Social Movement Studies Review of Digital rebellion (original) (raw)

Social Movements and Their Technologies. Wiring Social Change

Social Movements and their Technologies explores the interplay between social movements and their 'liberated technologies'. It analyzes the rise of low-power radio stations and radical internet projects ('emancipatory communication practices') as a political subject, focusing on the sociological and cultural processes at play. It provides an overview of the relationship between social movements and technology, and investigates what is behind the communication infrastructure that made possible the main protest events of the past fifteen years. In doing so, Stefania Milan illustrates how contemporary social movements organize in order to create autonomous alternatives to communication systems and networks, and how they contribute to change the way people communicate in daily life, as well as try to change communication policy from the grassroots. She situates these efforts in a historical context in order to show the origins of contemporary communication activism, and its linkages to media reform campaigns and policy advocacy.

Social Movements and Their Technologies

2013

struggles and emancipatory practices Media activism today: Hacktivism, liberation technology, and cloud protesting Low power to the people! A brief history of community broadcasting Running servers for revolution: A brief history of radical tech activism 3 Movement Formation and Identity Building Framing injustice Motivations of emancipatory communication activists Roots and muses of emancipatory communication activists vii viii Contents

The impact of modern information and communication technologies on social movements

ProQuest LLC eBooks, 2012

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have empowered non-state social actors, notably, social movements. They were quick to seize ICTs in the past (printing presses, television, fax machines), which was a major factor in their successes. Mass email campaigns, blogs, their audio-and video-variants (the podcasts and the videocasts), social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and other tools, such as Twitter, are increasingly popular among the movements and their activists. The extremely rapid diffusion of new technologies has raised a lot of questions about their impact on many areas of life from macroeconomic consequences to interpersonal relations, including much comment on their impact on social movements. Social historians are even rethinking the whole history of media. However, up to this point, we have no broad view of how social movement organizations are making use of the media. What types of movements are making use of new media? In what way are they using them and for what purposes? Are they more common in younger organizations, or in organizations that operate on larger geographic scales? Does their use lead to a sense of democratic empowerment? iv To answer these questions, this study analyzes an internet-based survey of four populations of social movement organizations ranging from the local to the international in geographic scope (four specific populations analyzed are: Pittsburgh (USA), Poland, the international movements, and the movements with high visibility online). This dissertation explores the use (and the non-use) of ICTs in the first broad survey on their use by modern social movements. It provides a broad overview of the movement's demographics (location, range, goal) and their membership (size, activity). It details the diffusion and use of over twenty ICTs, analyzing the success stories of email, static websites, phones and social networking, as well as the relatively poor performance of blogs, podcasts and faxes. Primary research questions revolve around the blurring boundaries between members and non-members (unofficial supporters and volunteers), the use of new media (by whom and for what), and the consequences of those trends (such as opposition to professionalization, or the empowerment of activists).

Review of Social Movements and Their Technologies: Wiring Social Change.

Interface Journal, 2015

While somewhat neglectful of the politics embedded within the development of new communicative technologies, Social Movements and Their Technologies opens up new conversations regarding the socio-cultural embeddness of contemporary social movements by providing a useful overview of the relationship between social movements and ‘liberating technologies’ that demystifies the communications infrastructures that have made possible some of the major protest events of the past 15 years. To do so, author Stefania Milan centres her analyses around what she terms ‘emancipatory communication practices’ (ECPs), repertoires of collective action and social organisation that seek to create alternatives by challenging existing media and communications infrastructures.

Studying media practices in social movements

ccnr.infotech.monash.edu

Even if the dimension of communication is central to collective action, standard approaches to communication from social movement theories have adopted a rather instrumental view of the media. Moreover, studies on social movements and ICTs have usually focused on "particular" portions of the Internet, such as websites, mailing lists, online groups, blogs and, more recently, social networking sites. There is a tendency in this scholarship to replicate the same 'bias' that some authors have ascribed to the general literature that have investigated the dynamics between social movements and the media: the focus on only one medium at a time. Based on Nardi and O"Day"s (2000) conceptual framework, drawing on a qualitative research which explored the media practices of a student collective from the University of Bologna, part of the Italian 'Anomalous Wave' movement, it will be shown that activists interact with a complex information ecology. This information ecology is a complex system where different technologies coexist and coevolve and where keystone species such as tech-savvy activists play a fundamental role. The exploration of this ecology allows us to highlight the complex interrelations, negotiations and conflicts among old and new technologies for activism and permits us to go beyond the "one-medium bias" that characterize most of the social movement literature.

From Virtual Public Spheres to Global Justice: A Critical Theory of Internetworked Social Movements*

Sociological Theory, 2005

From the early '90s when the EZLN (the Zapatistas), led by Subcommandte Marcos, first made use of the Internet, to the late '90s with the defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Trade and Investment and the anti WTO protests in Seattle, Quebec, and Genoa, it became evident that new, qualitatively different kinds of social protest movements were emergent. These new movements seemed diffuse and unstructured, yet at the same time, they forged unlikely coalitions of labor, environmentalists, feminists, peace and global social justice activists collectively critical of the adversities of neoliberal globalization and its associated militarism. Moreover, the rapid emergence and worldwide proliferation of these movements, organized and coordinated through the Internet, raised a number of questions that require rethinking social movement theory.

Social movements and digital media

2012

The title «Social movements in the internet age» indicates that I localize the new forms of political protest in the context of mediatization and digitalization. I believe that the allpervasive presence of the media in modern society means that it is necessary to investigate the extent to which all forms of social action, including political action, are potentially associated with the media. The leading questions are:

New Social Movements, the Use of ICTs, and Their Social Impact

2016

The following work is an analysis of new social movements and the use of new technologies from the perspective of political philosophy. It stems from the results obtained in the dissertation "New Social Movements and the Use of ICTs: Case Studies," presented at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid as part of the Communication, Social Change and Development program. While it is true that these movements have existed for a long time, new digital technologies allow for political agendas and proposals to increase in visibility, scope and dissemination. The "know-how" of these new movements and their ability to drive social transformation are expressions of a framework made up of different strategies to those proposed by traditional groups framed by political parties. The methods employed by civic action require a natural flow of information which political parties cannot reproduce. Symbolic resources and expressions of sentiments and emotions play a crucial role in structuring a new form of language and a different way of being. The implications are important, not only in terms of mass media and politics, but also in terms of social change.