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Mundane citizenship on the move: A counter-public response to inbound shopping tourism via mobile social media applications use
Abstract
Using digital ethnography to examine the daily mobile (micro)blogging (moblogging) practices of local residents as they confronted a wave of inbound shopping tourists in pre-Covid-19 pandemic Hong Kong, this article explores how the latest mode of mundane citizenship emerges from the communicative mobility of urban dwellers equipped with mobile phones and social media applications (apps). Recent research on the role of mobile devices and social media apps in citizen participation has focused on more visible forms of civic-political events, such as protests and voting, and tended to neglect the effects of mobile communication performed during banal travel and quotidian activities. This article offers an alternative reading of the relevance of mobile social media (MSM) in contemporary public lives by examining how they open up new temporalities and spatialities for counter-public engagement in the contexts of mundane urban mobility. The findings demonstrate various moblogging practices that entail modalities of counter-public engagement that traverse the personal, proto-political, and communal, and reveal how local residents used these modalities to articulate alternative public agendas, connect acts of consumer activism, and perform communal belonging vis-à-vis inbound shopping tourism amid their daily routines and modest journeys. Focusing on mobile socialities enabled by smartphones and networking apps, this article explicates how contemporary moblogging can, on the one hand, extend people's capacity to engage in citizen talk and connective action, while on the other hand, allow them to flexibly connect and contribute personal photobiographies and narratives to counter-public communities. By unpacking the novel pathways to citizen participation, it offers insights into new ways in which everyday mobile communication can be transformed into public involvement, albeit often in agonistic and emotional forms, and the role of MSM in this process.
... These confinements of emancipation, such as the protest camps of Occupy Movements (Castells, 2012;Feigenbaum et al., 2013;Juris, 2012;Ting, 2017) and autonomous social centres ( (Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010); Yates, 2014), 'are based on autonomy and selfreliance while often being disconnected from their surroundings' (Véron, 2016, 759). Yet political resistance may also emerge in precarious and ostensibly apolitical settings (Ting, 2022;Ting and Chen, 2021), where people engage in the practices of 'geographical insurgency' to challenge 'normative geographies in ordering of "appropriate behaviour"' (Cresswell, 1996, 38). In particular, discussions about these forms of spatial politics fall short of investigating how resistance towards normalising the rationales of government or oppression can occur in current networked urban spaces that are 'conductive to rhizomatic growth and nomadic movements that allow difference to be related in new and creative ways' (Sreekumar, 2020, 116). ...
Although heterotopia has been widely studied as relating to the marginal or subliminal sites of the city, the ubiquity of social media and mobile technology has facilitated the development of transient forms of heterotopia in support of large-scale urban movements. Using the case of Hong Kong’s networked mall protests, this article examines acts of mobile activism, whereby the urban landscape and its routines are temporarily reconfigured and turned into spaces of popular dissent joined by people in all walks of life. Drawing on multiple data sources and guided by connective ethnography, this study illustrates how digitally connected protestors created fleeting counter-sites in and across shopping centres to defy urban policing and subvert the spatio-temporal order it imposed. Rather than reclaiming urban public spaces to offer reservoirs of freedom, the protestors enacted occasions of opposing otherness not outside of urban repression but rather carved out of it as a nimble, counter-normative type of political resistance. By charting the contours of several types of these networked mall protests, this article reveals how contemporary mobile activism invents and reproduces alternate protest time-spaces. Focusing on their capacity to refashion contentious political life in the city, it offers nuanced insights into the latest form of spatial political engagement in a networked urban setting.
This paper examines the origins and dynamics of an extraordinary wave of protests in Hong Kong in 2019-2020. Despite lacking visible political opportunities and organizational resources, the movement drew resilient, mass participation unparalleled in the city's history and much of the world. Drawing from original sets of onsite and online datasets, we conceptualize the anti-extradition movement as a form of total mobilization from below. The totality of mobilization depended on a set of permissive and productive conditions: abeyant civil society networks concealed after the Umbrella Movement activated by fear over extradition to authoritarian encroachment, anger towards police conduct and coordinative communication through digital media. Its characteristics regarding protest scale, mobilizing structure, alternative space, and group solidarity are examined. The spasmodic moments of mobilization are explained by the nexus of network building in an unreceptive environment and a critical juncture. The roles of threats and emotions in mass mobilizations are also analysed.
