Digital Media and Local Protest

Our research is rooted in two distinct, yet complementary observations. On the one hand, both media coverage and academic attention focus on a (trans-)national level in the investigation of protest as one form of contentious collective action. This is contrasted by empirical findings in social movement studies, which have shown that the majority of protest events is highly localized (Rucht, 2001), depending on local grievances, local opportunity structures, local political configurations (Haselbacher & Rosenberger, 2018), or local civil society networks (Diani, 2015). On the other hand, the ubiquity of digital media in a “network society” (Castells, 1996) has given rise to ample academic debate on the role of platforms like Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook in the organization of and mobilization for contentious collective action (Margets, John, Hale, & Yasseri, 2015). Most notably, Bennett and Segerberg (2013) have formulated possible different “logics” of action brought about by digital media, where “personalized action frames” and networking processes of media might question the relevance of formal organization. However, joining both these observations leads us to ask whether the affordances of digital media platforms might play out differently in local settings than on the (trans-)national level. For example, we can easily imagine that the higher likelihood of face-to-face interactions among local actors might render digital media less relevant for social movement processes of resource exchange or identity formation. Thus, the debate on the role of digital media for collective organizational processes can only benefit from the explicit addition of a localized perspective. Yet, to our knowledge, empirical investigations of the role of digital media for local collective action are still rare and we thus propose to contribute to filling this research gap with our paper. Empirically, we will investigate mobilization around migration in two German middle-sized cities. This includes both mobilization for and against the participation and integration of migrants – an issue that has clearly politicised German society after the “summer of migration” 2015 and hence allows to observe a period of high mobilization (Grande, 2018; Rucht, 2018). Through a Protest Event Analysis (Hutter, 2014) based on local (traditional) news outlets, we can identify relevant actors, that have been active in mobilization. From this actor-centric perspective, we identify the digital traces of each actor, by studying their activity on digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, VK, or by public homepages. Rooted in a relational perspective to the study of collective action (McAdam & Diani, 2003) we investigate the networks that emerge from actors’ usage of these digital media to see what processes of recognition, resource exchange, and co-mobilization are at play. This allows us to answer the following research questions: Which digital media are used by contentious collective actors on the local level? Which interactions can be identified and what networks emerge from these activities?