Download or read book Net Activism How digital technologies have been changing individual and collective actions written by Francesco Antonelli and published by Roma TrE-Press. This book was released on 2017-04-01 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently, the digital architectures of interaction have also become, more than a new information architecture, a new ecology of dialogue and participation. In addition to the new forms of debate and interaction which are expressed far beyond the dynamics of modern public opinion, the digital networks have opened spaces of experimentation for new decision-making collaborative practices. In several areas, the creation of platforms and architectures of debate and deliberations is putting new questions about the technological possibility of overcoming the representative democracy. Finally, this new digital ecology has been changing social actions in everyday life. The book analyzes these phenomena both through a theoretical reflection (first part) and by some case studies (second part), as the result of the activities promoted by the Net-Activism International Research Network based on Atopos Lab in Universidade de São Paulo. At the Network join: Università degli Studi “Roma Tre”, Universidade Lusófona do Porto, Université de Lille 2, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris. Francesco Antonelli is Research Fellow in Sociology at the Department of Political Sciences, Università degli Studi “Roma Tre”. Recent publications: “European Politics of Numbers: Sociological Perspectives on Official Statistics. General Trends”, International Review of Sociology, 26,3, 2016; L’Europa del dissenso. Teorie e analisi sociopolitiche, Milano, Franco Angeli 2016.

Download or read book The Rise of Digital Repression written by Steven Feldstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Book" -- dust jacket.

Download or read book Digitally Enabled Social Change written by Jennifer Earl and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-03-04 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into how specific Web technologies can change the dynamics of organizing and participating in political and social protest. Much attention has been paid in recent years to the emergence of “Internet activism,” but scholars and pundits disagree about whether online political activity is different in kind from more traditional forms of activism. Does the global reach and blazing speed of the Internet affect the essential character or dynamics of online political protest? In Digitally Enabled Social Change, Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport examine key characteristics of web activism and investigate their impacts on organizing and participation. Earl and Kimport argue that the web offers two key affordances relevant to activism: sharply reduced costs for creating, organizing, and participating in protest; and the decreased need for activists to be physically together in order to act together. Drawing on evidence from samples of online petitions, boycotts, and letter-writing and e-mailing campaigns, Earl and Kimport show that the more these affordances are leveraged, the more transformative the changes to organizing and participating in protest.

Download or read book Digital Activism Decoded written by Mary C. Joyce and published by IDEA. This book was released on 2010 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The media has recently been abuzz with cases of citizens around the world using digital technologies to push for social and political change: from the use of Twitter to amplify protests in Iran and Moldova to the thousands of American non-profits creating Facebook accounts in the hopes of luring supporters. These stories have been published, discussed, extolled, and derided, but have not yet been viewed holistically as a new field of human endeavor. We call this field "digital activism" and its dynamics, practices, misconceptions, and possible futures are presented together for the first time in this book."--Pub. desc.

Download or read book The Revolution That Wasn t written by Jen Schradie and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This surprising study of online political mobilization shows that money and organizational sophistication influence politics online as much as off, and casts doubt on the democratizing power of digital activism. The internet has been hailed as a leveling force that is reshaping activism. From the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, digital activism seemed cheap, fast, and open to all. Now this celebratory narrative finds itself competing with an increasingly sinister story as platforms like Facebook and Twitter—once the darlings of digital democracy—are on the defensive for their role in promoting fake news. While hashtag activism captures headlines, conservative digital activism is proving more effective on the ground. In this sharp-eyed and counterintuitive study, Jen Schradie shows how the web has become another weapon in the arsenal of the powerful. She zeroes in on workers’ rights advocacy in North Carolina and finds a case study with broad implications. North Carolina’s hard-right turn in the early 2010s should have alerted political analysts to the web’s antidemocratic potential: amid booming online organizing, one of the country’s most closely contested states elected the most conservative government in North Carolina’s history. The Revolution That Wasn’t identifies the reasons behind this previously undiagnosed digital-activism gap. Large hierarchical political organizations with professional staff can amplify their digital impact, while horizontally organized volunteer groups tend to be less effective at translating online goodwill into meaningful action. Not only does technology fail to level the playing field, it tilts it further, so that only the most sophisticated and well-funded players can compete.