Much research in the past decade has illustrated the role of social media in protest mobilization and coordination, but few have examined whether and how social media facilitated movement continuity after the end of a protest cycle. This study contributes to knowledge about this research gap by examining levels of social media use and how social media use relates to protest attitudes-persistence, pessimism, and radicalism-among young people during movement abeyance. Analyzing a survey of university students in Hong Kong in March 2019, several months before the onset of the antiextradition bill protests, the findings show that political use of social media related to how young people evaluate the Umbrella Movement, the previous peak of mobilization in the city. Both social media use and evaluation of the Umbrella Movement shaped people's protest attitudes. Overall, the findings suggest that social media help maintain protest potential even at a time when social mobilization is generally weak.
Using Giddens' (1984) structuration theory we examine how social structures in mobile communication technologies shape the everyday life of individuals, thereby reshaping power dynamics that underlie the social organization of society. We argue that the anytime, anyplace connectivity afforded by mobile communication technologies structures society by imposing a network, social and personal logic. We discuss how each logic both reproduces and challenges traditional power structures, at the micro-as well as macro-level. At the micro-level, the network logic refers to mobile communication tech-nologies' capacity to organize activities in a networked fashion, granting people greater autonomy from time and place. The social logic refers to mobile communication technologies' capacity for perpetual contact, fostering social connectedness with social relationships. The personal logic refers to mobile communication technologies' capacity to serve as extensions of the Self, with which people can personalize contents, services, place and time. The flipside of these logics is that, at the micro-level, the responsibility to operate autonomously, to maintain personal social networks, and to manage and act based on personal information shifts to the individual. We also notice shifts in power structures at the macro-level. For instance, to reap the benefits of mobile communication technology individuals engage in free 'digital labor' and tolerate new forms of surveillance and control.
Many scholars discuss the role of social media in the context of social movements, but there remain major disagreements regarding the precise role that social media plays. One area that deserves more in-depth study is the affordances of social media for constructing collective identity. This article examines the case of an Iranian women’s rights campaign page on Facebook, “My Stealthy Freedom,” using an analysis of textual and visual content. The article examines how online campaign pages on Facebook contribute to the formation of collective identity and the construction of a campaign narrative. Following the analysis, the authors discuss how photobiographic campaigns—social media users sharing personal photos and adjoining personal narratives in support of a cause—illustrate two affordances of social media for construction of collective identity: affordances for discourse and affordances for performance. Affordances for discourse contribute to the collective action framing process through sharing of grievances and collectively negotiating meaning. These affordances also contribute to a collectively and incrementally constructed narrative by sharing personal stories that resonate with the group. Affordances for performance focus on the enactment of protest through transgressive photobiographies deliberately staged to convey the movement message to broader audiences. Here, transgressive photobiographies are defined as modular performances that can be adopted for the repertoires of contentious politics through protesting of laws and norms, such as the mandatory hijab. These transgressive performances create group solidarity through engagement in risk, thereby contributing to the formation of group identities.
Book synopsis: Media and Public Spheres, now available in paperback, presents empirical studies of print, recorded music, movies, radio, television and the Internet that reveal how media structure public spheres as well as how people use media to participate in the public sphere. They explore the nature of public spheres, how they are deliberative, egalitarian, exclusive or alternative, and the dilemmas that each of these present. The studies include cases of media, present and past, in North America, Europe and Asia.
The contributors are from the US, the UK, Germany, Sweden, Australia and China. They are familiar with varied media and political systems and span a wide array of scholarly fields, including communication and media studies, political science, sociology, psychology and history.
