From social movements to cloud protesting: the evolution of collective identity

Abstract

This article develops a conceptual framework for understanding collective action in the age of social media, focusing on the role of collective identity and the process of its making. It is grounded on an interactionist approach that considers organized collective action as a social construct with communicative action at its core [Melucci, A. 1996. Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press]. It explains how micromobilization is mediated by social media, and argues that social media play a novel broker role in the activists' meaning construction processes. Social media impose precise material constraints on their social affordances, which have profound implications in both the symbolic production and organizational dynamics of social action. The materiality of social media deeply affects identity building, in two ways: firstly, it amplifies the ‘interactive and shared’ elements of collective identity (Melucci, 1996), and secondly, it sets in motion a politics of visibility characterized by individuality, performance, visibility, and juxtaposition. The politics of visibility, at the heart of what I call ‘cloud protesting’, exacerbates the centrality of the subjective and private experience of the individual in contemporary mobilizations, and has partially replaced the politics of identity typical of social movements. The politics of visibility creates individuals-in-the-group, whereby the ‘collective’ is experienced through the ‘individual’ and the group is the means of collective action, rather than its end.

Keywords:

• social movements
• social media
• computer-mediated-communication
• collective identity
• politics of visibility

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the editors of this special issue and the two anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and valuable suggestions, without which this article would have been very different.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Stefania Milan (stefaniamilan.net) is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the interplay between technology and activism, cyberspace governance, and the politics of big data. She is the author of ‘Social Movements and Their Technologies: Wiring Social Change’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and co-author of ‘Media/Society’ (Sage, 2011). [Email: [email protected]]