Media ecologies and protest movements: main perspectives and key lessons

ABSTRACT

Studies adopting the media ecology metaphor to investigate social movements form a promising strand of literature that has emerged in the last years to overcome the communicative reductionism permeating the study of the relation between social movements and communication technologies. However, contributions that apply ecological visions to protest are scattered, and only seldom connect their analyses to more general media ecological frameworks. The article critically reviews and classifies the diverse strands of scholarship that adopt the ecological metaphor in their exploration of activism, and connects them with the more general literature on media and communication ecologies. Moreover, it extracts the constitutive elements of this literature that can help scholars to better address the complexity of communication within social movements, and it articulates four key lessons that a media ecology lens brings to the understanding of media and protest. Finally, the article further demonstrates the strengths of this approach through an illustration of the preliminary findings of an ongoing investigation on the 15M movement in Spain.

KEYWORDS:

• Media ecologies
• protest ecologies
• social movements
• digital activism
• literature review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Emiliano Treré is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Autonomous University of Querétaro (Mexico), and Research Fellow in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Lakehead University (Canada). [email: [email protected]]

Alice Mattoni is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences and Research Fellow of the Centre on Social Movement Studies, both based at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy. [email: [email protected]]

ORCID

Emiliano Treré http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2496-4571

Alice Mattoni http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4809-0207

Notes

1 The work of Altheide is itself informed by the media ecology tradition we analyzed in the previous section.

2 We deliberately decided to include only those studies that explicitly use the media ecology metaphor and to exclude those researches that instead employ other ecological metaphors, like the protest ecology metaphor used in the work of Bennett and Segerberg (2013) because it refers to a different, and broader, conceptual framework that goes beyond communication technologies. Unless otherwise specified, we have added the use of italics in the quotes so to emphasize the particular uses of the ecological terminology.

Additional information

Funding

Emiliano Treré and Alice Mattoni could write this article thanks to the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 430-2014-00181]. Alice Mattoni was also supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research through the Grant Scientific Independence for Young Scholars [grant number RBSI14GUJE].