Collective Identity and the Politics of Visibility in Times of Social Media

Social media and mobile devices are changing the way people organize, mobilize, and protest. Organizational patterns have transformed, as individuals and networked collective action become more prominent at the expense of traditional movement organizations. Organizing has become easier and quicker, and protest tends to be elusive and temporary. The narrative of the action is no longer centralized and controlled by social movement organizations and leaders, but any activist can contribute, by producing, selecting, punctuating, and diffusing material like tweets, posts, and videos. I call this new type of mobilizing “cloud protesting”, as it is grounded and enabled by digital communication technology and social media and mobile devices in particular. In computing, “cloud” indicates the delivery over the Internet of customized services such as software. Similarly, contemporary mobilizations such as the Occupy Wall Street protests can be seen as an imagined virtual space where a set of “soft resources” crucial to collective action coexist, such as identities, narratives, and know-how. These resources originate both online and offline, but mostly “live” online. They can be customized by and for individuals, who can in this way tailor their participation. But social media and mobile devices influence also the way collective identity is built and understood. Through social media protesters actively participate in building a collective identity. The politics of identity becomes a politics of visibility. In this paper, I explore the transformations of collective identity in interaction with social media, focusing in particular on the “politics of visibility” as a crucial component of contemporary collective action. The paper is based on qualitative data collected in various anti-austerity demonstrations in several European countries.