Dan Mercea

Digital Prefigurative Participation: The Entwinement of Online Communication and Offline Participation in Protest Events

This article reviews the main findings of a three-year empirical study that examined the possible contribution of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to participation in offline social movement protest events. Participation was examined as manifest in mobilization, identity building and organizational transformation. Digital prefigurative participation is a tentative construct that attempts to capture the CMC aspect of engagement in the three processes. The participatory processes were probed in the contrasting circumstances of high- and low-risk protest events. This distinction has revealed some important differences in the structural factors that foster participation, primary among which has been organizational affiliation. Yet, it has remained largely unexplored in studies of internet use in protest politics. Findings from two case studies of environmental protests in Romania and the UK suggest that digital prefigurative participation may be extensive among unaffiliated participants at a low-risk event and the affiliated at a high-risk one.

PROBING THE IMPLICATIONS OF FACEBOOK USE FOR THE ORGANIZATIONAL FORM OF SOCIAL MOVEMENT ORGANIZATIONS

This article examines the use of Facebook by social movement organizations (SMOs) and the ramifications from that usage for their organizational form. Organizational forms have been viewed to be in flux as networked communication becomes embedded in mobilization repertoires. In what follows, it is shown that the utilization of Facebook by networked heterarchical organizations is seen to grant them access to a hitherto untapped demographic for the purpose of mobilization. Concurrently, questions are raised pertaining to organizational form, particularly in relation to the role the Facebook audience plays in movement organizations. Communication on Facebook may catalyze deliberation, information sharing and mobilization. Moreover, evidence was found pointing to its use for the self-organization of protest participation. Yet, engagement between SMOs and their Facebook audience bore little on decision-making within the organizations. Although limited in scope, the emerging contribution of such communication may be by way of channelling items into decision-making agendas.

Serial activists: Political Twitter beyond influentials and the twittertariat

This article introduces a group of politically charged Twitter users that deviates from elite and ordinary users. After mining 20 M tweets related to nearly 200 instances of political protest from 2009 to 2013, we identified a network of individuals tweeting across geographically distant protest hashtags and revisited the term “serial activists.” We contacted 191 individuals and conducted 21 in-depth, semi-structured interviews thematically coded to provide a typology of serial activists and their struggles with institutionalized power. We found that these users have an ordinary following, but bridge disparate language communities and facilitate collective action by virtue of their dedication to multiple causes. Serial activists differ from influentials or traditional grassroots activists and their activity challenges Twitter scholarship foregrounding the two-step flow model of communication. The results add a much needed depth to the prevalent data-driven treatment of political Twitter by describing a class of extraordinarily prolific users beyond influentials and the twittertariat.

Towards a Conceptualization of Casual Protest Participation: Parsing a Case from the Save Roşia Montană Campaign

There is currently an empirical gap in the literature on protest participation in liberal democracies, which has overwhelmingly focused on Western Europe and North America at the expense of Eastern Europe. To contribute to closing that gap, this article reviews findings from a multi-method field study conducted at FânFest, the environmental protest festival designed to boost participation in Save Roşia Montană, the most prominent environmental campaign in Romania. In contrast to its Western counterparts, Romania has seen markedly lower levels of involvement in voluntary organizations that are a key setting for mobilization into collective action. Concurrently, experience with participation in physical protests is limited amongst Romanians. Specifically, the article probes recent indications that social network sites provide new impetus to protest participation as an instrumental means of mobilization. Dwelling on a distinction between experienced and newcomers to protest, results indicate that social network site usage may make possible the casual participation of individuals with prior protest experience who are not activists in a voluntary organization. Whilst this finding may signal a new participatory mode hinging on digitally networked communication, which is beginning to be theorized, it confounds expectations pertaining to a net contribution of social network site usage to the participation of newcomers to protest.

Protest communication ecologies

ABSTRACT The flurry of protests since the turn of the decade has sustained a growth area in the social sciences. The diversity of approaches to the various facets and concerns raised by the collective action of aggrieved groups the world over impresses through multidisciplinarity and the wealth of insights it has generated. This introduction to a special issue of the international journal Information, Communication and Society is an invitation to recover conceptual instruments – such as the ecological trope – that have fallen out of fashion in media and communication studies. We account for their fall from grace and explicate the rationale for seeking to reinsert them into the empirical terrain of interlocking media, communication practices and protest which we aim to both capture with theory and adopt as a starting point for further analytical innovation.

