scholarly journals Unintended consequences: the negative impact of e-mail use on participation and collective identity in two ‘horizontal’ social movement groups – ERRATUM

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-123
Author(s):  
Cristina Flesher Fominaya
2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Flesher Fominaya

The relation between face-to-face and online communication and its impact on collective identity processes is understudied. In this article I draw on two case studies conducted during a 3-year ethnographic study of the Global Justice Movement network in Madrid, Spain, from 2002 to 2005 to explore the unintended impact of e-mail on the sustainability, internal dynamics, and collective identity of two groups committed to participatory and deliberative practices as key features of their collective identity. I found that despite an explicit commitment to ‘horizontalism’ the use of e-mail in these two groups increased existing hierarchies, hindered consensus, decreased participation, and worked towards marginalization of group members. In addition, the negative and unintended consequences of e-mail use affected both groups, independently of activists’ evaluation of their experience in their face-to-face assemblies (one of which was overwhelmingly perceived as positive and one of which was perceived as negative). The article draws on e-mail research in organizations, online political deliberation research, and existing studies of e-mail use in social movement groups to analyse these findings.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 198-209
Author(s):  
Jason D. Reynolds (Taewon Choi) ◽  
Bridget M. Anton ◽  
Chiroshri Bhattacharjee ◽  
Megan E. Ingraham

Dr. Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, academician, and writer who has navigated and discussed issues of race, class, gender, and USA social policies across her 75 years of life. Davis’s activism established her as the icon of a larger social movement and further related to her decision-making and legacy. Using psychobiographical methods, data were gathered through publicly available sources to explore Davis’s personal, professional, and representational life, as well as understand Davis’s lived experience through a socio-cultural-historical perspective. Two established theories, Social Cognitive Career Theory and Politicized Collective Identity model, were applied to Davis’s life. Findings suggested that in addition to her unique intersectional identities, a confluence of factors including growing up in a family of activists, incarceration, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance, Communist Party involvement, marginalization within activist spaces, and practicing radical self-care impacted Davis committing to a life as an activist, academic, and the leader of a social movement.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-38
Author(s):  
Miguel A. Martínez ◽  
Elena Domingo San Juan

How to identify and assess the social and political impacts of a social movement such as the 15M/Indignados in Spain? A particular challenge comes up, first, when its limits and identity are blurred so here we distinguish three types of movement goals and explain how they emerged. Secondly, in order to evaluate their achievements we pay special attention to the usually neglected dimensions of movements’ impacts – their self-reproduction, the non-institutional effects and the ‘unintended consequences’. We argue that the 15M was able to challenge the authorities over the first three years of its existence by creating a counter-hegemonic political culture as well as a manifold set of practical initiatives of self-organisation. However, the institutional impacts were very limited, in spite of some significant successes and side-effects in the electoral arena. This is mainly explained by the resilient cohesion of the power elites and the continuation of the prevailing socio- economic structures.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S526-S526
Author(s):  
G Rainville ◽  
Cheryl Lampkin

Abstract Getting restful sleep is essential to well-being but stress and poor sleep habits may make sleeping through the night challenging. This research explored life event stressors and pre-sleep activities among 2,464 randomly selected Americans age 40 and older (using Ipsos’ KnowledgeNetwork panel) to determine their joint effects on mental well-being. Respondents reported how often they engaged in twelve individual behaviors within an hour of going to sleep. These behaviors (found to be inter-correlated) were combined using EFA into four factors representing levels of engagement in each of four classes of pre-sleep activities: pre-sleep electronics use (e.g. texting/e-mail before bed), deep relaxation activities, reliance on sleep-aids, and “nightowl” behaviors (i.e., snacking). Counter to expectations, only electronics use had significant conditional effects on the path between a life events stressor index (a count of current, potentially stressful life events) and scores on the positively-framed Warwick Edinburgh well-being scale (WEMWBS). How often one sleeps through the night also had unexpected effects in a conditional path analysis. A somewhat-involved relationship emerges between each of the theoretically-relevant measures. First, the negative impact of stress is moderated by sleeping through the night. Sleeping through the night is, counter to previous studies on electronics use and sleep, mediated by the use of electronics prior to sleep. We propose that mechanisms (such as the nature of backlighting used in electronics) that hamper restfulness may be offset by relaxation effects or by setting one’s ducks in a row by texting/emailing before going to sleep.


