Role of Social Media in Social Protest Cycles: A Sociomaterial Examination
by
Monideepa Tarafdar
Charles J. Dockendorff Endowed Professor
Operations & Information Management
Isenberg School of Management
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Friday, Mar 5
10 – 11 am | Zoom
(send an email to ayabakan@temple.edu to get the Zoom link)
Abstact:
Contemporary social media fueled social protest is self-organized, rapidly dynamic, and de-centralized, constitutes vast populations, and is shaped by multiple and concurrent channels of information flows. Who can forget the powerful images of the many different social medial fueled protests, across the world, from 2018 through early 2021? Such protest activity is captured in the concept of ‘social protest cycles’, which are short periods of intense and contentious protest activity characterized by temporal dynamics, a large repertoire of protest action, confrontation and potential violence, and possible institutional action. They are the micro-foundations of long-term social movements. Drawing from the theoretical concept of sociomaterial assemblages, we conceptualize the social media enabled social protest cycle as an assemblage having social (e.g., people, elected leaders, police, judges etc.) and technical (social media applications, online petition applications etc.) components and analyze how it transforms through performative intra-actions. The empirical context is a social media enabled social protest cycle that emerged following a fatal rape incident in New Delhi, India. Through mixed-methods analysis of longitudinal netnographic data collected from simultaneous protest activity on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, online blogs, and newspaper websites, we theorize three intra-actions – Consolidation, Expansion and Intensification – and explain how they transform the social protest cycle over time. The paper contributes to the IS literature that studies social media enabled social protest action.