Social Media Materialities and Protest

Critical Reflections

Mette Mortensen, Christina Neumayer, Thomas Poell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138093089
• eBook ISBN: 9781351605977
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Far from being neutral, social media platforms – such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and WeChat – possess their own material characteristics, which shape how people engage, protest, resist, and struggle. This innovative collection advances the notion of social media materialities to draw attention to the ways in which the wires and silicon, data streams and algorithms, user and programming interfaces, business models and terms of service steer contentious practices and, inversely, how technologies and economic models are handled and performed by users. The key question is how the tension between social media's techno-commercial infrastructures and activist agency plays out in protest. Addressing this, the volume goes beyond singular empirical examples and focuses on the characteristics of protest and social media materialities, offering further conceptualizations and guidance for this emerging field of research. The various contributions explore a wide variety of activist projects, protests, and regions, ranging from Occupy in the USA to environmental protests in China, and from the Mexican Barrio Nómada to the Copenhagen-based activist television channel TV Stop (1987–2005).

PART I

Spatiality

1

I post, you rally, she tweets…and we all occupy

The challenges of hybrid spatiality in the Occupy Wall Street mobilizations

Introduction

“I am not from the US, but I am here in Pittsburgh and I would like to help with the occupation”. This comment, which I posted at the end of September 2011 on the Occupy Pittsburgh blog, was my first interaction with the mobilization, which was just taking off. From that moment on, I participated in the mobilization both offline and online. Occupy Pittsburgh was indeed supported through the intertwining of many physical locations as well as various technological devices and online platforms, through which people could take part in the mobilization. Many scholars who are interested in social movements have noted the importance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for protests. They have suggested that such technologies play a key role in changing: organizational structures of mobilizations (Bennett & Segerberg 2013; Juris 2008), repertoires of contention (Earl & Kimport 2011), and the construction of shared meanings and common identities of social movements (Kavada 2015; Milan 2015a).

W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg were probably the most influential in arguing that the rise of social media platforms changes how mobilizations are organized and represented in the public space. These changes require a novel theoretical perspective to understand how contemporary protestors act and what the socio-political consequences of protest are. Analyzing Occupy Wall Street and other recent mobilizations, Bennett and Segerberg suggest that a logic of connective action is emerging, in which people engage with mobilizations at an individual level through the personalization of interpretations of protest that are then shared on social media platforms (Bennett & Segerberg 2013). While the logic of collective action revolved around collective action frames and actors, the logic of connective action gives rise to protests in which individuals play a prominent role and personal action frames dominate (ibid). However, as Kavada (2015) already noted, the logic of connective action seems difficult to apply to those activists who are more intensely and more frequently involved in social movements. As Bennett has recognized, the analytical framework he developed with Segerberg works well when considering “organizational processes in the media crowd” situated at the periphery of mobilizations. However, this framework is less helpful when considering activists running the protest camps, as well as their relationship with more distant publics (Bennett 2015, quoted in Mercea, Iannelli & Loader 2016).

This chapter explores these connections by focussing on the specific materiality of the spatial relations that unfolded during Occupy Pittsburgh. Many scholars have claimed that protest camps have been central to contemporary mobilizations (e.g. Gerbaudo 2017, Bennett & Segerberg 2013, Castells 2012). Yet, they have not closely investigated how protest camps are intertwined with digital technologies and how they connect different geographical locations. So far, scholars have highlighted how social media intersect with key social movement activities, such as collective identity building (Kavada 2015), social movement visibility (Theocharis et al. 2015), the recruitment of new supporters (Gaby & Caren 2012), and the temporal dimension of mobilizations (Kaun 2016). However, there is still a need to develop a solid understanding of how digital technologies transform the spatial dimension of protest and how such transformation in turn shapes social movement activities that sustain the unfolding of mobilizations.

As outlined above, I address this topic by analyzing the participation infrastructure of Occupy Pittsburgh. This infrastructure was hybrid, offering several interfaces through which people could be included in the mobilization, allowing for the intersection of different modes of participation, as well as the encounter between the dispersed media crowd and the activists who converged daily in the protest camp. Putting the participation infrastructure of Occupy Pittsburgh at the centre of my investigation also allows me to consider social media in the broader context of the media ecology in which the mobilization was embedded (Treré & Mattoni 2016). In other words, instead of asking how one distinct social media platform changes the spatial dimension of social movements, I focus on how a broader ensemble of internet tools, web platforms, low-tech media, and physical spaces intertwined in creating a multifaceted infrastructure for political participation that was characterized by specific spatial arrangements in Occupy Pittsburgh.

