Vlogging on YouTube: the online,political engagement of young Canadians advocating for social change

Youth are often perceived as passive and disengaged from civic and political life. However, many researchers have countered such discourses of youth passivity and isolation, highlighting young people's active and interactive political engagement through less traditional outlets, especially online. In this article, we are influenced by a poststructural orientation to agency to identify themes across the social change-oriented YouTube channels of eighteen young Canadians. The themes we have identified counter a dominant focus on youth civic disengagement, political apathy, and isolation, instead highlighting the diverse political issues young Canadian vloggers address, the strategies they use, their multiple subjectivities, the interaction and support of their online community, and the relevance of inequality. We show how YouTube has become an important venue for the production and dissemination of youth perspectives.     

A typology of political participation online: how citizens used Twitter to mobilize during the 2015 British general elections

This study investigates how, and to what extent, citizens use Twitter as a platform for political mobilization in an electoral context. Conceptualizing political participation as a process, we develop a typology of political participation designed to isolate mobilizing calls for action from the rest of the political discussion online. Based on Twitter data collected one week prior to the 2015 British general election, we then identify the top 100 most retweeted accounts using the hashtag #GE2015, classify them by actor type, and perform a content analysis of their Twitter posts according to our typology. Our results show that citizens – not political parties – are the primary initiators and sharers of political calls for action leading up to the election. However, this finding is largely due to an uneven distribution of citizen-driven mobilizing activity. A small number of highly active users, typically supporters of nationalist parties, are by far the most active users in our dataset. We also identify four primary strategies used by citizens to enact mobilization through Twitter: in-text calls for action, hashtag commands, sharing mobilizing content, and frequent postings. Citizens predominantly expressed political calls for action through Twitter’s hashtag feature, a finding that supports the notion that traditional conceptions of political participation require nuance to accommodate the new ways citizens are participating in the politics of the digital age.     

Building protest online: engagement with the digitally networked #not1more protest campaign on Twitter

This article examines engagement with digitally networked, politically contentious actions. Maintaining engagement over time is a key challenge for social movements attempting to network digitally. This article argues that proximity serves as a condition to address this challenge, because it configures the personal networks upon which transmission depends. This is a paradox of digital activism: it has the capacity to transcend barriers; however, proximity is essential for sustaining relations over time. Examining Twitter data from the #not1more protest campaign against immigrant deportations in the United States, quantitative and social network analyses show a differentiated development of engagement, which results in a particular geographical configuration with the following attributes. First, there is a robust and connected backbone of core organizers and activists located in particular major cities. Second, local groups engage with the campaign with direct actions in other cities. Third, a large and transitory contingent of geographically dispersed users direct attention to the campaign. We conclude by elaborating how this geographically differentiated configuration helps to sustain engagement with digitally networked action.     

Protest avatars as memetic signifiers: political profile pictures and the construction of collective identity on social media in the 2011 protest wave

Protest avatars, digital images that act as collective symbols for protest movements, have been widely used by supporters of the 2011 protest wave, from Egypt to Spain and the United States. From photos of Egyptian martyr Khaled Said, to protest posters and multiple variations of Anonymous' mask, a great variety of images have been adopted as profile pictures by Internet users to express their support for various causes and protest movements and communicate it to all their Internet peers. In this article, I explore protest avatars as forms of identification of protest movements in a digital era. I argue that protest avatars can be described as ‘memetic signifiers’ because (a) they are marked by a vagueness and inclusivity that distinguishes them from traditional protest symbols and (b) lend themselves to be used as memes for viral diffusion on social networks. In adopting these icons, participants experience a collective fusion in an online crowd, whose gathering is manifested in the very ‘masking’ of participants behind protest avatars. These forms of collective identification, while powerful in the short term, can however prove quite volatile, with Internet users often discarding avatars with relative ease, raising the question whether they can provide durable foundational elements of contemporary social movements.     

Generalizing from social media data: a formal theory approach

ABSTRACT

Researchers increasingly draw on social media data to answer big questions about social patterns and dynamics. However, as with any data source, social media data present both opportunities and significant challenges. One major critique of social media data is that the data are not generalizable outside of the platforms from which the data originate. Problems of generalizability stem from non-universal participation rates on various platforms, demographically biased samples, as well as limited access to data based on infrastructural constraints and/or user privacy practices. We suggest that instead of empirical generalizability, social media data are theoretically generalizable in the formal theory tradition. Through a case example in which we use YouTube comments to test and extend a key tenet of identity theory, we show how social media data can instantiate theoretical variables and thus generalize to theoretical propositions. Mediated through formal theory, social media data maintain the capacity to address broad social questions while upholding methodological integrity.     

