Young people,social media and connective action: from organisational maintenance to everyday political talk

Social media is pervasive in the lives of young people, and this paper critically analyses how politically engaged young people integrate social media use into their existing organisations and political communications. This qualitative research project studied how young people from a broad range of existing political and civic groups use social media for sharing information, mobilisation and, increasingly, as a means to redefine political action and political spaces. Twelve in-person focus groups were conducted in Australia, the USA and the UK with matched affinity groups based on university campuses. The groups were of four types: party political group, issue-based group, identity-based group and social group. Our focus group findings suggest that this in-depth approach to understanding young people's political engagement reveals important group-based differences emerging in young people's citizenship norms: between the dutiful allegiance to formal politics and a more personalised, self-actualising preference for online, discursive forms of political engagement and organising. The ways in which political information is broadcast, shared and talked about on social media by engaged young people demonstrate the importance of communicative forms of action for the future of political engagement and connective action.     

Campus politics,student societies and social media

The university campus has often been seen as an important site for the politicization of young people. Recent explanations for this have focused attention upon the role of the student union as a means to enable a ‘critical mass’ of previously isolated individuals to produce social networks of common interest. What is missing from these accounts, however, and what this article seeks to address, is how these factors actually facilitate the development of political norms and the active engagement of many students. Drawing upon qualitative data from three countries we argue that it is the milieu of the smaller student societies that are crucial for facilitating the habitus of the student citizen. They provide the space for creative development and performance of the political self, affiliations to particular fields and access to cultural and social capital. Moreover, we contend that these processes of politicization are increasingly enacted through social media networks that foreground their importance for developing political habitus in the future.     

I do not believe you: how providing a source corrects health misperceptions across social media platforms

Social media are often criticized as serving as a source of misinformation, but in this study we examine how they may also function to correct misperceptions on an emerging health issue. We use an experimental design to consider social correction that occurs via peers, testing both the type of correction (i.e., whether a source is provided or not) and the platform on which the correction ocratcurs (i.e., Facebook versus Twitter). Our results suggest that a source is necessary to correct misperceptions about the causes of the Zika virus on both Facebook and Twitter, but the mechanism by which such correction occurs differs across platforms. Implications for successful social media campaigns to address health misinformation are addressed.     

The ‘proper’ way to spread ideas through social media: exploring the affordances and constraints of different social media platforms as perceived by Italian activists

Social media have become a relevant arena for different forms of civic engagement and activism. This article focuses on the affordances and constraints of different social media platforms as they are perceived by Italian activists. Instead of focusing on single protest movements, or on single platforms, we adopt a media ecological approach and consider a variety of environments where people can choose to express protest‐related content. Our main goal is to explore whether, and how, the affordances and constraints of different social media platforms are perceived by users, and how such perceived differences are integrated in everyday social media activities. To this end, we combined in‐depth interviews with an adapted version of the cognitive walkthrough and thinking aloud techniques. Respondents reported that they act on social media platforms according to specific representations of what each platform ‘is’, and how it works. Such perceptions affect users’ protest‐related social media practices. Although they perceive major social media platforms filtering strategies and are aware, to different extents, of their commodified nature, they report continuing to use them for activism‐related communication, often adopting an instrumental approach.     

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.     

Unions and social media: Prospects for gender inclusion

The emergence of web 2.0 technologies led to optimistic predictions that social media (SM) might alter traditional gendered patterns of member participation in trade unions. Greene, Hogan, and Grieco and others suggested that the forms of communication and engagement these technologies offered to unions and their members had the potential to foster gender inclusion and contribute to union diversity, arguably central to effective representation. This article reports on a survey of union members’ experiences with and perceptions of their union's SM services, to identify whether there is a gendered dimension to members’ use. The findings indicate that for most union members regardless of gender, more traditional communication channels such as face‐to‐face contact and email remain the preferred means of communication. However, the findings also show that women are just as likely as men, if not more so, to engage with union SM. Given that historically, women largely participated less in union activities than their male counterparts, this broad parity of use by women supports the conclusion that SM has substantial potential to improve women's participation in unions.     

Refugee integration and social media: a local and experiential perspective

The refugee crisis has spurred the rapid development of creative technology and social media applications to tackle the problem of refugee integration in Europe. In this article, a qualitative study with 18 refugees from Syria, Eritrea and Afghanistan is presented in order to investigate the uses and purposes of social media associated to the different areas of refugee integration in the Netherlands. The results indicate that social media networking sites were particularly relevant for refugee participants to acquire language and cultural competences, as well as to build both bonding and bridging social capital. Another important finding concerns the role of government, host society and the agency of refugee actors in determining the way refugees experience social media. Building on these results, a theoretical model for analyzing refugee integration through social media is demonstrated.     

