The personalization of engagement: the symbolic construction of social media and grassroots mobilization in Canadian newspapers

Abstract

This article explores the symbolic construction of civic engagement mediated by social media in Canadian newspapers. The integration of social media in politics has created a discursive opening for reimagining engagement, partly as a result of enthusiastic accounts of the impact of digital technologies upon democracy. By means of a qualitative content analysis of Canadian newspaper articles between 2005 and 2014, we identify several discursive articulations of engagement: First, the articles offer the picture of a wide range of objects of engagement, suggesting a civic body actively involved in governance processes. Second, engagement appears to take place only reactively, after decisions are made. Finally, social media become the new social glue, bringing isolated individuals together and thus enabling them to pressure decision-making institutions. We argue that, collectively, these stories construct engagement as a deeply personal gesture that is nevertheless turned into a communal experience by the affordances of technology. The conclusion unpacks what we deem as the ambiguity at the heart of this discourse, considering its implications for democratic politics and suggesting avenues for the further monitoring of the technologically enabled personalization of engagement.

Voice and Listening in Social Media Facilitated Activist Collectives

“…On the one hand, the widespread use of social media in contentious collective action positions these platforms as quintessential spaces for the expression of individual voice (Dumitrica and Bakardjieva 2018). This builds upon a long‐standing framing of the proliferation of self‐expression on the Internet as a form of political participation (Keren 2010).…”

#Participating #Contesting: Studying Counterpublics’ Discourses on Twitter About the Social Acceptability of Medical Assistance in Dying Legislation in Canada

“…2015) and the Tea Party in the United States (Rohlinger and Bunnage 2015), Indignados in Spain (Loader, Vroomen, and Xenos 2014), Idle No More in Canada (Callison and Hermida 2015), and student protests in Chile (Scherman, Arrigada, and Valenzuela 2015) and in Quebec (Gallant, Latzko‐Toth, and Pastinelli 2015; Millette, Milette, and Proulx 2012; Raynauld, Lalancette, and Tourigny‐Koné 2016) have all greatly benefited from digital media. Platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram have been instrumental in creating large‐scale awareness of these causes (Dumitrica and Bakardjieva 2018; Poell 2014).…”

“…Platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram have been instrumental in creating large-scale awareness of these causes (Dumitrica and Bakardjieva 2018;Poell 2014).…”

The concept of authorial legacy in polarised debate on the ethics of social media-driven activism

“…The civic culture that social media produces, and the political engagement that this culture enables, has evolved rapidly over recent years and continues to evolve. One key observation that scholars examining political engagement on social media have shared is that, among activists but also in the community more widely, increasing personalisation of political engagement, and a concomitant polarisation of political debate, has led to increased complexity in people’s actual participation in civil and political society (Dumitrica and Bakardjieva, 2018; Garrett, 2009; Nikunen, 2018; Postill, 2018; Sunstein, 2018). The symbolic construction of social media participation in political debate as an emancipatory process (Dumitrica and Bakardjieva, 2018) is belied by, for example, the emergence of populism and populist reformulation of political discourse (Postill, 2018).…”

“…One key observation that scholars examining political engagement on social media have shared is that, among activists but also in the community more widely, increasing personalisation of political engagement, and a concomitant polarisation of political debate, has led to increased complexity in people’s actual participation in civil and political society (Dumitrica and Bakardjieva, 2018; Garrett, 2009; Nikunen, 2018; Postill, 2018; Sunstein, 2018). The symbolic construction of social media participation in political debate as an emancipatory process (Dumitrica and Bakardjieva, 2018) is belied by, for example, the emergence of populism and populist reformulation of political discourse (Postill, 2018). Activity characterised as social media-driven activism is shaped by particular modes of consumption and interpretation of political news, and particular modes of often exclusionary interaction (Rauch, 2007; Yang et al, 2016).…”