Technology, Media and Social Movements

Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Kevin Gillan, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Kevin Gillan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138368965
• eBook ISBN: 9780429768460
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

This book offers an interdisciplinary set of contributions from leading scholars, and explores the complex relationship between media, technology and social movements. It provides a valuable resource for scholars and students working in this rapidly developing field.

Providing theoretical engagement with contemporary debates in the field of social movements and new media, the book also includes a theoretical overview of central contemporary debates, a re-evaluation of theories of social movement communication, and a critical overview of media ecology and media approaches in social movement scholarship. The theoretical contributions are also developed though empirical case studies from around the world, including the use of Facebook in student protests in the UK, the way power operates in Anonymous, the "politics of mundanity" in China, the emotional dynamics on Twitter of India's Nirbhaya protest, and analysis of Twitter networks in the transnational feminist campaign 'Take Back The Tech!'. This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.

Navigating the technology-media-movements complex

Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Kevin Gillan

ABSTRACT

In this article we develop the notion of the technology-media-movements complex (TMMC) as a field-definition statement for ongoing inquiry into the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in social and political movements. We consider the definitions and boundaries of the TMMC, arguing particularly for a historically rooted conception of technological development that allows better integration of the different intellectual traditions that are currently focused on the same set of empirical phenomena. We then delineate two recurrent debates in the literature highlighting their contributions to emerging knowledge. The first debate concerns the divide between scholars who privilege media technologies, and see them as driving forces of movement dynamics, and those who privilege media practices over affordances. The second debate broadly opposes theorists who believe in the emancipatory potential of ICTs and those who highlight the ways they are used to repress social movements and grassroots mobilization. By mapping positions in these debates to the TMMC we identify and provide direction to three broad research areas which demand further consideration: (i) questions of power and agency in social movements; (ii) the relationships between, on the one hand, social movements and technology and media as politics (i.e. cyberpolitics and technopolitics), and on the other, the quotidian and ubiquitous use of digital tools in a digital age; and (iii) the significance of digital divides that cut across and beyond social movements, particularly in the way such divisions may overlay existing power relations in movements. In conclusion, we delineate six challenges for profitable further research on the TMMC.

The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in social and political movements is an ongoing and rich area of inquiry. Research work draws from several social scientific fields including movement scholarship, information and communications studies and media research. Our purpose in this article is to set out a general framework within which to navigate this field of inquiry. We begin by developing the notion of the technology-media-movements complex (TMMC) as a field-definition statement, allowing for better integration of the different intellectual traditions that are currently focused on the same set of empirical phenomena. We thereby introduce the essential features required for further rigorous knowledge generation in this area. In our first section we consider the definitions and boundaries of the TMMC, arguing particularly for a historically rooted conception of technological development and an approach to ‘novelty’ that recognizes it as a continually reproduced feature of the TMMC, rather than as a technologically driven, momentary historical break. We describe potential routes for integration of approaches from various fields and disciplines – including political communication, media studies, technology studies, organizational studies and social psychology – whose insights can be fruitfully applied to analysis of the nexus between technology, media, and social movements. In the second section we delineate two recurrent debates. First, we examine the tension between accounts that privilege technology or social agency as drivers of social change, arguing that what has to be analysed is the interplay of collective processes, pre-existing political commitments, technological competences, and technical affordances. This approach recognizes the creative and strategic agency of social movement actors. Second, we outline debates between scholars who emphasize the emancipatory potential of digital technology and those who are much less sanguine about its liberating potential. We highlight the real insights that proponents of divergent positions have offered the field, but note the need for nuanced accounts of empirical reality to test the veracity of competing visions of digital futures.

In our third section we consider three areas of inquiry within the TMMC that merit further consideration. First, we consider differing conceptions of social movements and the implications of each position for navigating the TMMC, distinguishing between individual agglomerate, collective, and network analyses. Second, we consider the distinction between scholarship on social movements that engage with technology and media as politics (i.e. cyberpolitics and technopolitics) and those that focus on the quotidian and ubiquitous use of digital tools in a digital age, highlighting the need for more research on how these different understandings of the role of digital tools reciprocally influence each other in movement practice. Third, we examine the digital divide. Rather than seeing this simply as a matter of global inequalities of access to technology, we argue that complex forms of digitally mediated exclusion exist within cyberspace and social movements and call for further research on the way these divisions overlay existing power relations on and offline. In this way we call attention to the need to pay more attention to lived experience and power in our analysis of the TMMC. In conclusion, we draw from the conceptual contributions of this article to set out six challenges for further research on the TMMC.