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.     

Blaming the messenger: The media,social workers and child abuse

Abstract

This paper explores the agenda-setting role of the media in child abuse, citing local and international examples. The author argues that much media coverage of child abuse promotes a conservative, pro-family political agenda, offering a narrow individualistic/legalistic view of child abuse as opposed to a broader structural definition. This conservative agenda is particularly reflected in media hostility to social workers involved in child abuse cases. Attention is drawn to the major manifestations of this criticism, and to some of the reasons why social workers experience disproportionate media censure. Suggestions are then made regarding the potential for a more effective and pro-active social work response.     

Hybrid social and news media protest events: from #MarchinMarch to #BusttheBudget in Australia

Public protest events are now both social media and news media events. They are deeply entangled, with news media actors – such as journalists or news organisations – directly participating in the protest by tweeting about the event using the protest hashtag; and social media actors sharing news items published online by professional news agencies. Protesters have always deployed tactics to engage the media and use news media agencies’ resources to amplify their reach, with the dual aim of mobilising new supporters and adding their voice to public, mediatised debate. When protest moves between a physical space and a virtual space, the interactions between protesters and media stop being asynchronous or post hoc and turn instantaneous. In this new media-protest ecosystem, traditional media are still relevant sources of information and legitimacy, yet this dynamic is increasingly underpinned by a hybrid interdependency between traditional news and social media sources. In this paper we focus on an anti-austerity government movement that arose in Australia in early 2014 and was mobilised as a series of social media driven, connective action protest events. We show that there is a complex symbiotic interdependency between the movement and the traditional media for recognition and amplification of initial protest events, but that over time as media interest wanes, the movements’ network becomes disconnected and momentum is lost. This suggests that the active role traditional media play in protest events is being underestimated in the current research agenda on connective action.     

Twitter publics: how online political communities signaled electoral outcomes in the 2010 US house election

Online social networks are an important setting for understanding the intersection of online communities and offline political processes. This paper analyzes the different ways that people discuss elections on Twitter. Using data from a random sample totaling 113,985 tweets and 30,995 users, we examine the differences between users who employ various strategies to talk about US 2010 Congressional candidates. We show that users who simply include the text of a candidate's name in a message exhibit different behaviors than those who use platform-specific mechanisms. Users who employ free-text tend to have younger accounts, are less likely to be ‘verified’, and generate fewer messages about candidates. Furthermore, candidates’ share of the free-text Twitter public has a larger correlation with their vote tallies than @mentions or hashtags. This research has methodological implications for studying the dynamics between online discourse and offline behavior. Overall, our findings support the view that forms of communication that are more accessible are more indicative of broader social trends.     

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.     

Creating the collective: social media,the Occupy Movement and its constitution as a collective actor

This paper examines the process through which Occupy activists came to constitute themselves as a collective actor and the role of social media in this process. The theoretical framework combines Melucci's (1996 Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) theory of collective identity with insights from the field of organizational communication and particularly from the ‘CCO’ strand – short for ‘Communication is Constitutive of Organizing’. This allows us to conceptualize collective identity as an open-ended and dynamic process that is constructed in conversations and codified in texts. Based on interviews with Occupy activists in New York, London and other cities, I then discuss the communication processes through which the movement was drawing the boundaries with its environment, creating codes and foundational documents, as well as speaking in a collective voice. The findings show that social media tended to blur the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the movement in a way that suited its values of inclusiveness and direct participation. Social media users could also follow remotely the meetings of the general assembly where the foundational documents were ratified, but their voices were not included in the process. The presence of the movement on social media also led to conflicts and negotiations around Occupy's collective voice as constructed on these platforms. Thus, viewing the movement as a phenomenon emerging in communication allows us an insight into the efforts of Occupy activists to create a collective that was both inclusive of the 99% and a distinctive actor with its own identity.     

NGO2.0 and social media praxis: activist as researcher

This article tracks the emergence of a particular brand of ICT activism that promotes the use of social media as a means of helping Chinese NGOs break out of their communication bottleneck. The author starts by introducing NGO2.0, an activist project targeting China's rural regions, using it as an entry point to examine the practice of “social media for social good” and shed light on the ecosystem of social media usage by Chinese NGOs. The author also deliberates on the explanatory value of the binary paradigm of “rural vs. urban,” looks into the methodological implications of undertaking “social media action research,” and articulates what it means to be engaged in the hybrid practice of “activist as scholar” in the specific context of Cultural Studies.     

