Merlyna Lim

Many Clicks but Little Sticks: Social Media Activism in Indonesia

Drawing on empirical cases from Indonesia, this article offers a critical approach to the promise of social media activism by analysing the complexity and dynamics of the relationship between social media and its users. Rather than viewing social media activism as the harbinger of social change or dismissing it as mere “slacktivism,” the article provides a more nuanced argument by identifying the conditions under which participation in social media might lead to successful political activism. In social media, networks are vast, content is overly abundant, attention spans are short, and conversations are parsed into diminutive sentences. For social media activism to be translated into populist political activism, it needs to embrace the principles of the contemporary culture of consumption: light package, headline appetite and trailer vision. Social media activism is more likely to successfully mobilise mass support when its narratives are simple, associated with low risk actions and congruent with dominant meta-narratives, such as nationalism and religiosity. Success is less likely when the narrative is contested by dominant competing narratives generated in mainstream media.

Framing Bouazizi: ‘White lies’, hybrid network, and collective/connective action in the 2010–11 Tunisian uprising:

By delving into the detailed account of the Tunisian uprising, this article offers an explanation that sets the 2010 uprising apart from its precursors. The 2010 uprising was successful because activists successfully managed to bridge geographical and class divides as well as to converge offline and online activisms. Such connection and convergence were made possible, first, through the availability of dramatic visual evidence that turned a local incident into a spectacle. Second, by successful frame alignment with a master narrative that culturally and politically resonated with the entire population. Third, by activating a hybrid network made of the connective structures to facilitate collective action – among Tunisians who shared collective identities and collective frames – and connective action – among individuals who sought more personalized paths to contribute to the movement through digital media.

Raising and Rising Voices in Social Media

Emerging cyber-collective social movements (CSMs) have frequently made headlines in the news. Despite their popularity, there is a lack of systematic methodologies to empirically study such movements in complex online environments. Using the Al-Huwaider online campaign as a case to illustrate our methodology, this contribution attempts to establish a rigorous and fundamental analysis that explains CSMs. We collected 150 blogs from 17 countries ranging between April 2003 and July 2010 with a special focus on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns capturing multi-cultural aspects for our analysis. Bearing the analysis upon three central tenets of individual, community, and transnational perspectives, we develop novel algorithms modeling CSMs by utilizing existing collective action theories and computational social network analysis. This article contributes a methodology to study the diffusion of issues in social networks and examines roles of influential community members. The proposed methodology provides a rigorous tool to understand the complexity and dynamics of CSMs. Such methodology also assists us in observing the transcending nature of CSMs with future possibilities for modeling transnational outreach. Our study addresses the lack of fundamental research on the formation of CSMs. This research contributes novel methodologies that can be applied to many settings including business, marketing and many others, beyond the exemplary setting chosen here for illustrative purposes.

Online Collective Action and the Role of Social Media in Mobilizing Opinions: A Case Study on Women's Right-to-Drive Campaigns in Saudi Arabia

With the advent of advanced information and communication technologies (ICT), especially social media, new forms of collective actions (CAs) have emerged calling for reassessment of some aspects of traditional CA theories. However, regardless of the prominent role of social media platforms in various movements, there is a scarcity of online CA research. Existing computational studies focusing on capturing and mapping social media interactions and issues manage to identify the very manifestations of CA. These studies, unfortunately, rarely go beyond a mere descriptive tendency. We propose a methodology to gain deeper insights into online CA by analyzing issue propagation, influential community members’ roles, and the transcending nature of CA through individual, community, and transnational perspectives. The efficacy of the proposed model is demonstrated by a case study of the Saudi women campaigns on the ban of driving, including data from the 2008 Wajeha al-Huwaider’s driving campaigns and the 2011 ‘Women2Drive’ campaign observed on various social media sites. As conceptualized, utilized, and illustrated in this case study, our proposed methodology highlights several key contributions to the fundamental research on online CAs as well as computational studies on social media in general. We offer: a new framework to understand the evolution and diffusion of issues in online CA networks; a new approach focusing on the formation of issues providing a rigorous model; and, ultimately, a new understanding of the relationship between online CAs and the rapidly changing online environment.

Collective Action Theory Meets the Blogosphere: A New Methodology

With the advent of advanced yet exoteric ICTs, especially the social media, new forms of collective actions have emerged to illuminate several fundamental yet theoretically obscure aspects of collective actions. Existing computational studies focusing on capturing and mapping the interactions and issues prevailing in social media manage to identify the manifestations of collective actions. They, however, lack modeling and predictive capabilities. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to gain deeper insights into cyber-collective actions by analyzing issue propagation, influential community members’ roles, and transcending nature of collective actions through individual, community, and transnational perspectives, The efficacy of the proposed model is demonstrated by a case-study on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns consisting of 150 blogs from 17 countries tracked between 2003 and 2010. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed methodology is the first to address the lacking fundamental research shedding light on re-framing Collective Action Theory in online environments.

