Social Movements and the Internet

                    This post is a summary of the book with the title above published in 2017 at   https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/156395/1/883181339.pdf

                     For some years, the field of research on social movements has undergone fundamental changes. This is due above all to the internet and social media platforms that have become an integral part of the emergence, organization and mobilization of protest. This article examines the role which these new infrastructure play in the development and stabilization of political protest and social movements. For this, it pursues two main objectives: One, a more precise identification of the foundations of collective behavior and action, which show the internet to be not only an enabling but also a regulatory and action-structuring with a degree of intervention. Two, the analysis of the new and close interplay of social and technical conditions under which collective protest and social movements take shape in the digital age. Social movements has undergone changes as purely social phenomena to taking into consideration the new technological foundations of collective action. The argument, that in this day and age protest unfolds much more individualized and personalized than before and no longer requires conventional organizational structures. Instead, social media platforms, as organizing agents, are seen to take on the functions of coordinating and mobilizing protest. In that context, digital tech play a central role. There is a consensus that social media have indeed broadened the scope of action and influence of protest. This paper seeks to identify the role played by the internet in the development and stabilization of political protest and social movements. Social movements include the organized workers' movements that formed around distinct social milieus and that focused on economic conflicts. However, since 1970s, they also include new social movements that are structured like networks and that are oriented towards post-material values, such as the civil rights, anti-war, ecological or women's movements. The consolidation of this field of research, then, engendered a widely shared notion of what constitutes a social movement. According to that understanding, a social movement is essentially a collective protest against perceived political, economic or cultural grievances. Social movements confront and challenge the ruling authorities, either demanding that a transformation take place or seeking to prevent changes deemed unacceptable. Nonetheless, a social movement is not usually referred to as such until its collective activities have consolidated into processes of cross-situation stabilization. In that context, it should be noted that the increasing of movements is always accompanied by the development of leadership figures on the one hand and an environment of sympathizers capable of mobilization on the other. Leadership in the form of opinion-making and organizing activists is seen to have a decisive role in the development and consolidation of movements. Protest and movements are always embedded in specific political, societal and social structures that influence their concrete possibilities, forms of organization and activities. The internet expanded interaction and participation possibilities, as well as an increased transparency and control of the movement activities. Together, these impacts serve to relativize the power. Moreover, the internet allows for gain in autonomy. As a fundamentally open, decentralized infrastructure, it essentially offers room for building independent platforms on which news, pictures and videos can be published and disseminated. The extended possibilities for action that arisen with the use of the social media, are paradoxically, accompanied by a significant loss of autonomy of action. This is because the dissemination and coordination of protest through social media must likewise adhere to the tech rules. As a result, the use of social media by movements suffers a near complete loss of control over their own data tracks, communication processes and content. The internet and social media have sustainably expanded the possibilities of expression of protest as well as the repertoire of action and organizational skills of social movements. In addition, social media activities today play an important role especially at the beginning of protest waves, which are often triggered by attention-drawing and mobilizing online activities that can spread virally and in part independently. The focus on the consolidating force of technically-mediated connectivity underestimates the still existing necessity of substantial identity-building, without which emerging social movements can neither be stabilized nor gain political influence over time as an extra-parliamentary voice. Social media are, of course, not simply media channels for the dissemination of manifestos, calls to action, demands and programs. Rather, they are also platforms where the exchange of individual perceptions and experiences is predominant and where political identity-building are much more visible. Moreover, charismatic leaders in the classic sense, who mobilize masses and who hold movements together and shape their identity, have by no means disappeared from the movements scene but, on the contrary, experiencing a remarkable renaissance for several years now. Among these are: Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Podemos in Spain; Beppo Grillo, the face of the Five-Stars Movement in Italy; and Bernie Sanders, who, in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election, knew how to revive and consolidate the potential of the Occupy movement.