From social movements to cloud protesting: the evolution of collective identity

This article develops a conceptual framework for understanding collective action in the age of social media, focusing on the role of collective identity and the process of its making. It is grounded on an interactionist approach that considers organized collective action as a social construct with communicative action at its core [Melucci, A. 1996 Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press]. It explains how micromobilization is mediated by social media, and argues that social media play a novel broker role in the activists' meaning construction processes. Social media impose precise material constraints on their social affordances, which have profound implications in both the symbolic production and organizational dynamics of social action. The materiality of social media deeply affects identity building, in two ways: firstly, it amplifies the ‘interactive and shared’ elements of collective identity (Melucci, 1996 Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), and secondly, it sets in motion a politics of visibility characterized by individuality, performance, visibility, and juxtaposition. The politics of visibility, at the heart of what I call ‘cloud protesting’, exacerbates the centrality of the subjective and private experience of the individual in contemporary mobilizations, and has partially replaced the politics of identity typical of social movements. The politics of visibility creates individuals-in-the-group, whereby the ‘collective’ is experienced through the ‘individual’ and the group is the means of collective action, rather than its end.     

People with disability and new disaster communications: access and the social media mash-up

This article explores how a lack of access to increasingly complex and overlapping digital communications platforms in times of disaster for people with disabilities has the potential to make already life-threatening situations considerably more dangerous. As we are increasingly coming to rely on a social media mash-up of digital platforms to assist in communications during disaster situations, the issue of accessibility for people with disabilities is as dire as if it was high ground during a tsunami or transport during a typhoon. The contemporary social media environment is characterised by a complex and overlapping network of complementary platforms, populated by user-generated content, where people communicate and exchange ideas. In this environment, YouTube videos are posted to Facebook and embedded in blogs, and Twitter is used to link to these other sites and is itself embedded in other platforms. These networks are increasingly supplementing and supplanting more traditional communication platforms, such as the television and radio, particularly in times of disaster. The concern of this paper is that the elements from which this mash-up of communications channels is made are not always accessible to people with disabilities. This evolving network of social media-based communication exposes the limits of existing Internet-based universal design.     

Utilizing social media for social work: insights from clients in online youth services

ABSTRACT

This study explored and conceptualised service users’ experiences in online outreach projects supported by the Hong Kong SAR government. Fifteen active users were interviewed. The study used thematic analysis to explore service users’ experiences that might not have been possible without technology. Participant utterances were non-mutually-exclusively tagged with a specific theme. Each utterance reflected an aspect of user experience which combined a technical component with a service-need component. Six themes were identified, including: (i) Personalised newsfeeds help identify service information and news, (ii) Online status indicators improve service accessibility, (iii) Online communications enable a disinhibition effect, (iv) Asynchronous communications facilitate continual feedback loops, (v) Incomplete communicative modalities may cause misunderstanding and (vi) Asynchronous communication may disrupt conversations. The findings reveal that there are middle-level concepts between broad social work concepts and ever-changing technology. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Gender identity and lexical variation in social media

We present a study of the relationship between gender, linguistic style, and social networks, using a novel corpus of 14,000 Twitter users. Prior quantitative work on gender often treats this social variable as a female/male binary; we argue for a more nuanced approach. By clustering Twitter users, we find a natural decomposition of the dataset into various styles and topical interests. Many clusters have strong gender orientations, but their use of linguistic resources sometimes directly conflicts with the population‐level language statistics. We view these clusters as a more accurate reflection of the multifaceted nature of gendered language styles. Previous corpus‐based work has also had little to say about individuals whose linguistic styles defy population‐level gender patterns. To identify such individuals, we train a statistical classifier, and measure the classifier confidence for each individual in the dataset. Examining individuals whose language does not match the classifier's model for their gender, we find that they have social networks that include significantly fewer same‐gender social connections and that, in general, social network homophily is correlated with the use of same‐gender language markers. Pairing computational methods and social theory thus offers a new perspective on how gender emerges as individuals position themselves relative to audiences, topics, and mainstream gender norms.     

Ethnography and the digital fields of social media

Qualitative researchers struggle to study the transient fields of social network sites like Twitter through conventional ethnographic approaches. This paper suggests that, in order to step further, we should distinguish between the relatively stable ‘contextual’ fields of bounded online communities and the fluid, ‘meta-fields’ resulting from the aggregation of scattered communicative contents based on their metadata. Both these two intertwined layers of the digital environment interplay with users’ online social practices – which are embedded within offline everyday life and vice versa. While Internet ethnography largely dealt with contextual digital fields, recent developments in the realm of online research allow the ethnographic exploration of digital meta-fields and their publics. This shift recalls Marcus’ appeal for a multi-sited ethnography but, in fact, goes further beyond, towards a truly ‘un-sited’ ethnography. I highlight and discuss the main methodological implications of meta- and contextual fieldworks by presenting an exploratory study of European exchange students’ Facebook identities.     

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.