Life Is Local in the Imagined Global Community: Islam and Politics in the Indonesian Blogosphere

The rapid expansion of the Internet, marked by a storm of blogs and social networking platforms, is perceived as an enabling instrument for Muslims to be engaged globally. In this regard, the blogosphere can be a vehicle for worldwide interactions and the formation of global Muslim community, the ummah. While this idea is enchanting, this article shows that such an idea needs judicious scrutiny. Using three prominent cases from Indonesia, this article tries to explore the ways in which Muslim bloggers in Indonesia use this new flexible form to be engaged in conversations that are related to Islam and to answer the following questions: How do the features of the blogosphere influence discussions on Islam related issues? Does the promise of a “global village” change the dynamics of Muslim communities in Indonesia? Does the blogosphere perpetuate a sense of ummah consciousness or does it reinforce nationalism? Does the blogosphere offer promising possibilities for new types of Muslim communities to emerge in the form of globalized community?

Studying the Evolution of Online Collective Action: Saudi Arabian Women’s ‘Oct26Driving’ Twitter Campaign

Social media have played a substantial role in supporting collective actions. Reports state that protesters use blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other online communication media and environments to mobilize and spread awareness. In this research, we focus on studying the process of formation of online collective action (OCA) by analyzing the diffusion of hashtags. We examine the recently organized Saudi Arabian women’s right to drive campaign, called ‘Oct26Driving’ and collected the Twitter data, starting from September 25, 2013 to the present. Given the definitive nature of hashtags, we investigate the co-evolution of hashtag usage and the campaign network. The study considers the dominant hashtags dedicated to the Oct26Driving campaign, viz., ‘#oct26driving’ and ‘#قيادة_26اكتوبر’. Morteover, it identifies cross-cultural aspects with individual hashtag networks, with Arabic hashtags relating to local factors and English hashtags contributing to transnational support from other organizations, such as those related to human rights and women’s rights. Despite the wide news media coverage of social movements, there is a lack of systematic methodologies to analytically model such phenomena in complex online environments. The research aims to develop models that help advance the understanding of interconnected collective actions conducted through modern social and information systems.

Freedom to hate: social media, algorithmic enclaves, and the rise of tribal nationalism in Indonesia

ABSTRACT Empirically grounded in the 2017 Jakarta Gubernatorial Election (Pilkada DKI) case, this article discusses the relationship of social media and electoral politics in Indonesia. There is no doubt that sectarianism and racism played significant roles in the election and social media, which were heavily utilized during the campaign, contributed to the increasing polarization among Indonesians. However, it is misleading to frame the contestation among ordinary citizens on social media in an oppositional binary, such as democratic versus undemocratic forces, pluralism versus sectarianism, or rational versus racist voters. Marked by the utilization of volunteers, buzzers, and micro-celebrities, the Pilkada DKI exemplifies the practice of post-truth politics in marketing the brand. While encouraging freedom of expression, social media also emboldens freedom to hate, where individuals exercise their right to voice their opinions while actively silencing others. Unraveling the complexity of the relationship between social media and electoral politics, I suggest that the mutual shaping between users and algorithms results in the formation of “algorithmic enclaves” that, in turn, produce multiple forms of tribal nationalism. Within these multiple online enclaves, social media users claim and legitimize their own versions of nationalism by excluding equality and justice for others.

Online Collective Action

Sentiment Analysis deals with the detection and analysis of affective content in written text. It utilizes methodologies, theories, and techniques from a diverse set of scientific domains, ranging from psychology and sociology to natural language processing and machine learning. In this chapter, we discuss the contributions of the field in social media analysis with a particular focus in online collective actions; as these actions are typically motivated and driven by intense emotional states (e.g., anger), sentiment analysis can provide unique insights into the inner workings of such phenomena throughout their life cycle. We also present the state of the art in the field and describe some of its contributions into understanding online collective behavior. Lastly, we discuss significant real-world datasets that have been successfully utilized in research and are available for scientific purposes and also present a diverse set of available tools for conducting sentiment analysis.

Sticks and Stones, Clicks and Phones: Contextualizing the Role of Digital Media in the Politics of Transformation

In the last decade, we have seen major protests occurring around the world. The frequency of these protests has increased dramatically since the so-called Arab Spring started in Tunisia in December 2010. Since then, there have been thousands of protests emerging in various places in the world.