John Postill

Social Media Ethnography: The Digital Researcher in a Messy Web:

Social media practices and technologies are often part of how ethnographic research participants navigate their wider social, material and technological worlds, and are equally part of ethnographic practice. This creates the need to consider how emergent forms of social media-driven ethnographic practice might be understood theoretically and methodologically. In this article, we respond critically to existing literatures concerning the nature of the internet as an ethnographic site by suggesting how concepts of routine, movement and sociality enable us to understand the making of social media ethnography knowledge and places.

Democracy in an age of viral reality: A media epidemiography of Spain’s indignados movement:

The present article draws from fieldwork on the indignados (or 15M) movement in Spain to propose a new approach to the study of protest movements in the digital era: ‘media epidemiography’. This composite of the terms ‘epidemiology’ and ‘ethnography’ is used as a heuristic to address the research challenge of today’s swiftly evolving techno-political terrains. I argue that viral media have played a key role in Spain’s indignados movement, with Twitter as the central site of propagation. Protesters have used Twitter and other viral platforms to great effect and in a range of different ways, including as a means of setting the tone and agenda of the protests, spreading slogans and organizational practices, and offering alternative accounts of the movement. These developments may signal the coming of an era in which political reality is shaped by viral contents ‘shared’ by media professionals and amateurs – an age of viral reality.

Multitudinous identities: a qualitative and network analysis of the 15M collective identity

The emergence of network-movements since 2011 has opened the debate around the way in which social media and networked practices make possible innovative forms of collective identity. We briefly review the literature on social movements and ‘collective identity’, and show the tension between different positions stressing either organization or culture, the personal or the collective, aggregative or networking logics. We argue that the 15M (indignados) network-movement in Spain demands conceptual and methodological innovations. Its rapid emergence, endurance, diversity, multifaceted development and adaptive capacity, posit numerous theoretical and methodological challenges. We show how the use of structural and dynamic analysis of interaction networks (in combination with qualitative data) is a valuable tool to track the shape and change of what we term the ‘systemic dimension’ of collective identities in network-movements. In particular, we introduce a novel method for synchrony detection in Facebook activity to identify the distributed, yet integrated, coordinated activity behind collective identities. Applying this analytical strategy to the 15M movement, we show how it displays a specific form of systemic collective identity we call ‘multitudinous identity’, characterized by social transversality and internal heterogeneity, as well as a transient and distributed leadership driven by action initiatives. Our approach attends to the role of distributed interaction and transient leadership at a mesoscale level of organizational dynamics, which may contribute to contemporary discussions of collective identity in network-movements.

Freedom technologists and the new protest movements A theory of protest formulas

In this article, I draw from anthropological fieldwork in Spain and secondary research on Tunisia and Iceland to explore the connection between Internet freedom activism and post-2008 protest movements. I introduce two new concepts: ‘freedom technologists’ and ‘protest formulas’. I use the term freedom technologists to refer to those social agents who combine technological and political skills to pursue greater Internet and democratic freedoms, which they regard as being inextricably entwined. Far from being techno-utopians or deluded ‘slacktivists’ (Morozov, 2013, Skoric, 2012), I argue that most freedom technologists are in fact techno-pragmatists, that is, people who take a very practical view of the limits and possibilities of new technologies for political change. I also differentiate among freedom technologists, singling out three main specialists for their strong contribution to the new movements, namely hackers/geeks, tech lawyers and online journalists. The second new coinage I develop is protest formulas. This term refers to the unique compound of societal forces and outcomes that characterizes each protest movement – as well as each phase or initiative within a movement. In this article, I track the influence of freedom technologists on emerging protest movements as they interact with other agents within these political compounds.

A critical history of internet activism and social protest in Malaysia, 1998-2011

AbstractThis article asks two related questions. First, to what extent has internet activism shaped social protest in Malaysia from the late 1990s to the present? Second, what can the history of internet activism and social protest in Malaysia tell us, if anything, about the 2011 global wave of protests? To address these questions I distinguish three key moments in Malaysia’s eventful history of internet activism and social protest, namely the 1998-1999 reformasi movement, the electoral ‘tsunami’ of 2008 (in which the ruling coalition lost its two-thirds majority), and the Bersih 2.0 rallies of 2011. I argue that Bersih 2.0 is best explained as both the latest episode in a series of uniquely Malaysian techno-political events and as a local variant of the global wave of protests of 2011 – a wave in which hackers, online journalists, and technology lawyers, as well as ordinary citizens using digital media, played an important part. The article ends with a summary and with suggestions for further research.

Populism and social media: a global perspective:

The link between the spread of social media and the recent surge of populism around the world remains elusive. A global, rather than Western, theory is required to explore this connection. Such a theory would need to pay particular attention to five questions, namely, the roots of populism, ideology and populism, the rise of theocratic populism, social media and non-populist politicians, and the embedding of social media in larger systems of communication. In this essay, I draw from a range of cross-cultural examples to argue that social media are inextricable from a dense web of highly diverse online and offline communicative practices. Like most other forms of political communication, populism is twice hybrid, in that it entails the ceaseless interaction between old and new media as well as between online and offline sites of communication. Populists never operate in a vacuum or indeed in a filter bubble: they share hybridly mediated spaces and arenas with other populists and with non-populists. Over time, these varied political actors have co-evolved media strategies and tactics in full awareness of one another’s existence.

Book Review: The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious PoliticsBennettW. L.SegerbergA.The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 240 pp. ISBN: 9781107642720

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Indonesian Religion as a Hybrid Media Space: Social Dramas in a Contested Realm

The popularity of social media in Indonesia, along with the rise of political Islam, is changing the ways in which people engage with religious matters in the country. In this article, we deploy post-Bourdieuan field theory to explore Indonesia’s religious domain as a ‘hybrid media space’ – a social space mediated by old and new media agents interacting to produce viralized forms of public communication. We undertake this exploration through three viral controversies, or ‘social dramas’, triggered by a perceived breach of the religious space’s order. All three dramas involved political Islamists in contention with various political actors, namely the Muslim senator Fahira Fahmi, the West Sumatran atheist Alexander Aan, and the then governor of Jakarta, ‘Ahok’. These examples shed light on the current state of Indonesia’s religious space and its multiple mediations, as well as taking field theory into new communicative and religious terrain.

Digital-visual Stakeholder Ethnography:

In this article, we discuss how new configurations of stakeholders are implicated and can be conceptualised in digital-visual applied and public ethnography. We set the discussion in the context of the increasing calls for researchers to have impact in the world and the ways that digital technologies are increasingly implicated in this. In doing so, we situate ethnographic practice and stakeholder relationships within a digital-material world. To develop our argument, we discuss examples of two recent digital video ethnography projects, developed in dialogue with anthropological theory, with online digital-visual applied and public dissemination outputs. As we show, such projects do not necessarily have one direct applied line, but rather can have multiple impacts across different groups of stakeholders.