http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2398-632X
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ABSTRACT
Public protest events are now both social media and news media events. They are deeply entangled, with news media actors – such as journalists or news organisations – directly participating in the protest by tweeting about the event using the protest hashtag; and social media actors sharing news items published online by professional news agencies. Protesters have always deployed tactics to engage the media and use news media agencies’ resources to amplify their reach, with the dual aim of mobilising new supporters and adding their voice to public, mediatised debate. When protest moves between a physical space and a virtual space, the interactions between protesters and media stop being asynchronous or post hoc and turn instantaneous. In this new media-protest ecosystem, traditional media are still relevant sources of information and legitimacy, yet this dynamic is increasingly underpinned by a hybrid interdependency between traditional news and social media sources. In this paper we focus on an anti-austerity government movement that arose in Australia in early 2014 and was mobilised as a series of social media driven, connective action protest events. We show that there is a complex symbiotic interdependency between the movement and the traditional media for recognition and amplification of initial protest events, but that over time as media interest wanes, the movements’ network becomes disconnected and momentum is lost. This suggests that the active role traditional media play in protest events is being underestimated in the current research agenda on connective action.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Francesco Bailo is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. He is completing a thesis on the impacts of online talk and social networking sites on political participation and organisations. Currently, he is researching the online activity around Italy’s Five Star Movement. He is interested in the applications of network analysis and computational text analysis. [email: [email protected]].
Ariadne Vromen is Professor of Political Sociology in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research interests are on new forms of political engagement that are facilitated by social media and the digital context. She also has a longstanding interest in young peoples’ politics and Australian civil society movements. Her new book, Digital citizenship and political engagement, on online campaigning organisations will be published in 2016. [email: [email protected]].
ORCID
Ariadne Vromen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2398-632X
Notes
* The underlying research material for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MIU9K3.
1. In Twitter parlance, friends are Twitter users followed by a given account. Contrary to Facebook, on Twitter friendship is not symmetrical.
2. The Twitter API returns, along with the actual text of the tweet (or status), information describing the tweet (e.g., timestamp, number of replies and geographic coordinates) and the user publishing it (e.g., number of followers, number of friends and location).
3. According to a survey conducted in the U.S.A. in 2015, 63% of Twitter and Facebook users received news via the service (Pew Research Center, Citation2015).
4. The ‘densities’ of friendship networks are assessed measuring their clustering coefficients (Newman, Citation2010, p. 199) which are observed to be relatively higher in social networks (Watts & Strogatz, Citation1998).