Download or read book CasaPound Italia written by Caterina Froio and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-24 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2003, the occupation of a state-owned building in Rome led to the emergence of a new extreme-right youth movement: CasaPound Italia (CPI). Its members described themselves as 'Fascists of the Third Millennium', and were unabashed about their admiration for Benito Mussolini. Over the next 15 years, they would take to the street, contest national elections, open over a hundred centres across Italy, and capture the attention of the Italian public. While CPI can count only on a few thousands votes, it enjoys disproportionate attention in public debates from the media. So what exactly is CasaPound? How can we explain the high profile achieved by such a nostalgic group with no electoral support? In this book, Caterina Froio, Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Giorgia Bulli and Matteo Albanese explore CasaPound Italia and its particular political strategy combining the organization and style of both political parties and social movements and bringing together extreme-right ideas and pop-culture symbols. They contend that this strategy of hybridization allowed a fringe organization like CasaPound to consolidate its position within the Italian far-right milieu, but also, crucially, to make extreme-right ideas routine in public debates. The authors illustrate this argument drawing on unique empirical material gathered during five years of research, including several months of overt observation at concerts and events, face-to-face interviews, and the qualitative and quantitative analysis of online and offline campaigns. By describing how hybridization grants extremist groups the leeway to expand their reach and penetrate mainstream political debates, this book is core reading for anyone concerned about the nature and growth of far-right politics in contemporary democracies. Providing a fresh insight as to how contemporary extreme-right groups organize to capture public attention, this study will also be of interest to students, scholars and activists interested in the complex relationship between party competition and street protest more generally.

Download or read book The Size Effect written by Aa. Vv. and published by Mimesis. This book was released on 2019-06-13T00:00:00+02:00 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the last century, the so-called “new technologies” started to question the process of design, production, sales and consumption through a radical change, which today re-defi nes many concepts both in industry and every-day life. The notion of “size” – a cross-cutting term in the cultural and creative sector – has gone through a phase of crisis from which it is now re-emerging, enriched with new meanings and possibilities. To redefine this complex term, the authors of the book have observed the path of audiovisual products and social media, fashion, everyday objects, architectures and cities, and identified in each of these fields elements of continuity, breaking points with the past as well as future alternatives. In this collection of essays, the authors adopt an interdisciplinary approach overcoming the boundaries of their discipline. Through different perspectives this volume presents and develops new paradigms that explain the complexities of the contemporary era and its new “sizes”.

Download or read book Researching Far Right Movements written by Emanuele Toscano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-14 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As extreme and far right movements become increasingly widespread in many countries, the sociology of social movements is called to confront them. This book addresses the specific challenges entailed by the empirical study of such movements, presenting case studies from Japan, Thailand, England, France, Italy, the USA, and Turkey. Based on empirical fieldwork, the chapters explore the ethics and politics of researching far right movements, considering the researcher's reflexivity and the methodological issues raised by being emotionally linked to a research object that affirms and strives for values that differ markedly from those of the researcher. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and politics with interests in social movements and research methods.

Download or read book Technology Activism and Social Justice in a Digital Age written by John G. McNutt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology, Activism, and Social Justice in a Digital Age offers a close look at both the present nature and future prospects for social change. In particular, the text explores the cutting edge of technology and social change, while discussing developments in social media, civic technology, and leaderless organizations -- as well as more traditional approaches to social change. It effectively assembles a rich variety of perspectives to the issue of technology and social change; the featured authors are academics and practitioners (representing both new voices and experienced researchers) who share a common devotion to a future that is just, fair, and supportive of human potential. They come from the fields of social work, public administration, journalism, law, philanthropy, urban affairs, planning, and education, and their work builds upon 30-plus years of research. The authors' efforts to examine changing nature of social change organizations and the issues they face will help readers reflect upon modern advocacy, social change, and the potential to utilize technology in making a difference.

Download or read book The Logic of Connective Action written by W. Lance Bennett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-26 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Logic of Connective Action shows how political action is coordinated and power is organized in communication-based networks, and what political outcomes may result.

Download or read book Social Changes in a Global World written by Ulrike Schuerkens and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned author Ulrike Schuerkens presents an in-depth exploration of social transformations and developments. Combining an international approach with up-to-date research, the book: Has dedicated chapters on contemporary topics including technology, new media, war and terror, political culture and inequality Includes an analysis of societal structures – inequality, globalization, transnationalism Contains learning features including: discussion questions, annotated further reading, chapter summaries and pointers to online resources to assist with study A must buy for students taking modules in social change, social inequality, social theory and globalization.