Starting with such premises, I seek to answer three interrelated questions: First, what are the spatial layers that characterize the infrastructure of participation in relation to Occupy Pittsburgh? Second, what modes of participation did they enable? Third, what challenges were faced by the activists when participation in one spatial layer of mobilizations collided with participation in another? Answering these questions allows me to contribute to the current debate on how social media and other digital media are shaping the emerging spatiality of activist participation in contemporary societies. I will answer these questions by drawing on the analysis of qualitative data I gathered through an ethnographic investigation of the first two months of Occupy Pittsburgh, from its first assemblies in early October 2011 to the end of November 2011, when the protests reached their peak. I employed participant observation (Lichterman 1998), conducting fieldwork both online and offline, to grasp the interplay of physical and digital localities (Pink et al. 2015) in Occupy Pittsburgh. I participated in and took notes on the following issues: the activities that occurred on the official Occupy Pittsburgh website, the live-stream channel, the two Facebook groups, and some Google Groups; the activities that occurred at the protest camp and beyond, including general assemblies, demonstrations, working groups meetings, teach-ins and the daily life at the protest camp; and informal conversations with the activists who were at the protest camp.

The next section provides a portrait of Occupy Pittsburgh, its main phases and features. Then, I reconstruct the spatial layers that characterized the participation infrastructure of the mobilization and how it came together in three subsequent waves. The subsequent section discusses the modes of participation that were possible in the different spatial layers of the participation infrastructure. Finally, I consider two specific examples – the use of the live stream and the Facebook group – to cast light on the challenges faced by activists when the spatial layers of the mobilizations collided.

Occupy Pittsburgh at a glance

After the occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York on 17 September 2011, Occupy Wall Street quickly spread to other cities across the USA. In Pittsburgh, the Occupy Wall Street mobilizations first took shape through the creation of a website and then a Facebook group. This online presence evolved in face-to-face general assemblies aiming to prepare the occupation downtown. After three meetings with an average of 300 participants each, activists organized a demonstration on 15 October that culminated in the occupation of a public park downtown that was privately owned and managed by the Mellon Bank of New York. Before the occupation, the activists had already created several working groups that acted collectively through non-hierarchical and participatory decision-making processes to manage the many aspects involved in the establishment of a protest camp, such as the food working group, the medical working group, and the social media working group. Each working group had its own tent from which to develop its activities. In line with Occupy Wall Street mobilizations and other similar pro-democracy and anti-austerity movements that have emerged in the 2010s across the world (della Porta & Mattoni 2014), physical occupation of city space and the consequent organization of a protest camp was a defining feature of Occupy Pittsburgh. The rest of this chapter goes beyond the materiality of the protest camp to analyze its relationship with the other physical spaces and digital localities that nurtured participation in Occupy Pittsburgh, expanding the reach of the protest camp itself, well beyond the boundaries of its physical location. In doing this, I address the three research questions outlined above to explore how participation in contemporary social movements simultaneously occurs in different geographical settings, configuring a spatially hybrid participation infrastructure that poses important challenges to activists.

Participation in the hybrid spatiality of Occupy Pittsburgh

Protest camps are a longstanding feature of social movements’ repertoire of contention (Brown et al. 2017, Frenzel et al. 2014, Feigenbaum et al. 2013). In such camps, four different infrastructures are usually in place, each linked to a specific spatial dimension and each providing the facilities and services to support the reaching of common goals:

1. The domestic infrastructure that sustains the daily life at the protest camp and includes the running of common services, including food provision and medical support;
2. the action infrastructure that allows the protest camp to function as a hub from which other forms of protest might develop;
3. the communication infrastructure that refers to the protest camp as a form of representation in which and from which activists communicate with potential supporters, bystanders and opponents; and, finally,
4. the governance infrastructure that sustains the decision-making process occurring within the protest camp and affecting the mobilization of which it is part.

