Trajectories of Publicness and Contestation

This paper develops a conceptual framework for the systematic analysis of the relationship between social media and public contestation. It argues that to understand the role of social platforms in today’s protests, it is important to trace how these platforms are involved in trajectories of contestation, in which publicness is 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 approach 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. We will argue that contemporary public contestation, centrally involving social media, cannot be adequately theorized through this framework. It makes the notion of a ‘sphere’ as a ‘natural’ container of relations of publicness problematic, complicates the concepts of the ‘collective’ and ‘public’ as stable sets of social relations, and confuses 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 case studies we have done, over the past years, on the Occupy and Arab Spring protests. 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.