From the Arab Spring and los indignados in Spain, to Occupy Wall Street (and beyond), largescale, sustained It argues that understanding such variations in large-scale action networks requires distinguishing between at least two logics that may be in play: The familiar logic of collective action associated with high levels of organizational resources and the formation of collective identities, and the less familiar logic of connective action based on personalized content sharing across media networks. In the former, introducing digital media do not change the core dynamics of the action. In the case of the latter, they do. Building on these distinctions, the article presents three ideal types of large-scale action networks that are becoming prominent in the contentious politics of the contemporary era.With the world economy in crisis, the heads of the 20 leading economies held a series of meetings beginning in fall of 2008 to coordinate financial rescue policies. Wherever the G20 leaders met, whether in Washington, London, St. Andrews, Pittsburgh, Toronto, or Seoul, they were greeted by protests. In London, anti-capitalist, environmental direct activist, and non-governmental organization (NGO)-sponsored actions were coordinated across different days. The largest of these demonstrations was sponsored by a number of prominent NGOs including Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, Save the Children, and World Vision. This loose coalition launched a Put People First (PPF) campaign promoting public mobilization against social and environmental harms of 'business as usual' solutions to the financial crisis. The website for the campaign carried the simple statement:Even before the banking collapse, the world suffered poverty, inequality and the threat of climate chaos. The world has followed a financial model that has created an economy fuelled by ever-increasing debt, both financial and environmental. Our future depends on creating an economy based on fair distribution of wealth, decent jobs for all and a low carbon future. (Put People First 2009) The centerpiece of this PPF campaign was a march of some 35,000 people through the streets of London a few days ahead of the G20 meeting to give voice and show commitment to the campaign's simple theme.The London PPF protest drew together a large and diverse protest with the emphasis on personal expression, but it still displayed what Tilly (2004, 2006) termed WUNC: worthiness embodied by the endorsements by some 160 prominent civil society organizations and recognition of their demands by various prominent officials; unity reflected in the orderliness of the event;numbers of participants that made PPF the largest of a series of London G20 protests and the largest demonstration during the string of G20 meetings in different world locations; and commitment reflected in the presence of delegations from some 20 different nations who joined local citizens in spending much of the day listening to speakers in Hyde Park or attending religious services sponsored by church-based developme...
From the Arab Spring and los indignados in Spain, to Occupy Wall Street (and beyond), largescale, sustained It argues that understanding such variations in large-scale action networks requires distinguishing between at least two logics that may be in play: The familiar logic of collective action associated with high levels of organizational resources and the formation of collective identities, and the less familiar logic of connective action based on personalized content sharing across media networks. In the former, introducing digital media do not change the core dynamics of the action. In the case of the latter, they do. Building on these distinctions, the article presents three ideal types of large-scale action networks that are becoming prominent in the contentious politics of the contemporary era.With the world economy in crisis, the heads of the 20 leading economies held a series of meetings beginning in fall of 2008 to coordinate financial rescue policies. Wherever the G20 leaders met, whether in Washington, London, St. Andrews, Pittsburgh, Toronto, or Seoul, they were greeted by protests. In London, anti-capitalist, environmental direct activist, and non-governmental organization (NGO)-sponsored actions were coordinated across different days. The largest of these demonstrations was sponsored by a number of prominent NGOs including Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, Save the Children, and World Vision. This loose coalition launched a Put People First (PPF) campaign promoting public mobilization against social and environmental harms of 'business as usual' solutions to the financial crisis. The website for the campaign carried the simple statement:Even before the banking collapse, the world suffered poverty, inequality and the threat of climate chaos. The world has followed a financial model that has created an economy fuelled by ever-increasing debt, both financial and environmental. Our future depends on creating an economy based on fair distribution of wealth, decent jobs for all and a low carbon future. (Put People First 2009) The centerpiece of this PPF campaign was a march of some 35,000 people through the streets of London a few days ahead of the G20 meeting to give voice and show commitment to the campaign's simple theme.The London PPF protest drew together a large and diverse protest with the emphasis on personal expression, but it still displayed what Tilly (2004, 2006) termed WUNC: worthiness embodied by the endorsements by some 160 prominent civil society organizations and recognition of their demands by various prominent officials; unity reflected in the orderliness of the event;numbers of participants that made PPF the largest of a series of London G20 protests and the largest demonstration during the string of G20 meetings in different world locations; and commitment reflected in the presence of delegations from some 20 different nations who joined local citizens in spending much of the day listening to speakers in Hyde Park or attending religious services sponsored by church-based developme...
The Twitter Revolutions of 2009 reinvigorated the question of whether new social media have any real effect on contentious politics. In this article, the authors argue that evaluating the relation between transforming communication technologies and collective action demands recognizing how such technologies infuse specific protest ecologies. This includes looking beyond informational functions to the role of social media as organizing mechanisms and recognizing that traces of these media may reflect larger organizational schemes. Three points become salient in the case of Twitter against this background: (a) Twitter streams represent crosscutting networking mechanisms in a protest ecology, (b) they embed and are embedded in various kinds of gatekeeping processes, and (c) they reflect changing dynamics in the ecology over time. The authors illustrate their argument with reference to two hashtags used in the protests around the 2009 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen.The year 2009 was the year social media moved to the front line in a variety of national and transnational protests. Activists, police, and mass media announced their intent to step up use of social technology to coordinate, communicate, and monitor the G20 London Summit protests (Ward, 2009); Evgeny Morozov commented on "Moldova's Twitter Revolution" (Morozov, 2009a); and soon it was proclaimed that the Iranian revolution would be tweeted (Sullivan, 2009). As the early euphoria over the events in Iran was tempered, the debate instead came to center on whether and how new media have "real consequences for contentious politics" (Aday et al., 2010, p. 5). In general, however, "real" consequences continued to be measured in terms of pro-democratic institutional outcomes, and "new media" often boiled down to Twitter.Sweeping assumptions and generalizations are not helpful starting points for examining the relation between social media and contentious collective action, much less for illuminating how social technologies operate in specific contexts with specific effects. Looking beyond their obvious function as means of sending and receiving messages, we argue for the importance of analyzing social technologies both as organizing mechanisms in complex collective action ecologies and as reflections of larger organizational schemes. Toward this end, we propose an approach that locates Twitter and other social technologies in diverse contexts of use while opening up for more focused assessments of the differing roles these media might play. We illustrate our argument with reference to two hashtags that were used in a family of protests leading up to the 15th United Nations Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP15) which took place in Copenhagen between the 7th and the 18th of Contextualizing Twitter RevolutionsThe debate about the 2009 Twitter Revolutions at base concerned whether Twitter triggers revolutions, and whether twittered uprisings are effective. This (pre-Egypt) discussion included focus on two issues: the uses of Twitter for pu...
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