Social media mobilisations: Articulating participatory processes or visibilizing dissent?

Abstract

Analyses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the internet have underlined, on the one hand, their capacity to enable processes of participation and democratic dynamics and, on the other hand, have criticised certain tendencies to a technological determinism and cyberutopianism regarding this capacity. These debates have intensified with the emergence of social media, associated with a richer user experience and architecture of participation, openness, freedom and horizontality. In the context of this dualism among utopian and dystopian visions, this study aims to examine the uses of social media in social mobilisation and their transition to sustained spaces of social participation, i.e. social movements. The study includes three cases of recent social mobilisations: Occupy Wall Street (USA), Taksim Square protests (Turkey) and #YoSoy132 (Mexico). Discourse analysis was used to compare uses of social media in the narratives associated with those mobilisations. Three main themes were analysed: 1) references to democracy, in particular criticisms of representative democracy and proposals for alternatives; 2) comments on the role of social media in social mobilisation and its development; and 3) reflections on tensions between online and offline actions as part of collective action. The findings indicate that social media are mainly used for the emotional mobilisation of individuals and visibilisation during the period of major collective action and there is a two-step development from social media to collective mobilisation and from collective mobilisation to social movements.