BJPsych Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Gallagher ◽  
Mark A. Wetherell

Background Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is likely to exacerbate the symptoms of poor mental health in family caregivers. Aims To investigate whether rates of depressive symptomatology increased in caregivers during COVID-19 and whether the unintended consequences of health protective measures, i.e., social isolation, exacerbated this risk. Another aim was to see if caregivers accessed any online/phone psychological support during COVID. Method Data (1349 caregivers; 6178 non-caregivers) was extracted from Understanding Society, a UK population-level data-set. The General Health Questionnaire cut-off scores identified those who are likely to have depression. Results After adjustment for confounding caregivers had a higher risk of having depressive symptoms compared with non-caregivers, odds ratio (OR) = 1.22 (95% CI 1.05–1.40, P = 0.008) evidenced by higher levels of depression pre-COVID-19 (16.7% caregivers v. 12.1% non-caregivers) and during the COVID-19 pandemic (21.6% caregivers v. 17.9% non-caregivers), respectively. Further, higher levels of loneliness increased the risk of depression symptoms almost four-fold in caregivers, OR = 3.85 (95% 95% CI 3.08–4.85, P < 0.001), whereas accessing therapy attenuated the risk of depression (43%). A total of 60% of caregivers with depression symptoms reported not accessing any therapeutic support (for example online or face to face) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusions COVID-19 has had a negative impact on family caregivers’ mental health with loneliness a significant contributor to depressive symptomatology. However, despite these detriments in mental health, the majority of caregivers do not access any online or phone psychiatric support. Finally, psychiatric services and healthcare professionals should aim to focus on reducing feelings of loneliness to support at-risk caregivers.


Author(s):  
Olu Jenzen ◽  
Itir Erhart ◽  
Hande Eslen-Ziya ◽  
Umut Korkut ◽  
Aidan McGarry

This article explores how Twitter has emerged as a signifier of contemporary protest. Using the concept of ‘social media imaginaries’, a derivative of the broader field of ‘media imaginaries’, our analysis seeks to offer new insights into activists’ relation to and conceptualisation of social media and how it shapes their digital media practices. Extending the concept of media imaginaries to include analysis of protestors’ use of aesthetics, it aims to unpick how a particular ‘social media imaginary’ is constructed and informs their collective identity. Using the Gezi Park protest of 2013 as a case study, it illustrates how social media became a symbolic part of the protest movement by providing the visualised possibility of imagining the movement. In previous research, the main emphasis has been given to the functionality of social media as a means of information sharing and a tool for protest organisation. This article seeks to redress this by directing our attention to the role of visual communication in online protest expressions and thus also illustrates the role of visual analysis in social movement studies.


Author(s):  
Hee Yoon Kwon ◽  
Koray Özpolat

We explored the effects of assessment gamification on students’ content knowledge and perceptions of satisfaction, course experience, learning, and impact of teaching techniques. The course preparation, attendance, quizzes, classroom activities, and team projects of an undergraduate operations and supply chain management course had game elements that accumulate to team advantages in the collaborative midterm and final exam. Interestingly, we found that gamifying assessment activities resulted in significantly lower content knowledge, satisfaction, and course experience. Difference in perceived learning was not significant. Also, team exam scores were significantly lower in the gamified group, whereas individual exam scores were not significantly different. This study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence that gamification in classroom may produce unintended consequences and implementing gamification restrictively to assessment is ineffective at best. Directions for further research are discussed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda O'Neill

AbstractThis article examines how the changing environment faced by and context within the Canadian feminist movement is reflected in the beliefs and strategies of recruits to the movement at a given point in time. The framework for the investigation is Whittier's generational approach (1997) that posits that different political generations—defined as cohorts of recruits who join a social movement during distinctive periods of protest—introduce change to its collective identity given the formative experiences faced by each generation. Using an original large sample data set, I provide evidence that the changes experienced by the Canadian feminist movement from the 1980s onwards are reflected in noticeable shifts in the collective identity and activist strategies of subsequent waves of feminist recruits. The findings suggest that further research into cohort recruitment and replacement is essential for understanding the forces at play in shaping the contemporary Canadian feminist movement.


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