The Disconnection In Online Politics: the youth political web sphere and US election sites, 2002-2004

In recent years, candidates and other political actors have dramatically increased their presence and activities online. Although the notion of these activities reaching beyond a limited set of early-adopters is relatively new, younger citizens have long been at the forefront of new developments on the web and continue to make up a substantial proportion of those seeking political information online. Given longstanding concern over levels of civic and political engagement among young people, questions concerning what young people seeking information and opportunities for political involvement online might find there are particularly relevant. In particular, we explore political websites that are directly targeted at younger voters (e.g. Rock the Vote and similar sites), websites produced by candidates and political parties, and possible linkages between these two web spheres. Based on content and hyperlink analyses spanning the 2002 and 2004 US election cycles, we find a complex evolution of the online political information environment offered to youth. Although the youth engagement web sphere experienced dramatic growth during this time period, our data also identify a reluctance of many mainstream political actors to speak directly to young people through the web, and a surprising underdevelopment of linkages between youth politics websites and the wider web of political information online. We conclude by considering the implications of these patterns for future research on the role of new media in processes of political communication and engagement.     

Connected seniors: how older adults in East York exchange social support online and offline

ABSTRACT

How do older adults mobilize social support, with and without digital media? To investigate this, we focus on older adults 65+ residing in the Toronto locality of East York, using 42 interviews lasting about 90 minutes done in 2013–2014. We find that digital media help in mobilizing social support as well as maintaining and strengthening existing relationships with geographically near and distant contacts. This is especially important for those individuals (and their network members) who have limited mobility. Once older adults start using digital media, they become routinely incorporated into their lives, used in conjunction with the telephone to maintain existing relationships but not to develop new ones. Contradicting fears that digital media are inadequate for meaningful relational contact, we found that these older adults considered social support exchanged via digital media to be real support that cannot be dismissed as token. Older adults especially used and valued digital media for companionship. They also used them for coordination, maintaining ties, and casual conversations. Email was used more with friends than relatives; some Skype was used with close family ties. Our research suggests that policy efforts need to emphasize the strengthening of existing networks rather than the establishment of interventions that are outside of older adults’ existing ties. Our findings also show that learning how to master technology is in itself a form of social support that provides opportunities to strengthen the networks of older adults.     

Inaugural: A necessary disenchantment: myth,agency and injustice in a digital world

This lecture reviews the history of how the status and authority of media institutions over the past century have been entangled with wider claims about social knowledge and the order of societies. It analyses those relations in terms of three successive and now overlapping myths: ‘the myth of the mediated centre’ which claims that media (traditional mass media institutions) are privileged access points to our centre of social values and social reality; the ‘myth of us’ which is now emerging around the supposedly natural collectivities that ‘we’ form on commercial social media platforms; and, from outside the media industries, the ‘myth of big data’ which proclaims big data techniques are generating an entirely new and better form of social knowledge. All these myths require deconstruction by a particular hermeneutic, but the case of the myth of big data is the most paradoxical, since its claims amount to an anti‐hermeneutic, a refusal to interpret the social anymore as the resultant of processes of meaning‐making. This third myth, it is argued, requires a hermeneutic of the anti‐hermeneutic if it is to be deconstructed and previous conceptions of social knowledge (from Weber onwards), and the claims to possible justice and politics based upon them, are to be preserved.     

Interface methods: renegotiating relations between digital social research,STS and sociology

This paper introduces a distinctive approach to methods development in digital social research called ‘interface methods’. We begin by discussing various methodological confluences between digital media, social studies of science and technology (STS) and sociology. Some authors have posited significant overlap between, on the one hand, sociological and STS concepts, and on the other hand, the ontologies of digital media. Others have emphasized the significant differences between prominent methods built into digital media and those of STS and sociology. This paper advocates a third approach, one that (a) highlights the dynamism and relative under‐determinacy of digital methods, and (b) affirms that multiple methodological traditions intersect in digital devices and research. We argue that these two circumstances enable a distinctive approach to methodology in digital social research – thinking methods as ‘interface methods’ – and the paper contextualizes this approach in two different ways. First, we show how the proliferation of online data tools or ‘digital analytics’ opens up distinctive opportunities for critical and creative engagement with methods development at the intersection of sociology, STS and digital research. Second, we discuss a digital research project in which we investigated a specific ‘interface method’, namely co‐occurrence analysis. In this digital pilot study we implemented this method in a critical and creative way to analyse and visualize ‘issue dynamics’ in the area of climate change on Twitter. We evaluate this project in the light of our principal objective, which was to test the possibilities for the modification of methods through experimental implementation and interfacing of various methodological traditions. To conclude, we discuss a major obstacle to the development of ‘interface methods’: digital media are marked by particular quantitative dynamics that seem adverse to some of the methodological commitments of sociology and STS. To address this, we argue in favour of a methodological approach in digital social research that affirms its maladjustment to the research methods that are prevalent in the medium.     

