Information, Communication, Digitization, and Datafication: Four Analytical Stages in Researching Social Movements and Media

In this paper, we make a claim for considering current discussions on big data and their relevance for collective political participation as the latest stage of a broader theoretical and methodological reflection on the fluid interplay between social movement and media. Certainly, the widespread adoption of digital media as tools for protest and activism during critical junctures – such as the Arab Springs or the severe economic crisis in Europe and all over the world – has prompted a highly interdisciplinary reflection on how increased communication possibilities entwine with the organizational and the symbolic dimensions of social movements. Moreover, new avenues of research have opened that consider media practices as forms of resistance in their own right, focus on communication governance, privacy, and technology-related rights as contested issues, and use digital data as a primary resource to understand the social and the political spheres. Thus, current research endeavors often rise up to the challenges posed by the complexities of the contemporary hybrid mediascape, developing sophisticated approaches to map the present of collective endeavors at the finest grain and with a special look of anticipating the future. However, ongoing research in this domain is seldom carried out in connection with longer-term reflections on the role of media within contentious politics – both as a factor affecting the development and the unfolding of collective dynamics and as a topic of mobilization in its own right. Such disconnection, in turn, does not allow researchers to take advantage of lessons learned in the past through the adoption of critical theoretical and methodological approaches towards media. Moreover, it strengthens the communication reductionism that is typical of collective action studies for which media are either neutral background factors or, conversely, the causative mechanism of collective participation, and for which investigations are limited to single platforms and at a limited point in time. In order to overcome this situation, we propose to adopt a longitudinal and sociotechnical approach to reflect on the nexus between social movements and media along four main analytical stages, each of which represents an ideal-typical convergence of media affordances, movement strategies, and epistemological research orientations: information, centered on the interplay between traditional mass-media and social movements; communication, focused on the adoption of networked communication to organize and strategize collectively; digitization, which looks at the progressive growth of digital forms of contention and activism; and datafication, in which movements resist and, at the same time, leverage the digital turn of our contemporary societies. While each of this analytical stage has been produced looking at specific temporalities, we argue that they co-exist today, in which grassroots politics have to confront the deep mediatization of current societies.