The new information frontier: toward a more nuanced view of social movement communication

Abstract

The information environment that social movements face is increasingly complex, making traditional assumptions about media, messaging, and communication used in social movement studies less relevant. Building on work begun within the study of digital protest, we argue that a greater integration of political communication research within social movement studies could offer substantial research contributions. We illustrate this claim by discussing how a greater focus on audiences and message reception, as well as message context, could advance the study of social movements. Specifically, we discuss a range of topics as applied to movement research, including information overload, selective attention, perceptions of bias, the possibilities that entertainment-related communications open up, and priming, among other topics. We suggest the risks of not adapting to this changing information environment, and incorporating insights from political communication, affect both the study of contemporary (including digital) protest, as well as potentially historical protest. The possibilities opened up by this move are immense including entirely new research programs and questions.

Keywords:

• Framing
• media
• communication
• digital protest
• online protest

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for its support of the Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network, which contributed to Jennifer Earl’s work on this topic. We would also like to thank the Editor, the anonymous reviewers, and the UA Writing Group, of which Jennifer Earl is a member, for providing helpful comments on an early draft.

Notes

1. We recognize that social movements may actually have multiple audiences, including potential supporters, current and past supporters, opponents, and multiple targets. Differences across these audiences are important, but our goal is to illustrate ways in which attending to message reception is useful more broadly. Fully tracing message effects for every type of recipient is beyond the scope of this article. Likewise, we recognize that movements vary widely across a range of dimensions (e.g. size, coherence, and professionalization), and that this powerfully shapes communication dynamics. Space limitations, however, prevent us from considering how different movements might be differently affected by our arguments.

2. This article largely focuses on research on social movements and political communication from the U.S., although numerous European researchers have studied communication practices related to digital protest (e.g. contributions to the 2015 special issue of Information, Communication, & Society on digital protest). Although our focus is weighted toward American theoretical traditions, we view this as not a limit of the approach we recommend but rather of ourselves as authors. We invite European scholars, representing different traditions, to seek different pathways for bringing communication practices into focus within social movement studies.

3. It is also worth noting that resonance-based framing research has been criticized by political communication scholars for being imprecise, and insufficiently distinct from priming (Cacciatore, Scheufele, & Iyengar, 2015).