The Yellow Vest Movement Organizing its Activities: Between Online Coordination Repertoires and Spontaneous Individual Communications

This paper discusses the different types of spontaneous coordinations (Maillet, 2006) online that guide the Yellow Vests (YV) movement in France. The citizens involved in this movement favour forms of activism that are characterized by a more pragmatic and concrete approach to engagement, the rejection of hierarchical and institutionalized structures, and finally by a flexible and limited personal involvement, which starts with involvement in online groups (Facebook mainly). Yellow Vest practices give way to various types of militancy in the construction of decentralized alliances that will network to carry out these diverse actions. These action networks can also be perceived as an agglutination of "weak cooperation" (Cardon, 2008) or as massive opportunism. Thus, these networks use weak links between actors for a mass dissemination on social-digital networks through decentralized communication, against a background of very strong mistrust towards traditional media. Within the framework of this movement, the Internet has clearly contributed to the evolution of coordination repertoires, where the ability of YVs to mobilize individuals on an ad hoc basis in the service of precisely circumscribed objectives relies notably on investments in diffuse technological forms (Granjon, 2002), using the capacity of socio-digital networks to rapidly bring audiences together around lively issues. Communication practices and the support of ICTs have made it easier for individuals to collaborate and coordinate in a short time frame, in the form of "connective actions" (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). In this enterprise of aggregating individualized policy orientations, actors are generally encouraged to create their own communication tools, demonstrating a willingness to decentralize communication and to animate seemingly independent spaces (Wojcik et al., 2013) to embark on this "trend of systematic occupation of the web" (Vedel & Michalska, 2009). This research thus aims to explore the methods used by Yellow Vests on their various "constituent" media (Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, mailing lists, Youtube, Snapchat) in order to gather, structure, organize and promote protest. The plurality of actions undertaken, which can take many different forms (interactive surveys, video capsules, live in situ, montages, interviews, visuals, etc.) and made possible by digital media. It is therefore interesting to observe how the YVs have built and developed their links with a view to having an impact on physical demonstrations, revealing the importance of a strong articulation between an online establishment and organisation and the setting up of offline actions (sittings on roundabouts; tolls or production site blockades). The community functioning of the demonstrators on the different platforms also draws more or less clear roles and relationships between the participants, thus implying particular social situations such as phenomena of domination or exclusion that can materialise in different forms and intensities. Finally, the modes of dissemination, archiving and research of information within the communication and structuring devices of the movement testify to the difficulty of organizing information in a perennial way, at the service of the collective, in the absence of a real moderation of online spaces and a structuring leadership.