Occupy Online: How Cute Old Men and Malcolm X Recruited 400,000 US Users to OWS on Facebook

In search of the ‘we’ of social media activism: introduction to the special issue on social media and protest identities

“…It stems from the way in which the dominance of big data analytics as an emerging set of quantitative methodologies in the social sciences has marginalized the study of symbolic processes whose understanding requires the nuanced and in-depth discernment of qualitative methods (boyd & Crawford, 2012;Couldry, 2014). Big data analysis has become a scholarly 'fashion' among researchers looking at the wave of recent protest movements: on the Occupy movement (Conover et al, 2013;Gaby & Caren, 2012), on the Arab Spring (Starbird & Palen, 2012), the Brazilian vinegar protests (Bastos, Da Cunha Recuero, & da Silva Zago, 2014), the 15M/Indignados Spanish movement (Toret et al, 2015), and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece (Theocharis, Lowe, van Deth, & García-Albacete, 2015). While this stream of analysis has considerable merits, data analysis alone is not always well suited to get to grips with symbolic processes and the construction of collective identity.…”

The Organizational Trace of an Insurgent Moment

“…The authors concluded, "It is doubtless that supporters may have hoped for a more sustained discourse than is evident from the near-complete abandonment of these once high-profile communication channels" (p. 5). Although social media played an important role in helping OWS go viral (Gaby and Caren 2012;Penney and Dadas 2013), this virality was a short-lived flare in consciousness with little impact on participants over the long term (Conover et al 2013). …”

“…The initial call for action came from the Canadian anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters in July 2011, and mobilization took place not through existing formal organizations as much as through the channels of social media (Gaby and Caren 2012;Penney and Dadas 2013;Tremayne 2014). Yet neither can OWS said to have been tamed or coopted by formal organizations.…”

FCJ-197 Entanglements with Media and Technologies in the Occupy Movement

“…[3] Gaby and Caren (2012) demonstrate the role Facebook played in spreading Occupy messaging after protests started on September 7, 2010, which included access to related news, information sharing, updates on meetings, and as a site for messaging. Posts about protests drew new members, especially those depicting images of confrontations between the police and protesters (Tremayne, 2013).…”