Download or read book Political Turbulence written by Helen Margetts and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How social media is giving rise to a chaotic new form of politics As people spend increasing proportions of their daily lives using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, they are being invited to support myriad political causes by sharing, liking, endorsing, or downloading. Chain reactions caused by these tiny acts of participation form a growing part of collective action today, from neighborhood campaigns to global political movements. Political Turbulence reveals that, in fact, most attempts at collective action online do not succeed, but some give rise to huge mobilizations—even revolutions. Drawing on large-scale data generated from the Internet and real-world events, this book shows how mobilizations that succeed are unpredictable, unstable, and often unsustainable. To better understand this unruly new force in the political world, the authors use experiments that test how social media influence citizens deciding whether or not to participate. They show how different personality types react to social influences and identify which types of people are willing to participate at an early stage in a mobilization when there are few supporters or signals of viability. The authors argue that pluralism is the model of democracy that is emerging in the social media age—not the ordered, organized vision of early pluralists, but a chaotic, turbulent form of politics. This book demonstrates how data science and experimentation with social data can provide a methodological toolkit for understanding, shaping, and perhaps even predicting the outcomes of this democratic turbulence.

Download or read book Invisible machines Collective action through digital space written by Edmund Zagorin and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Philosophy - Miscellaneous, grade: Highest Honors, University of Michigan, language: English, abstract: The past two decades have seen an explosion in activism organized through digital space. From the early-90s efforts of the Zapatistas to build a global support network for a localist struggle to the recent tumultuous revolutions of the Arab Spring, digital technology has enabled organizing for social change in ways that previous generations of activists could scarcely have imagined. And yet, is the ascendancy of digital activism truly that surprising? As cultural interactions and materials are increasingly enacted online, it is only to be expected that digital natives seize upon clickable social repertoires to articulate new political possibilities. Rather than analyzing the effects of a particular platform or technology in isolation, I examine the social dynamics that contribute to the dissemination of contentious frames and messages throughout digital space. By examining the network dynamics of everyday online socializing, I seek to elucidate some of the repertoires of contention through which digital activists have achieved critical mass. These immanent dynamics of everyday online social interaction provide the basis for understanding how networked collectivities come to attach social significance to contentious ideas, and then mobilize individuals for offline collective action.I further argue that classical social science theories of group organizing are unable to account for the seemingly spontaneous and eruptive nature of digitally-organized movements. The difficulty, I argue, is not that theories of collective dissent are not empirically grounded, but that they are complicit with institutional edifices of static knowledge production in ways that resist recognizing the emergence of novel collectivities. In elaborating this point, I initially focus on a case study of the 2008 demonstrations in Seoul, South Korea over the Lee Administration’s decision to lift the import ban on American beef. These demonstrations offer a prime example of the ways in which digital movements do not call for us to create new theories in place of old, but instead argue against the essentialist process of theorization itself. They further show how thinking of activism as online versus offline tactics represents a false dichotomy, since digital space augments, supplements and motivates offline spaces of encounter.

