“I don’t Wear Blinkers, All Right?” The Multiple Meanings of Civic Identity in the Indignados and the Role of Social Media

Abstract

The global upsurge in collective action has highlighted the extensive use of social media by social movements. Yet the extent to which citizenship is enacted and potentially transformed by social media use within these movements remains under-explored. This study employs a cross-country comparative analysis of the relationship between social media, movement mobilisation and civic membership within the Indignados movement in Greece and France. Through interviews with Indignados members and content analysis of activist discourses in the movement’s Facebook groups, we critically evaluate the potential of social media in (re)defining the meaning and practice of civic membership. The study reveals that civic membership plays a significant role in activist self-identification because the “citizen” category unites subjects despite differences in their political identities. However, social media’s role in the construction of civic and collective identities is highly ambivalent. While on Facebook different subjectivities are brought together under a shared civic identity, in specific Facebook groups users re-enact their partial (nationalistic) identities, creating digital enclaves that host a distinct “we” within the broader Indignados movement. These findings problematise the notion that Facebook has an intrinsic capacity to facilitate online communities which transcend given boundaries; social media can equally sustain existing boundaries of exclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• social media
• activism
• protest
• social movements
• Indignados; citizenship

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. To safeguard interviewees’ anonymity, activists quoted are given a false name.

2. Their absence is notable in the Greek context, partly due to the xenophobic tendencies of the “Upper Square”, according to Sotirakopoulos and Sotiropoulos (2013).

3. “Workers’ fathers” (ergatopateres) is a Greek phrase used to describe trade union leaders who act against the workers’ interests by taking advantage of the trade union to acquire personal political power.

4. The topology of the protests in Syntagma Square reflects the division of the movement between two clusters. The “Upper” square group attracted protesters clustered around “patriotic” themes with nationalist slogans, Greek flags and even a few individuals saluting in the Nazi way; the “Down” square was inhabited by left-wing and anarchist activists organising task groups for supplying food, cleaning the space, providing legal assistance and putting up artistic events (Karamichas 2012).

5. “Turkish seeds” is a pejorative phrase used to describe anyone “who dares to differ from the ‘nationally correct’ canon” (Pesmazoglou 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Venetia Papa

Venetia Papa (corresponding author) is Special Scientist in the Department of Communication and Internet Studies, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus.

Dimitra L. Milioni

Dimitra L. Milioni is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Internet Studies, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus. Email: [email protected].