scholarly journals The symbol of social media in contemporary protest: Twitter and the Gezi Park movement

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):  
Donya Alinejad

This paper presents a small-scale case study of the Facebook page, Europe Says OXI, and a group of political activists spread across European cities who are affiliated with the page. It focuses on how digital communications practices play a role in social movement participation, and follows these young people’s practices and stories as they move between different forms of mediated communication. This shows how activists use social media to apply mobilization frames that align with their shared ideological tenets, display emergent forms of leadership, and negotiate the use of media within moral frameworks. The argument complicates theories of connective identity and connective action, which some scholars discuss as a new mode of practice produced through the uptake of social media within contemporary social movements. It challenges the idea that these new modes are replacing older notions of collective identity by being personalized, leaderless, and eschewing ideology. Moving beyond seeing collective and connective in opposition, the paper attempts to build a concept around the emic term, ‘online camaraderie’, taking it as a felt sense of shared connection to the movement, its events, places, and its other participants. It suggests that understanding how a sense of camaraderie is mediation requires further theoretical and methodological reflection on how to trace the traversal of the affective relationships that the social movement relies on across various means of communication.  


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-511
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Takovski

AbstractAs many social movements demonstrate, humor can serve as an important resource to resist oppression, fight social injustice and bring social change. Existing research has focused on humor’s role within social movements and its positive effects on the free expression of criticism, reduction of fear, communication, mobilization of participants and so on. However, the current literature on the activist use of humor also expresses some reservations about its political efficacy. While humor may steam off the energy necessary to counteract oppression and injustice, other tools of achieving the same political ends have been successfully deployed, primarily social media. Building upon this research, the present case study explores the 2016 Macedonian social movement called the Colorful Revolution. In particular, through the analysis of social media and activists’ reflection on the political use of humor, this case study examines how on-line humor contributed to the emergence and development of the movement. Factoring in activists’ opinions on the role of humor in society and especially in movements, while also paying attention to the role of social media, this case study tends to re-interpret the role of humor in the totality of the actions and circumstances underpinning the development of a social movement.


Tripodos ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 147-167
Author(s):  
Athira B K

This paper examines the changing wedding scenes and performance of bridehood in India in a post-liberalisation period. The study, based on a digital ethnography, explores the changing wedding practices by considering the role of digital media in circulating and reifying the image of an emergent bridehood, tethering it to the ideology of consumption as well as distinctions based on social categories like gender and religion. It looks into the possibility of a scheme that goes beyond the narrative of ‘uniformisation’ in explaining the changes manifested in the performance of bridehood in the Eastern and Western regions of India, with an expansion of social media practices in the recent years.


Author(s):  
Angga Prawadika Aji

In the past decade, the number of community-based animal protection movements has shown a significant increase in Indonesia. These groups are actively fighting for animal rights, protection, and conservation while continuing to expand the influence and attract new members through various channels, especially social media. This article seeks to see the contribution of the social media strategy used by animal rights groups to the three basic elements of a social movement: collective identity, actual mobilisation, and network organisation. How social media, especially Face book and Instagram, are used by animal rights groups to achieve their ultimate goal as a social movement. This analysis also seeks to map the character of the movement for animal protection in Indonesia in the realm of new media based on their ideology, strategies, and objectives they want to achieve.


Author(s):  
Ariza Fuadi

Hashtag #GejayanMemanggil (Gejayan is Calling) became a trending topic on social media one day before the protest against several problematic laws, and the bills that were going to be passed. At that time, activists had successfully circulated the issues to the public through social media. As a result, at least 5000 protesters had joined in the protest in Yogyakarta. This phenomenon showed activeness of Indonesia’s civil society in the movement by involving digital media technologies. The author argued that social media allows the citizens, either communal or individual, to disseminate the issue and encourage others to join the protest in such short notice. This article aims to describe the role of social media and the impact of mobilisation through social media through the hashtag #GejayanMemanggil in the Yogyakarta movement. The qualitative method was employed to examine the phenomenon of the protests and to describe the role of social media. The data in this study was taken from online news, the official account of the movement, and blog posts. The results indicated that social media has the potential to trigger Indonesians to express their willingness and participate in activism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roei Davidson

Abstract This study considers cultural crowdfunding as a heterogeneous system that allows money and attention to flow from backers to founders of cultural projects in diverse cultural sectors and focuses on the nature of the standards governing it. It analyzes Kickstarter’s corporate blog since the platform’s launch and finds indications that social media practices are increasingly naturalized as integral to crowdfunding and that social media architectures are increasingly adopted by the crowdfunding platform. This, I argue, has a potential exclusionary effect. At the same time, the analysis finds evidence that Kickstarter is striving to develop an independent capacity to set aesthetic standards, which might moderate that effect and help constitute crowdfunding as an alternative decentralized arena for the funding of culture.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 3836
Author(s):  
David Flores-Ruiz ◽  
Adolfo Elizondo-Salto ◽  
María de la O. Barroso-González