Download or read book From Clicks to Collective Action written by Samuel Bestvater and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do individuals participate in collective action to challenge their government in an era of digitally-connected social movements? The internet has served as a central actor in the interplay between governments and the movements that seek to challenge them for long enough that we have come to understand many of the important ways in which new connected technologies change and do not change this relationship, on a large scale. We understand less about how the internet has changed the role individuals play in mass movements, as well as how individuals make decisions about when and how to participate. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of these phenomena by considering how online social networks can help create support for protest movements, how engaging in activism online can lead to physical protest participation, and what happens to digital dissent when the state responds to a digitally-connected movement with coercion. After a brief introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 considers the role of online social network ties in the generation of support for digitally-connected protest movements. Since the emergence of social media as a ubiquitous tool for the creation and coordination of protest movements, significant scholarly attention has been devoted to the role of online social networks in diffusing protest-related information and driving rapid horizontal growth in modern, digitally-connected movements. However, more than just coordinating information diffuses throughout these networks. This study argues that the formation of opinions about protest movements is also a process of social contagion, where individuals develop and express support for a movement in response to the expressed opinions of their neighbors. This theory is evaluated through a descriptive analysis of evidence contained in the Twitter profiles of supporters of the 2019-2020 Anti-Extradition Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests in Hong Kong. Using machine learning and natural language processing techniques, I examine the characteristics of online support for these protests, as well as the structure of the online activist network surrounding the movement. A dynamic analysis of egocentric network data shows evidence consistent with a process of opinion diffusion, where individuals who are exposed to higher levels of overall movement support expressed by their neighbors in the online social network subsequently express increased levels of support for the protests themselves. Chapter 3 addresses the question of whether online activism motivates physical protest attendance. While social movements often use social media to inform and coordinate, critics suggest that online "slacktivism" can also provide less-engaged supporters with a low-cost protest alternative. This study challenges that notion, arguing that those who express greater support for a movement online are also more likely to physically protest, mobilized through the development of network ties to other supporters online. I test this theory by applying machine learning techniques to the Twitter profiles of supporters of the 2017 Women's March, measuring individual movement support levels and identifying networked interactions between activists. I find that connections to movement supporters in the online social network significantly predict an individual's event attendance, even when controlling for their own level of movement support. This paper joins the protest micromobilization literature with new social media analysis techniques, addressing an increasingly important question about how social media affects political participation. Finally, Chapter 4 considers how state repression affects online dissent. Significant scholarly attention has been devoted to the question of how protest movements respond to coercive state actions, sometimes demobilizing and sometimes escalating dissent. However, since the emergence of social media as a common tool for modern, digitally-connected protest movements, dissent occurs in both virtual and physical arenas. This study argues that in an ongoing protest campaign, repression has similar effects on digital activism as it does on physical protest. This theory is evaluated through an individual-level panel analysis of Twitter users who expressed support for the 2019-2020 Anti-Extradition Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests in Hong Kong. Using machine learning and natural language processing techniques, I examine the characteristics of these users' online engagement with the protests, and observe how their expressions of digital dissent vary along with the contours of the protest campaign and the repressive responses of government and police. I find that while less severe forms of repression targeting both physical and digital dissent increase levels of online activism, more severe forms of repression have a demobilizing effect. Contrary to expectations, these demobilizing effects of severe repression on digital activism are observed to be stronger for individuals who are highly connected to other activists online.

Download or read book Political Internet written by Biju P. R. and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the Internet as a site of political contestation in the Indian context. It widens the scope of the public sphere to social media, and explores its role in shaping the resistance and protest movements on the ground. The volume also explores the role of the Internet, a global technology, in framing debates on the idea of the nation state, especially India, as well as diplomacy and international relations. It also discusses the possibility of whether Internet can be used as a tool for social justice and change, particularly by the underprivileged, to go beyond caste, class, gender and other oppressive social structures. A tract for our times, this book will interest scholars and researchers of politics, media studies, popular culture, sociology, international relations as well as the general reader.

Download or read book Protest Technologies and Media Revolutions written by Athina Karatzogianni and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-26 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains an Open Access chapter. With chapters spanning from the Russian Revolution to the present day, this book considers how art, media and communication technologies have been operationalised to connect, mobilise, organize and inspire the masses in particular national, political, and economic contexts.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics written by Kerric Harvey and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2013-12-20 with total page 1613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics explores how the rise of social media is altering politics both in the United States and in key moments, movements, and places around the world. Its scope encompasses the disruptive technologies and activities that are changing basic patterns in American politics and the amazing transformations that social media use is rendering in other political systems heretofore resistant to democratization and change. In a time when social media are revolutionizing and galvanizing politics in the United States and around the world, this encyclopedia is a must-have reference. It reflects the changing landscape of politics where old modes and methods of political communication from elites to the masses (top down) and from the masses to elites (bottom up) are being displaced rapidly by social media, and where activists are building new movements and protests using social media to alter mainstream political agendas. Key Features This three-volume A-to-Z encyclopedia set includes 600 short essays on high-interest topics that explore social media’s impact on politics, such as “Activists and Activism,” “Issues and Social Media,” “Politics and Social Media,” and “Popular Uprisings and Protest.” A stellar array of world renowned scholars have written entries in a clear and accessible style that invites readers to explore and reflect on the use of social media by political candidates in this country, as well as the use of social media in protests overseas Unique to this book is a detailed appendix with material unavailable anywhere else tracking and illustrating social media usage by U.S. Senators and Congressmen. This encyclopedia set is a must-have general, non-technical resource for students and researchers who seek to understand how the changes in social networking through social media are affecting politics, both in the United States and in selected countries or regions around the world.