Trajectories of publicness and contestation: tracing the temporal, spatial, and material articulation of protest through social platforms

This paper develops a conceptual framework for the systematic analysis of the relationship between social media and public contestation. To understand the role of social platforms in today’s protests, it is important to trace how these platforms are involved in particular trajectories of contestation, in which publics are continuously reshaped. Rather than primarily focusing on glorious moments of mass mobilization and communication at major social platforms, as most current research has done, the complex temporal, spatial, and material articulation of trajectories of publicness need to be explored. The proposed framework is developed in critical dialogue with public sphere theory, which has been the main conceptual framework through which relations between public contestation, mediated communication, and power have been examined. Especially three sets of changes in the character and dynamics of public contention inspire us to rethink how social media activism should be studied. First, in protest communication and mobilization, centrally involving social platforms, we see new connections emerging between the ‘local’, ‘national’, and ‘transnational’. As mobile technologies have become omnipresent in contemporary protest, street activity becomes inextricably entangled with national and transnational public communication. Second, a broad shift is taking place from mobilization through collective identities, ideas, and claims to mobilization through easy to personalize images and slogans, such as ‘we are the 99%’, which are shared online. Simultaneously, ephemeral moments of ‘collective identification’ and ‘public attention’ remain important. At the height of protest events, flashes of collectivity are produced on major social platforms, tying large numbers of people to these events. Third, the central role of social media in contemporary activism means that protest communication increasingly occurs through hyper-commercial platforms, which shape how this communication unfolds. Deploying techniques such as data mining, user profiling, and targeted advertising, social platforms affect the aesthetics of popular expression, as well as how people connect with each other. These interrelated developments cannot be adequately understood through public sphere theory. They: a) make the notion of a ‘sphere’ as a ‘natural’ container of relations of publicness problematic, b) complicate the concepts of the ‘collective’ and ‘public’ as stable sets of social relations, and c) confuse the traditional distinction between ‘public’ and ‘commercial’ space. In the light of the observed developments, we propose a conceptual framework that can capture the highly dynamic character of platform mediated public contention, tracing its evolving ‘temporal’, ‘material’, and ‘spatial’ instantiations. We will illustrate this framework through examples from a range of case studies we have done, over the past years, on the Occupy and Arab Spring protests (Kavada 2015; Poell et al. 2015; Poell & Darmoni 2012). Drawing from these examples, we show how to study: a) the temporal formation and reformation of contentious actors, issues, symbols, and practices on platforms, b) the specific materiality of the different social technologies, and c) the spatial character of public contention, in which local protests become suddenly connected to ‘distant’ global actors in streams of social media communication.