Kunuk took it to the streets of Greenland: single-issue protests in a young online democracy

Single-issue protests and online mobilization have proliferated in the wake of social media. While significant ground has been covered regarding the changing possibilities for mobilization, the question of how specific circumstances condition the political impact of online mobilization and public protests has received much less attention. During the last couple of years, Greenlanders have increasingly employed Facebook to mobilize the populace and arrange public demonstrations with noteworthy results. Arguing that single-issue protests cannot be separated from the issues they are concerned with, the paper explores how a single and potential trivial political issue – a new parliament building – developed from a prestige project supported by a nearly unanimous Parliament into a public-contested issue and a failed political project. The paper invokes Actor-Network Theory to account for the trajectory of the issue and how it was translated along the way as actors built and broke alliances. The concepts of mobilizing structures, opportunity structures and framing processes are employed to shed light on the conditions of possibilities for the emergence, development and impact of the protest against the parliament building. Finally, the paper discusses social media’s impact on the image of politically engaged Inuit and on the power relations between citizens and parliament in Greenland. This discussion is of paramount importance as Greenlanders are struggling with their colonial heritage while they are constructing Greenlandic democracy.     

Deras as sites of electoral mobilisation in Indian Punjab: examining the reasons that political parties flock to the deras

Mushrooming of the deras in Indian Punjab, and the role of some of these deras in influencing the political choices of their followers, most of whom belong to the socially and economically marginal groups, is being recognised and apparently encouraged by the political parties. This is evident in the fact that political leaders/candidates cutting across party divides flocked to various deras in the run-up to the recent elections. This phenomenon can be attributed primarily to the fact that the social basis of political power of state has remained unaltered in favour of the upper castes/communities. Unwilling to share power, yet compelled to seek the crucial support of numerically strong and economically mobile dalit and other backward castes voters in a closely contested bi-polar polity, the upper-caste political leadership takes recourse to the ‘softer’ option of cultivating the deras to ‘deliver’ en bloc the marginal-castes votes. With one form of the identity politics based on ethno-regional communal divide having receded to background, it is the turn of the caste-based identity politics through the ‘dera route’ that is prevailing in post-militancy Punjab.     

Political influence across generations: partisanship and candidate evaluations in the 2008 election

Recent scholarship in political socialization has moved beyond traditional transmission models of parent-driven socialization to consider alternative pathways, like trickle-up socialization and its predictors. However, these studies have paid less attention to the diverse ways in which parents and children develop discrete political orientations, especially during a competitive presidential campaign. In this study, we examine various pathways through which influence occurs across generations in terms of partisanship and candidate evaluations. Our results suggest that while harmonious attitudes remain the norm, there are substantial opportunities for youth to demonstrate their independence, particularly when gaining perspectives from schools and digital media sources. Our findings indicate the importance of exploring how youth and their parents come to understand politics and the forces that shape youth socialization.     

Anatomy of Protest in the Digital Era: A Network Analysis of Twitter and Occupy Wall Street

Two months before the first Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest in September 2011, activists were using Twitter to organize and spread the movement. In this study, the earliest Twitter messages regarding #OccupyWallStreet were subjected to network analysis to answer these questions: What were the central hubs in the OWS discourse on Twitter in the summer of 2011? How did OWS emerge from among several social movement organizations to lead a nationwide series of demonstrations? What were the key points in the Twitter dialogue that aided the process of scale shift? By addressing these questions, this research connects social movement concepts with network centrality measures to provide a clearer picture of movements in the digital era.     