This paper explores the role of social media in tourist sentiment analysis. To do this, it describes previous studies that have carried out tourist sentiment analysis using social media data, before analyzing changes in tourists’ sentiments and behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the case study, which focuses on Andalusia, the changes experienced by the tourism sector in the southern Spanish region as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic are assessed using the Andalusian Tourism Situation Survey (ECTA). This information is then compared with data obtained from a sentiment analysis based on the social network Twitter. On the basis of this comparative analysis, the paper concludes that it is possible to identify and classify tourists’ perceptions using sentiment analysis on a mass scale with the help of statistical software (RStudio and Knime). The sentiment analysis using Twitter data correlates with and is supplemented by information from the ECTA survey, with both analyses showing that tourists placed greater value on safety and preferred to travel individually to nearby, less crowded destinations since the pandemic began. Of the two analytical tools, sentiment analysis can be carried out on social media on a continuous basis and offers cost savings.


Author(s):  
Lisa Bode

On July 14, 2019, a 3-minute 36-second video titled “Keanu Reeves Stops A ROBBERY!” was released on YouTube visual effects (VFX) channel, Corridor. The video’s click-bait title ensured it was quickly shared by users across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Comments on the video suggest that the vast majority of viewers categorised it as fiction. What seemed less universally recognised, though, was that the performer in the clip was not Keanu Reeves himself. It was voice actor and stuntman Reuben Langdon, and his face was digitally replaced with that of Reeves, through the use of an AI generated deepfake, an open access application, Faceswap, and compositing in Adobe After Effects. This article uses Corridor’s deepfake Keanu video (hereafter shorted to CDFK) as a case study which allows the fleshing out of an, as yet, under-researched area of deepfakes: the role of framing contexts in shaping how viewers evaluate, categorise, make sense of and discuss these images. This research draws on visual effects scholarship, celebrity studies, cognitive film studies, social media theory, digital rhetoric, and discourse analysis. It is intended to serve as a starting point of a larger study that will eventually map types of online manipulated media creation on a continuum from the professional to the vernacular, across different platforms, and attending to their aesthetic, ethical, cultural and reception dimensions. The focus on context (platform, creator channel, and comments) also reveals the emergence of an industrial and aesthetic category of visual effects, which I call here “platform VFX,” a key term that provides us with more nuanced frames for illuminating and analysing a range of manipulated media practices as VFX software becomes ever more accessible and lends itself to more vernacular uses, such as we see with various face swap apps


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tom Bradshaw

This thesis examines the major ethical issues experienced by UK sports journalists in the course of their practice in the modern digital media landscape, with a particular focus on selfcensorship. In tandem, it captures the lived professional experience of sports journalists in the digital era. My own professional experience is considered alongside the experiences of interviewees and diary-keepers. Initially, an exploratory case study of the work of investigative journalist David Walsh is used to highlight key ethical issues affecting sports journalism. A Kantian deontological theoretical perspective is articulated and developed. Qualitative approaches, specifically Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and autoethnography, are then used to provide an original analysis of the research objectives, enhanced by philosophical analysis. Ten in-depth, semi-structured interviews are conducted with a homogeneous sample of UK sports journalists, while diaries kept by three different journalists provide another seam of data. Reflective logs of my own work as a sports journalist provide the basis for autoethnographic data. The main log runs for two-and-half years (2016- 19) with a separate additional log covering the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan. The semistructured interviews, diaries, autoethnography and case study are synthesized. The thesis explores how social media has introduced a host of ethical issues for sports journalists, not least the handling of abuse directed at them. Social media emerges as a double-edged sword. One of its most positive functions is to raise the standard of some journalists’ output due to the greater scrutiny that reporters feel they are under in the digital era, but at its worst it can be a platform for grotesque distortion and for corrupting sports journalists’ decision-making processes. Self-censorship of both facts and opinions emerges as a pervasive factor in sports journalism, a phenomenon that has been intensified by the advent of social media. Sports journalists show low engagement with codes of conduct, with the research suggesting that participants are on occasion more readily influenced by self-policing dynamics. This project captures vividly sports journalists’ personal involvement and emotional investment in their work, and reconsiders the ‘toy department’-versus-watchdog classification of sports journalists. The thesis concludes with recommendations for industry, including the introduction of formal support for sports journalists affected by online abuse.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiao-Chieh Chen ◽  
Yu-Ping Chiu

PurposeSocial media have become famous platform to search and share the COVID-19-related information. The objective of this research is to bridge the gap by proposing the effects of network cluster and transmitter activity on information sharing process.Design/methodology/approachData were collected by using Facebook application, which was available for 14 days (May 1–14) in 2020. These data were analyzed to determine the influence of the network cluster and transmitter activity.FindingsThe results showed that network cluster is positively related to transmitter activity on social media. In addition, transmitter activity partially mediated the effect of network cluster on the extent of information liked and shared. That is, transmitter activity can affect COVID-19-related information sharing on Facebook, and the activity effect is plausible and should become stronger as social network become denser.Originality/valueThis study has contributed to the knowledge of health information sharing in social media and has generated new opportunities for research into the role of network cluster. As social media is firmly entrenched in society, researches that improve the experience or quality for users is potentially impactful.


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