New “Media Logic”: The Mediatisation of Protest Movements (original) (raw)

Cammaerts et al. (2013) argue that media are important to social movements because “without (self-) mediation, insurrectionary performances and acts of resistance become meaningless” (11). They assert that social movements should organise staged events that lead to visibility in a mass mediated public sphere and ask how “media logic” can “shape, inform or constrain the way activist conceptualize and enact protests” (11). Recent social movements, however, suggest a greater emphasis upon collective, long-term actions supported by social media. For example, many in the popular press and academia have linked the emergence of the Green Wave in Iran (Afshari, 2009, Grossman, 2009), the Arab Spring (see Howard and Hussain, 2011) and the #Occupy movement to services such as Facebook and Twitter. Castells (2012), for example, says Occupy was “born digital” and that the Internet “allows a leaderless movement to survive, deliberate, coordinate and expand” (229). Others are less enthusiastic, critiquing social media for enabling “slacktivism” (cf. Barney, 2008, Morozov, 2011). These debates demonstrate that, despite changes, it is still valid to consider how a “media logic” influences the development of protest movements. Indeed, the Internet had a marked effect on even offline incarnations of the Occupy movement in particular. Its insistence on a leaderless structure, for example, mirrors the Internet’s perceived open and egalitarian form of participation, an idea rooted in the (mistaken) association of the Web with 1960s counterculture. Critiques of the movement demonstrate similar parallels. Dean (2008), for example, argues that openness of the Internet leads to “the multiplication of resistances and assertions so extensive that it hinders the formation of strong counterhegemonies” (102). The Occupy movement has been similarly criticised for multiple, ambiguous and ultimately unachievable demands (Castells, 2012: 187). Barney (2008) cautions that online exchange often “stands in for motivation, judgement and action” because communication is “culturally coded, in advance, as political, eliminating any motivation (or obligation) to take on heavier burdens of judgment and action” (101). Claims that the “process is the message” of the Occupy movement (Castells, 2012: 185) similarly suggest that discussing issues is just as “political” as achieving discrete goals. The purpose of this exploratory paper is to conceptualise this mediatisation (see Hepp et al., 2010) of protest movements through an historical, comparative approach that examines media logic and protest actions from two different events—the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 (in which mobile media played a key role) and the Occupy movement (engaged with social media)—in order to examine the ways in which the contemporary media logic influenced not only the media activities of these movements, but also their structure, development, expectations, and activities (both offline and online). In other words, did interactions with media inform, consciously or unconsciously, these movements? If so, what possibilities were enabled through this mediatisation, and which were foreclosed? It is hoped this discussion can be used as a framework for understanding the development of other social movements in a way that resists generalising assumptions