Riots and Twitter: connective politics, social media and framing discourses in the digital public sphere

ABSTRACT

Social media technologies like Twitter are credited with enabling a new form of connective action, in which political movements coalesce and mobilise around hashtags, memes and personalised action frames. After the UK riots in 2011, citizen ‘broom armies’ took to the streets to clear up and repair damage. Different hashtags, including #RiotCleanUp and #OperationCupOfTea, were implicated in these movements.

This paper questions connective action theory in this context. It seeks to respond to two criticisms of the connective approach, namely that connective action underplays differences between technologies and does not account sufficiently for cultural and ideological drivers of action.

The paper combines an analysis of software systems, issue publics and discourse to giver a fuller account of connective politics during the riot clean-up movements. In doing so, it develops several metrics to advance understanding of digital communication systems, drawing attention to the roles that time and account status play in assembling meaning on Twitter. This analysis suggests that the clean-up movements were complex, discursive political acts, in which celebrity accounts played an influential role in framing discourse. Furthermore, the #RiotCleanUp hashtag credited with mobilising these groups is found to provide a less compelling explanation of action when compared against the more emotive but less noted #OperationCupOfTea.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• connective action
• Twitter
• ICTs
• media studies
• social movements

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Philip Pond is a researcher in digital communication and software studies at RMIT University in Melbourne. He runs the Digital-Social Systems Lab, which designs research and builds software to study the impact of technology on society.

Professor Jeff Lewis is co-director of the Human Security and Disasters Research. He is a former Fellow of the Centre for Civil Society, London School of Economics, and has published over 40 book chapters, reviews and articles. He has also published numerous stories and articles for magazines and newspapers.

Notes

1 A systems approach is used to frame Twitter for analysis. In brief, Twitter is seen primarily as a communication system, within which different sub-systems interact to assemble meaningful exchange. A systems approach emphasises complexity – Twitter is ‘revealed’ only through a careful and detailed reading of these interacting components – but it is also possible to identify and to focus upon parts of a system to gain insight into its macro function. Hartley and Potts (2014) define and locate communication systems within wider complex of social, technological, informational and cultural interaction – the interaction between these systems is paramount.

2 If a tweet contained a hyperlink, the review attempted to follow that link and to assess material at the specified location. If the link was broken or the destination was missing, then the reviewer noted this and the link was ignored for content coding purposes.

3 Note, also, that the contributions of ‘elite’ users are more likely to be picked up and broadcast by mainstream media. As such, the engagement of elite users suggests a qualitatively different type of discourse.