Mediated Interaction Rituals: A Geography of Everyday Life and Contention in Black Lives Matter*

Abstract

The Movement for Black Lives has connected millions of people online. How are their outrage and hope mediated through social media? To address this question, this article extends Randall Collins’s Interaction Ritual Theory to social media. Employing semisupervised image recognition methods on a million Instagram posts with the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, we identify four different interaction ritual types, each with distinct geographies. Instagram posts featuring interactions with physical copresence are concentrated in urban areas. We identify two different types of such areas: arenas where contention plays out and milieus where movement identities are affirmed. Instagram posts that do not feature physical copresence are more geographically dispersed. These posts, including memes and selfies, allow people to engage with the movement even when they are not embedded in activist environments. Our analysis helps to understand how different forms of engagement are embedded in particular places and connected through the circulation of social media posts.

Spatial dynamics of protest: Themes and trajectories

“…Acknowledging multiple spaces that we now inhabit as they relate to new technologies, scholars offered a more complex understanding of public space and dissent, one which includes both physical and virtual spaces (Amin, 2015; Steinhilper, 2018; Vasi & Suh, 2016). Starting with the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement and growing with the expansion of the Black Lives Matter Movement in the U.S. after 2014 (Cheng & Chan, 2016; Mislán & Dache‐Gerbino, 2018; Ray, 2020), some scholarly debates engaged with different aspects of protest in place (presented throughout this article) in the context of in‐person/online activism and the back and forth between the physical and the virtual (Steinhilper, 2018; van Haperen et al., 2020; Vasi & Suh, 2016). As one example, van Haperen et al.…”

“…As one example, van Haperen et al. (2020) investigate the relation between presentation and online performance, and locational context. They show that different interaction ritual types operate in distinct geographies.…”

Memes, brands and the politics of post-terror togetherness: following the Manchester bee after the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing

“…The less digital responses of other actors or sectors of society were meanwhile less likely to gain visibility via social media and scale-up. Subsequently, it must be acknowledged that social media platforms are associated with particular demographics with, for example, access to and use of Instagram known to be stratified by gender, class and race (van Haperen et al, 2020). Illustrative of this, the bee tattoos in the sub-sample mostly adorn white skin.…”

“…At the same time, social media platforms often facilitate forms of being and acting together that are dynamic and multifaceted, episodic and fragmentary. The feelings of togetherness that they make possible do not necessarily rely on physical copresence and often take shape through different 'trajectories of publicness'including those of a spatial, temporal and material charactercontributing to broader networks of connection (Couldry, 2020;Kavada & Poell, 2020;van Haperen et al, 2020). Such trajectories can also be affective insofar as emotional connectivity allows 'fundamentally different actors, identities, and perspectives to temporarily come together' (Poell & Van Dijck, 2016, p. 232).…”

Modeling the emergence of affective polarization in the social media society

“…New media simply relaxes the external constraints that have historically introduced the integrating forces understood via contact theory, such as neighborhoods, workplaces, villages, etc. Rather than meeting under the label of a geographical location, new information technology enables us to increasingly meet under the label of shared interests or attributes—and meeting under the banner of shared interests and attributes leads to the formation and strengthening of social identities [ 85 , 86 ].…”