Frenzel et al. 2014

The protest camp of Occupy Pittsburgh clearly relied on these four infrastructures. Focussing on them will allow for a reconstruction of the spatiality of the protest camp as such. However, as mentioned above, in this chapter I seek to understand how the concrete location of the protest camp intertwined with different types of media technologies, reaching beyond its physical boundaries. In particular, I am interested in reconstructing what I call the participation infrastructure that supported Occupy Pittsburgh, of which the protest camp was just one, although crucial, place. Drawing on Feigenbaum et al. (2013: 54), I define the participation infrastructure of a mobilization such as Occupy Pittsburgh as all the processes, spaces and technologies that people might employ to take part in protest activities. In past mobilizations, the participation infrastructure included media technologies that remained at the margins due to their limited ability to allow for massive long-distance and asynchronous political participation. However, today, the participation infrastructure is not only more multifaceted, but it is also more balanced between the physical experience of the protest camp and interactions with digital technologies, which expand the opportunities for participation in time and space.

To grasp the whole participation infrastructure of contemporary mobilizations, it is then necessary to adopt a comprehensive perspective that goes beyond the temporal and spatial constraints of the protest camp. On the one hand, considering protest camps from the viewpoint of their temporal dimension, it is clear that the participation infrastructure of Occupy Pittsburgh had already begun to exist when the activists gathered to decide how to set up the protest camp itself. On the other hand, considering the spatiality of the protest camp, it was clear that the spaces for decision-making related to Occupy Pittsburgh went beyond its particular location to include social media platforms, as well as physical spaces that were located in other areas of Pittsburgh. More specifically, the participation infrastructure of Occupy Pittsburgh developed in three subsequent waves that combined different places, spaces and ICTs.

The first wave began once the news about Occupy Wall Street in New York reached Pittsburgh. At that point, people living in Pittsburgh were part of the dispersed media crowd that was following the unfolding of events in New York through various social media platforms. However, soon some activists in Pittsburgh established a Facebook group and registered an internet domain on which they constructed the official Occupy Pittsburgh website. Thus, two online spaces at the core of the participation infrastructure developed in the first stage of Occupy Pittsburgh. The second wave coincided with the organization of three general assemblies that were open to the public, and convened before the actual occupation. The first and the third general assemblies occurred in the First Unitarian Church, while the second occurred in a park situated on the university campus. These waves of infrastructural development culminated with the establishment of Occupy Pittsburgh as a recognizable social movement, the organization of a peaceful demonstration on 15 October 2011, and the occupation of the downtown Mellon Bank Park where the activists established a protest camp. The third wave of infrastructural development followed, which clearly revolved around, but was not situated solely at, the protest camp. The tents in the park multiplied rapidly and, at the same time, the participation infrastructure expanded beyond its premises by combining different types of physical spaces. Due to severe weather conditions, several general assemblies occurred in the United Steelworkers building near the protest camp, and many working group meetings were held in commercial establishments that served coffee and other products, and they were also held in university buildings. Moreover, due to the widespread use of laptops and, even more importantly, smartphones, people could potentially participate in Occupy Pittsburgh from anywhere. Hence, spaces of the struggle temporarily materialized in the areas daily traversed by participants, including workplaces and habitations.

The participation infrastructure resulting from these three subsequent waves was inherently hybrid in its spatiality, since it included and integrated different types of places – public and private, online and offline, and commercial and non-profit spaces – in which people gathered to participate in the broad range of activities related to Occupy Pittsburgh. This, in turn, had the direct consequence of empowering different types of engagement in Occupy Pittsburgh. I observed how the activists devoted different amounts of time to Occupy Pittsburgh: from full-time involvement to sporadic commitment. Moreover, they engaged with the mobilization through three main entry points: the protest camp itself, its activists’ working groups, and the general assemblies that sustained Occupy Pittsburgh. For each entry point, face-to-face interactions blended with ICTs in different ways. Informal chats at the protest camp and in its immediate surroundings were supplemented by phone calls and email exchanges. Furthermore, low-tech media were also used at the protest camp to engage in conversation with potential supporters, such as the “debt wall”, a placard in the middle of the campsite on which anyone could declare her loan. Face-to-face interactions in working groups were complemented by the use of online Google groups and, only in one case, the use of an activist-run mailing list service. Many of the working groups continued their face-to-face conversations online, which was essential for the drafting of the proposals and documents to be discussed in general assemblies. Finally, the general assemblies were frequently ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Social media materialities and protest
• PART I: Spatiality
• PART II: Temporality
• PART III: Platformization
• Afterword: Lessons and puzzles in studying social media materialities and protest
• Index