Symposium on political communication and social movements: audience, persuasion, and influence

ABSTRACT

This article argues that an important contribution that political communication can offer social movement studies is a more variegated understanding of social movement audiences and their role in social movement strategy and processes. Specifically, the article introduces a coarse typology of social movement audiences and discusses the importance of understanding differences in the goals of these audiences and what kinds of influence, from messaging or other forms of pressure, may be important to affect different audiences in movements’ favors. The article also examines the ways in which audiences are active, shaping what messages they are exposed to, consume, believe, and act upon. The call of the article is to bring a concern for audiences into social movement studies in the hopes of wedding these more media and communication-focused concerns with the kinds of structural and material influences social movement studies is so accomplished in investigating.

KEYWORDS:

• Social movements
• politics
• communication studies
• audience
• media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jennifer Earl is a Professor of Sociology and (by courtesy) Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. She is Director Emeritus of the Center for Information Technology and Society and Director Emeritus of the Technology and Society PhD Emphasis, both at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on social movements, information technologies, and the sociology of law, with research emphases on Internet activism, social movement repression, youth activism, and legal change. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for research from 2006 to 2011 on Web activism, was a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics, and co-authored with Katrina Kimport, Digitally enabled social change [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 I am largely focused in this essay on the importance of audiences to understanding and explaining social movement processes in academic research, although it is also the case that social movement’s actors themselves might benefit from considering many of the same topics. However, I would regard it as quite likely that social movement actors already do consider many of these topics far more than researchers have thus far.

2 It is not clear where former movement participants would fit as audience members for a movement, in part because so little research exists on the reasons that people exit movements, save work such as Linden and Klandermans (2006).

3 I use framing throughout this essay to refer specifically to the concept as introduced by Snow and collaborators, which focuses on specific communicative tasks and messages designed to accomplish those tasks. I use more general terms such as message or communication when referring to more general messaging and persuasion processes. While frames are always messages, messages are not always frames.

4 As indicated above, many new rows could be added to this typology. For instance, it would be possible to argue that potential repressors such as the police (and government elites and militaries in many nations) may also be audiences for movement messages. In advance of massive, multi-day mobilizations, such as those occurring around party conventions in the US, it is not unusual for the police and movements to message one another through the media about expected levels of conflict and consequences. However, this typology is not meant to be exhaustive in its present form so much as illustrative of the myriad of different audiences and the important distinctions amongst them.

5 Swerts (2015) attempts a broader explicit classification of audiences, but limits that to how audiences differently relate to narrative.