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

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.

Social Movements and New Media

Sociology Compass, 2008

This article explores the contention that social movements are a significant social force transforming societies through their engagement with new media, such as the Internet, Web 2.0, and digital communications, which are seen as capable of facilitating new power structures. Utilizing della Porta and Diani's framework, it considers how new media technologies may be shaping the structure, identity, opportunity, and protest dimensions of social movements. It concludes by suggesting that new media does offer important opportunities for cost-effective networking, interpretive framing, mobilization, and repertoires of protest action. However, their adoption does not represent the creation of entirely new virtual social movements but rather a new means of providing existing social movement organisations, local activist networks, and street-level protest with a trans-national capacity to collaborate, share information, and communicate with a wider audience. Such new media-enabled social action is both more congruent with a politics of identity but may also increasingly be competing within a media environment saturated by user-generated content.

Social Movements’ Media: Evaluating Fresh Perspectives

International Journal of Communication, 2014

The study of social movements in general has grown considerably over the past 30 years, but research has been dominated by political scientists and sociologists, very often those working within the Rational Social Actor paradigm. Mediatic-or, more generally, communicative-cultural, and, until recently, even emotional dimensions have rarely played a significant part in the stories these scholars tell, with the curious effect of reducing social movement activism to mute pieces on a chessboard of calculative moves. Movement activists are very rarely mute or any more rational than the rest of us, so the result is to produce a stick-figure/mime version of social movement process. In the meantime, media studies researchers have been exceptionally active over the past decade and a half in generating a slew of work on social movement media, community media, tactical media, and alternative media. Events since 2008 in Greece, Iran, Thailand, Chile, and elsewhere-most notably the Arab region-in addition to the Occupy movement and the indignados movement, have compelled the hitherto reluctant communication academy to engage to an unprecedented degree with the protean phenomena variously termed alternative media, community media, citizens media, tactical media, social movement media, or still other sobriquets. Since 2011, a particular focus has been on digital connective media (social media), which are certainly of major interest, but have often been taken out of their societal and mediatic

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.