The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media for Protest Politics and Citizen Engagement

Abstract

The relationship between social media and political participation remains a topical and contested question. Over time, improved accessibility to social media platforms made possible by portable technologies has multiplied the modalities and venues in which people and organisations influence the political process. More recent studies have showed the potential of social media for the organisation and coordination of social movements, making an even stronger case for the integration of social movements into the broader analysis of social protests and campaigns. The engagement of social media in processes of participation within state institutions has also attracted some considerable scholarly attention, promising to revitalise liberal democracies and to orientate them towards the needs of citizens. Citizens, in turn, are increasingly performing citizenship through social media, forcing a reconsideration of democracy through the lens of concepts such as digital and e-democracy. And yet, many questions remain to be clarified regarding the implications and consequences of social media in political participation. As online mobilisation becomes central to political participation, and much scholarly attention concentrates on explaining and understanding different dimensions of it, what happens in the offline world remains important and continues to influence citizens’ accessibility to social media and their political engagement with them. This panel emphasises the ambivalent ways in which social media and political participation have become intertwined, moving from the realm of contentious forms of mobilisation to institutions of e-democracy and practices of citizenship. Issues raised in the panel include the contribution of social media to collective identity formation and street protests, radical media experiences, the functioning of online democracy in local settings, and innovation brought by social media to what is means to be a good citizen. Papers focus on emerging and more established movements, engaging in a variety of theoretical perspectives, as well as a range of methods: from single to comparative case analysis, discourse analysis of social media content, digital ethnography, interviews and quantitative methods. Findings reported in the researches speak to core questions raised in debates about social media and movements, among which the increasing integration between online and offline mobilisations; the assimilation of social media into everyday strategies designed by activists in processes of social mobilisations; the way in which independent social media remain alternative but can be also complementary to mainstream social media; the opportunities and challenges generated by social media and e-democracy for citizen engagement.

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