Making the Syntagma Square protests visible. Cultures of participation and activists’ communication in Greek anti-austerity protests

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the following general question: how do movement cultures of participation shape activists’ communication strategies in the construction of visibility for their protests? While other scholars have tackled this issue at the theoretical level, in this article I address this enquiry through a concrete case study – the Greek Indignants (Aγανακτισμένοι) and, more specifically, the occupation of Syntagma square – and employing the lens of culture at the analytical level. Overall, the main theoretical claim behind this article is that we cannot consider movement cultures as a monolithic construct transversally affecting activists’ usages of both digital media and non-digital media. First, there is the need to understand social movements’ cultures as embedded into their broader context. Second, as the empirical analysis shows, movement cultures related to a specific type of practice – i.e. the one of participation – hold more explanatory power when we split them into different subdimensions to then understand how each of them intertwines with a specific aspect of activists’ communication strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• social movements
• culture of participation
• anti-austerity protests
• Facebook
• Greece

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alice Mattoni is Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. She published extensively on the relationship between social movements and media technologies. She is the author of Media Practices and Protest Politics. How Precarious Workers Mobilize (Routledge 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 430-2014-00181].