Digital-fist Campaigning and its logics. Impact on quality and modes of participation

In a short time span the attitude towards the role of digital tools in our democratic life has turned quite pessimistic. The Internet, and more recently social media, have been for long time considered a space for liberation by many activists and scholars - being free and easy to use. It was only in 2011 when many praised the role of the internet in supporting the uprising in the Middle East. But this euphoria, as Jen Schradie said in her last book “The revolution that wasn’t” (2019), has started shifting, as the original enthusiasm has turned into a bleak outlook, facing the acknowledgment that the democratic features of the Internet and some digital platforms are, perhaps, even endangering democracy itself, generating new forms of inequalities, surveillance, disinformation and polarisation. This paper draws on the expanding literature from the joint fields of digital media and social movements studies (Stephansen and Treré, 2020), to explore the impact of digital tools on protests and activism considered as fundamental components for the quality of our democracies. Communication processes can be understood as key factors in determining the organisational structure of social movements, and therefore so called ‘networked social movements’ (Castells, 2012) could be considered a new species of social movements in their own rights. Taking an historical approach, one could better assess the wider impact of digital communication on activism and the democratic space, looking not only at how pre-existing social movements have used online tactics and increased their presence on the digital space, but presenting reflections from the growing phenomenon of so-called ‘digital-first campaigning’ organisations (Karpf, 2012). Originally based on the so called ‘MoveOn model’, built around the famous US online campaigning group, these online-first campaigning organisations have developed unique internal structures and modes of functioning that are deeply shaped by the use of digital communication and analytics. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the area of digital-first campaigning, the paper presents empirical findings about the impact of digitalisation on the quality of democracy. The paper will present two main processes, which are deeply affecting the quality of our digital public sphere and which are the results of digitally-enabled modes of mobilisation. The first, highlights the impact of digital tools on the quality of participation. Initially understood as a way of amplifying citizens voice in the democratic public space, emerging literature is currently revealing how digital tools are actually generating a ‘digital activism gap’ (Schradie, 2019). The second process regards the modes of participation, since digital-first activism risks reducing protests into ‘spectacles’, as certain tactics are more successful within the algorithmic logics than others. Tactics that are suffering the most in the online sphere are those that aim at empowering citizens, like deliberative exercises or affirmative action. The paper concludes by suggesting the need for new frames of analysis in order to understand the ‘digital first’ ways of organising protests, since they follow a novel logic of their own.