Movements as multiplicities and contentious branding: lessons from the digital exploration of #Occupy and #Anonymous

ABSTRACT

This conceptual paper wishes to contribute to the debate on digitally mediated movements by developing the perspective of ‘contentious branding’. The empirical research has followed the #Occupy and #Anonymous hashtags around popular social media, reconstructing their highly heterogeneous adoption. A branding perspective on contentious politics is aimed at highlighting the diverse and sometimes contradictory appropriations of the ‘semiotic repertoires’ of protest movements, particularly apparent within digital networks of communication. A contentious branding perspective on social movements not only tries to fit these specific cases better: it intends to provide an epistemological and methodological device to sustain a non-essentialist understanding of social movements in general, and to face the challenges and opportunities of digital social movement research in particular. The first section of the paper briefly discusses the concepts ‘social movement’ and ‘branding’, characterizing the proposed idea of ‘contentious branding’. Some insights derived from a broader digital exploration on the uses of the hashtags #Occupy and #Anonymous then serve to emphasize their variable, incoherent and at times contradictory utilization: few of the several reiterations of the brand Occupy, deviating from its original use, are presented, and a heuristic categorization of Anonymous’ diverse issues of involvement is proposed. Based on this, the discussion further develops the concept of contentious branding, clarifying its analytical boundaries vis a vis neighboring approaches in social movement theory. The conclusion discusses some of the epistemological and methodological implications that contentious branding bears for the study of social movements in the digital age.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• multiplicity
• contentious branding
• occupy
• anonymous

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge Jennifer Doyle, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Max Kortlander, Lorenzo Mosca, Paola Rebughini, and Justus Uitermark for their feedback on this paper and / or on the overall research process behind it. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The episode was reported by the Italian journalist Bruno Ballardini on the newspaper ‘Il Fatto Quotidiano’ (http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2015/03/01/anonymous-colto-di-sorpresa-dallisis/1463946/). For sake of clarity, the seemingly pro-ISIS message was posted in the name of the Islamist hacker group AnonGhost, not in the name of Anonymous. Despite often associated, the two ‘groups’ have recently stated their mutual independence. However, both the name and the most common logo of AnonGhost makes a direct reference to the Anonymous brand.

2 See for example the case of CtrlSecGroup: https://mic.com/articles/129679/anonymous-vs-isis-how-ghostsec-and-ghost-security-group-are-targeting-terrorists.

3 Several groups (such as LulzSec, RedHack, AnonGhost, etc.) have felt the need to further qualify their identity, although without cutting references to the Anonymous umbrella-brand.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Davide Beraldo

Davide Beraldo is a Lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. He holds a PhD (cum laude) in sociology from the University of Amsterdam and the University of Milan, and a master (cum laude) in social sciences. He is currently working on investigating political biases in recommendation systems of popular social media and on developing a Social Movement Studies framework for the conceptualization of data activism. In his PhD dissertation, he explored the epistemological and methodological implications of the digital mediation of social movements, investigating large datasets of social media data related to the Occupy and Anonymous protest movements. His research interests include digital sociology, social movements, algorithms, irony politics, and epistemology of complexity. [email: [email protected]]