Remote control: evaluating the potential of virtual desktops as a data collection tool in studies exploring how people use the Internet

Abstract

This study explores how virtual desktops hosted within a cloud computing environment can be used as a data capture tool to undertake research exploring web-browsing and web-searching behaviour. It details the protocol used to observe the task-orientated web interactions of 105 university and school aged participants within the confines of a research experiment and considers the comparability between data collected remotely via virtual desktops and data collected in a controlled environment. Data collected remotely via virtual desktops is found to be comparable to data collected in the field across a number of key statistics, with remote data collection making recruitment and participation more convenient, whilst potentially reducing response bias. The protocol detailed has broad potential for adaption where there is a need to remotely capture participants’ web-use in a cost-effective and non-technical manner. Limitations with the protocol are identified and possibilities for future adaptations are discussed.     

Introduction: Resistance in the Twenty‐First Century

This essay introduces the articles that comprise a special issue of Sociological Forum titled “Resistance in the Twenty‐First Century.”     

Closing the gap: gender parity in political engagement on social media

Historically, major gender differences exist in both political engagement and online content creation. Expanding on these literatures, this study considers the extent to which men and women engage in politics specifically in social media. Novel survey data are employed to test for any gendered differences in encountering and responding to political content via social media. Despite measuring a robust set of political behaviors within social media, few gender differences emerge. Where differences do emerge, they are most likely among the most visible political behaviors, suggesting that women may strategically engage in less visible or less-likely-to-offend political behaviors, as compared to men. This poses important questions regarding political participation, representation, and gender.     

Framing and counter-framing a Peace March in Russia: the use of Twitter during a hybrid war

ABSTRACT

Framing is vital to the capacity of social movements to enlist popular support and sustain contentious collective action. Using the case of a Peace March held in Moscow on 21 September 2014, the article examines how antiwar activists and their opponents framed a protest against Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. The study argues that different interpretations of patriotism underpinned divergent evaluations of the conflict and the construction of opposing identities. An analysis of Twitter posts on the eve of the march shows that peace activists positioned themselves as citizens with high moral standards and a healthy dose of patriotism, criticized the Russian government for military intervention in Ukraine, and called for a peaceful conflict resolution. In turn, opponents of the march considered themselves as real patriots and their adversaries as national traitors, denied Russia’s military presence in Ukraine, and fomented an attack on critics of Russian foreign policy. The study contributes to social movement literature by analyzing the framing of antiwar activism on a social media platform in the midst of a hybrid war, marked by a great deal of ambiguity and deception about causes, dynamics, and consequences of military operations by state and non-state actors.     

Climate,class and culture: political issues as cultural signifiers in the US

Since the 1970s, social scientists have argued that general pro‐environmental attitudes have diffused throughout American society, rendering socio‐demographics largely irrelevant in predicting support for such issues. The public reaction to the issue of climate change, however, is an exception to this narrative. While media bias, ideological framing, and business influence are often invoked to explain public apathy, I argue that ignoring class and culture in determining why climate change is so divisive is a potentially significant oversight. Using the cultural theory of Bourdieu, I examine how the conception of and reaction to climate change varies with economic and cultural capital using data from 40 interviews of Boston‐area respondents. The results suggest that climate change may indeed be a ‘classed’ issue – both in how the respondents conceive of it in the first place, and how they speak of social class in the context of it. The results suggest that social scientists should go beyond rational‐choice and media framing explanations, to take two prolific examples, in exploring how disagreements on the importance of climate change persist in the US.     

Canada is #IdleNoMore: exploring dynamics of Indigenous political and civic protest in the Twitterverse

Social media have been playing a growingly important role in grassroots protest over the last five years. While many scholars have explored dynamics of political cyberprotest (e.g., the ongoing transnational Occupy movement, the 2012 Quebec student strike, the student-led protest movement in Chile between 2011 and 2013), few have studied sub-dynamics relating to ethno-cultural minorities’ uses of social media to gain visibility, mobilize support, and engage in political and civil action. We fill part of this gap in the academic literature by investigating uses of Twitter for political engagement in the context of the Canada-based Idle No More movement (INM). This ongoing protest initiative, which emerged in December 2012, seeks to mobilize Indigenous Peoples in Canada and internationally as well as their non-Indigenous allies. It does so by bringing attention to their culture, struggles, and identities as well as advocating for changes in policy areas relating to the environment, governance, and socio-economic matters. Our study explores to what extent references to aspects of Indigenous identities and culture shaped INM-related tweeting and, by extension, activism during the summer of 2013. We conducted a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 1650 #IdleNoMore tweets shared by supporters of this movement between 3 July 2013 and 2 August 2013. Our study demonstrates that unlike other social media-intensive movements where economic and political concerns were the primary drivers of political and civil engagement, aspects of Indigenous culture influenced information flows and mobilization among #IdleNoMore tweeters.