnical timeline of protest and media technology scholarship within three dimensions: technological development, methods and techniques, and the social phenomena under investigation. The article concludes by identifying major trends in protest and media technologies scholarship over the past 15 years. The sociotechnical timeline enhances our understanding of academic discourse at the intersection of protest and media technologies by highlighting shortcomings and potential for future research.

Laying Claim to Social Media by Activists: A Cyber-Material Détournement

This article examines current appropriations of social media by activists of the radical left in Greece and Sweden. Previous research has shown that the discourse concerning social media’s empowering potential is embedded in commercial values that contradict the value systems of many activists who engage in struggles against the current economic system. We employ the notion of détournement, which describes how social movements turn something aside from its normal course or purpose. Based on interviews and online ethnographic observations, we seek to understand how and with what consequences social media facilitate and limit collective action. The article enhances our understanding of activists’ social media use by turning our attention to the sociotechnical impact of social media on collective action initiated by leftist groups as well as the relationship between ideological loyalties and the political economy of corporate social media.

Disguised Propaganda from Digital to Social Media

Disguised propaganda and political deception in digital media have been studied since the early days of the World Wide Web. At the intersection of internet research and propaganda studies, this cha ...

Images of protest in social media: Struggle over visibility and visual narratives

While political protest is essentially a visual expression of dissent, both social movement research and media studies have thus far been hesitant to focus on visual social media data from protest events. This research explores the visual dimension (photos and videos) of Twitter communication in the Blockupy protests against the opening of the European Central Bank (ECB) headquarters in Frankfurt am Main on 18 March 2015. It does so through a novel combination of quantitative analysis, content analysis of images, and identification of narratives. The article concludes by arguing that the visual in political protest in social media reproduces existing visualities and hierarchies rather than challenges them. This research enhances our conceptual understanding of how activists’ struggles play out in the visual and contributes to developing methods for empirical inquiry into visual social media content.

Mapping the Intersection between Scientific Discourse, Technological Evolution and Social Movements: A Visual Approach

The relationship between technology and sociopolitical change has been a major topic in academic discourse concerning political engagement and protest.[...]