Protest communication ecologies

ABSTRACT

The flurry of protests since the turn of the decade has sustained a growth area in the social sciences. The diversity of approaches to the various facets and concerns raised by the collective action of aggrieved groups the world over impresses through multidisciplinarity and the wealth of insights it has generated. This introduction to a special issue of the international journal Information, Communication and Society is an invitation to recover conceptual instruments – such as the ecological trope – that have fallen out of fashion in media and communication studies. We account for their fall from grace and explicate the rationale for seeking to reinsert them into the empirical terrain of interlocking media, communication practices and protest which we aim to both capture with theory and adopt as a starting point for further analytical innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• Protest
• communication
• media
• ecology
• social media
• social movement

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the University of Sassari for hosting the iCS Symposium Protest Participation in Variable Communication Ecologies and to the Department of Sociology, City University London for its support for the event.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dan Mercea is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, City University London. He is the author of Civic Participation in Contentious Politics: The Digital Foreshadowing of Protest (forthcoming, Palgrave) [email: [email protected]].

Laura Iannelli is Lecturer in the Department of Political Sciences, Communication Sciences and Information Engineering, University of Sassari. She is the author of Hybrid Politics. Participation and Communication (forthcoming, Sage). [email: [email protected]]

Brian D. Loader is Associate-Director of the Science and Technology Studies Unit (SATSU) in the Department of Sociology based at the University of York, UK. [email: [email protected]]

ORCID

Laura Iannelli http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1679-0647

Notes

1 The multidisciplinary intellectual tradition building on McLuhan's work (1964) advanced ‘media ecology’ –where media are assumed as environments and environments as media – as an encompassing theoretical framework for grappling with interacting changes in cultural, political and social organizations.

2 Altheide's (1994) ‘ecology of communication’ was a conceptual tool for tapping into the relationship between, on the one hand, social action and engagement and, on the other hand, the expanding array of information and communication technologies together with their presumed accompanying logic.