Boundaries and definitions: technology, media, movements

The study of ICTs and social movements is not (yet) an integrated subfield. There are two important reasons for the diffuse nature of inquiry in this area. The first is that empirically led studies are often understandably interested in delineating the uptake of specific new technologies within social movements. Email, IRC channels, websites, pirate radio, mobile phones, live streaming, social media platforms; the list is potentially endless as new communicative technologies become available. From an empirical point of view one often wants to examine questions such as what ways are specific technologies put to use within particular movements, what they can contribute to mobilization or contestation, or what limitations might they place on actors. At this level, it is difficult to find broad applicability in answers to such questions. Differences in both underlying technological design and the political contexts in which they are adopted suggest that there is little hope that single cases will offer many general lessons without more concerted efforts at theoretical development. The result is that, for each technological innovation – now social media, previously, the Web, email, television and so on – there has been a tendency to cycle through a particular kind of unproductive debate: optimists see radical democratizing potential, pessimists see the reconfiguration of traditional power structures in a new arena, while others seek a middle ground.

A second barrier to integration in this area of inquiry is the fact that it necessarily draws on different fields. There is much productive potential in bringing these fields together, especially by combining insights from movement scholarship with those of (political) communication (Earl & Garett, 2017), media studies (Mattoni, 2017) and technologies studies (Pavan, 2017). At present, however, it is more a case of separate lines of inquiry with only occasional intersections. As movement scholars writing in Social Movement Studies we, and several contributors to the issue, tend to examine ICTs through the conceptual frameworks developed in this field and address questions concerning the utility or otherwise provided in central movement processes such as the communication of movement frames, the generation of collective identities, or the production of movement resources. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that this movement-centrism is field-specific; elsewhere, Gillan has adopted frameworks drawing more from technology studies (2008) or political communication (Gibson, Gillan, Greffet, Lee, & Ward, 2013), whereas Flesher Fominaya (2016) has drawn on insights from human–computer interaction studies and social-psychology to apply them to analysis of the TMMC. A vital first step in enabling positive cross-field developments is a more clearly defined statement of the particular complex of phenomena that has generated such a strong flow of research publications in recent years, namely: technology, media, and movements (or TMMC). We specify each in the following paragraphs.

For technology, ICTs are the core focus. It is these technologies in particular that have been the subject of so much innovation and excitement since the personal computers of the early 1960s, but especially since the creation of two major communication infrastructures: mobile phone networks beginning in the 1960s and the Internet (and various nationally specific variants) in the 1980s. A technologically vital and more recent process here is widespread digitization. Spurred by the characteristics of microchip processing and the Internet, the more that data are available in digital form the more they can be transformed and communicated. This is not a trivial technological outcome. The first mobile phone networks, drawing from their obvious predecessors on landlines, were analogue communication systems and only became digitized with the ‘second generation’ EU-led GSM protocol deployed from the early 1990s, which not incidentally made short message service (SMS) texting feasible (Castells, Qiu, Fernandez-Ardevol, & Sey, 2006). Without the digitization pathway, powerful and emotive imagery, audio and video would have been much harder to share online; and the visual language of contemporary information flows potentially changes the nature of the public sphere in which much movement communication is located (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002). Perhaps more fundamentally, without the digitization of mobile networks the convergence between mobile phones and Internet devices – creating complex hybrid spaces that intertwine the informational and the physical – would have been practically impossible (see De Souza e Silva, 2006; Gordon, 2006). From a communications angle, without decades of SMS texts it seems unlikely that many users would have found interaction through Twitter’s 144-character messaging interface appealing or even coherent; the devel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Navigating the technology-media-movements complex
• 2. Complex contention: analyzing power dynamics within Anonymous
• 3. From ‘moments of madness’ to ‘the politics of mundanity’ - researching digital media and contentious collective actions in China
• 4. The integrative power of online collective action networks beyond protest. Exploring social media use in the process of institutionalization
• 5. Tweeting India’s Nirbhaya protest: a study of emotional dynamics in an online social movement
• 6. Open networks and secret Facebook groups: exploring cycle effects on activists’ social media use in the 2010/11 UK student protests
• 7. The new information frontier: toward a more nuanced view of social movement communication
• 8. A situated understanding of digital technologies in social movements. Media ecology and media practice approaches
• Index