The Social Media Overture of the Pan-European Stop-ACTA Protest: An Empirical Examination of Participatory Coordination in Connective Action

As the latest instalments of protest from the Arab Spring to Occupy and beyond are digested in scholarly work, they point to a scalable, informal structure that develops as an impermanent framework for performing coordinational tasks formerly associated with collective organizations. Whilst a substitution of this nature appears a distinct possibility with social media, the participatory dynamics at the heart of such connective action remain largely uncharted. This article scrutinizes the scope for the participatory development of motivations and resources to undertake collective action. For this purpose, it reviews an empirical study of public Facebook and Twitter communication associated with the pan-European protest against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Ensuing results point to a rational, resource-oriented mode of communication figuring prominently on both platforms. Moreover, the time distribution of motivational and resource-driven talk confounds earlier claims about patterns of social media usage in collective action. Finally, despite their smaller number, motivational posts had a higher impact than resource-oriented talk on both platforms – an apparent sign of their particularly positive reception.

Making Sense of Democratic Institutions Intertextually Communication on Social Media as a Civic Literacy Event Preceding Collective Action

Communication on social media preceding coordinated street demonstrations is assayed for evidence of practice-based informal civic learning about conventional politics and mainstream media. This is done to offset a mounting interest in activist self-organization and self-reflexivity with a scrutiny of networked communication as a civic literacy event. The article proposes that skepticism and criticality directed at media and political institutions provide fertile justification for their challenge, thereby rendering intertextual informal learning an expedient to collective action.

Parametrizing Brexit: Mapping Twitter Political Space to Parliamentary Constituencies

ABSTRACT In this paper, a proof of concept study is performed to validate the use of social media signal to model the ideological coordinates underpinning the Brexit debate. We rely on geographically enriched Twitter data and a purpose-built, deep learning algorithm to map the political value space of users tweeting the referendum onto Parliamentary Constituencies. We find a significant incidence of nationalist sentiments and economic views expressed on Twitter, which persist throughout the campaign and are only offset in the last days when a globalist upsurge brings the British Twittersphere closer to a divide between nationalist and globalist standpoints. Upon combining demographic variables with the classifier scores, we find that the model explains 41% of the variance in the referendum vote, an indication that not only material inequality, but also ideological readjustments have contributed to the outcome of the referendum. We conclude with a discussion of conceptual and methodological challenges in signal-processing social media data as a source for the measurement of public opinion.

Building Contention Word-by-Word: Social Media Usage in the European Stop ACTA Movement

The chapter reports on research into the latitude for coordination and informal civic learning occasioned by the networked communication of protestors on social media. An examination of the 2012 pan-European mobilisation against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement indicated that talk directed at resource coordination represented a significant component of the communication preceding street demonstrations. Further, participants in communication exchanges on Facebook and Twitter conjured and interconnected multiple motives for partaking in collective action whilst articulating a discourse critical of both political institutions and media organisations, thereby constructing the justification for their collective action. The findings illustrated how collective organisation together with its cognitive and emotional groundwork may be assembled ahead of an embodied protest through granular instalments such as posts on social media.

Movement Social Learning on Twitter: The Case of the People's Assembly

The article examines the UK movement People’s Assembly against Austerity. It probes the extent to which opposition to austerity expressed on Twitter contributes to building bridges among disparate social groups affected by austerity politics and to enabling their joint collective action. The study aims to add to the scholarship on anti-austerity protests since the credit crunch. Numerous of those protests have been accompanied by vibrant activity on social media. Rather than to propose yet another examination of participant mobilisation on social media, the analysis delineates and seeks to evidence a process of social learning among the social media following of a social movement. Relying on a combination of social network, semantic and discourse analysis, the authors discuss movement social learning as a diffusion process transpiring in the communication over an extended period of substantive and organisational issues, strategy and critical reflections that crystallised a cohesive in-group among the participant entities in the People’s Assembly.