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become an essential part of contentious politics and social movements in contemporary China. Although quite a few scholars have explored ICTs, contentious politics, and collective action in China, they largely focus on the event-based analysis of discrete contentious events, failing to capture, reflect, and assess most of the political ferment in and around the routine use of digital media in people’s everyday lives. This study proposes a broader research agenda by shifting the focus from contentious events – ‘moments of madness’ – to ‘the politics of mundanity’: the political dynamics in the mundanity of digitally mediated, routine daily life. The agenda includes, first, the investigation of the dynamics underlying the mundane use of digital media, which not only places the use of ICTs in contentious moments into ‘a big picture’ to understand the political potential of mundane use of ICTs, but also reveals ‘everyday resistance,’ or less publicly conspicuous tactics, as precursors of open, confrontational forms of contentious activity. Second, the agenda proposes the examination of mundane experiences to understand the sudden outburst of contention and digital media as the ‘repertoire of contention.’ Third, the agenda scrutinizes the adoption of mundane expressions of contentious challenges to authoritarian regimes, as they allow for the circumvention of the heavy censorship of collective action mobilization. Mundane expressions have thereby emerged as a prominent part of the mobilization mechanism of contention in China. Addressing ‘the politics of mundanity’ will provide a nuanced understanding of ICTs and contentious collective action in China.
'The variety of approaches that claim to constitute practice-based research are several and varied. Silvia Gherardi cuts through the various approaches to address practice-based research as itself a practice in an invaluable guide for organization and management researchers. Written in a characteristically accessible style, this volume is an indispensable guide.' - Stewart Clegg, University of Technology Business School, Sydney, Australia.
The Logic of Connective Action explains the rise of a personalized digitally networked politics in which diverse individuals address the common problems of our times such as economic fairness and climate change. Rich case studies from the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany illustrate a theoretical framework for understanding how large-scale connective action is coordinated using inclusive discourses such as “We Are the 99%” that travel easily through social media. in many of these mobilizations, communication operates as an organizational process that may replace or supplement familiar forms of collective action based on organizational resource mobilization, leadership, and collective action framing. in some cases, connective action emerges from crowds that shun leaders, as when Occupy protesters created media networks to channel resources and create loose ties among dispersed physical groups. in other cases, conventional political organizations deploy personalized communication logics to enable large-scale engagement with a variety of political causes. The Logic of Connective Action shows how power is organized in communication-based networks, and what political outcomes may result.
The conceptualization and measurement of political participation has been an issue vibrantly debated for more than 50 years. The arrival of digital media came to add important parameters to the debate complicating matters further. Digital media have added inexhaustive creative and nonpolitical ways to engage in social and political life that not only often appear to form the basis of political participation but also, in a plethora of everyday contexts, seem to become embedded into what eventually evolves to become a politically meaningful act. This article argues that digitally networked participation—and its manifestations—is a form of political participation and should be conceptualized, identified, and measured as one. Relying on recent conceptual and empirical work, it shows how various common manifestations of digitally networked participation conform to minimalist, targeted, and motivational definitions of political participation. Finally, tackling common misconceptions about the value of such acts, this article argues that nonpolitical forms of digitally networked participation can occasionally be far more impactful than forms of participation commonly accepted as political. This article concludes by recommending the systematic development of measures for digitally networked participation and its formal integration in the study of political participation.
Based on 17 in-depth interviews with people involved in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, we present a typology of how Twitter is used in the service of protest that draws attention to its utilization in conjunction with face-to-face actions. The OWS case study demonstrates how the rapid digital circulation of texts allows protestors to quickly build a geographically dispersed, networked counterpublic that can articulate a critique of power outside of the parameters of mainstream media. Furthermore, we find that the relay of pre-existing material was perceived to be just as meaningful a form of participation as drafting original compositions. By including these forwarding activities in their online efforts, these Twitter users worked to expand the circulation of information building and sustaining an OWS counterpublic. However, dependence on this external platform leaves protestors vulnerable to restrictions on their ability to communicate, as well as to unwanted surveillance from potentially hostile authorities.
Digital telecommunication technology has expanded the potential of the mobile phone to be used increasingly as a weapon against authoritarian rule and censorship. Since the content of mobile communication is unpredictable and unregulated, mobile phones have the capability to breach state-sponsored blockage of information. This in turn helps the Chinese people to maintain contact with each other, receive information from outside the country, and make political waves in an aggressive battle for control over information. This paper examines spontaneous mobilization via mobile phones, with a focus on two concrete popular protests in rural and urban areas, demonstrating how Chinese citizens have expanded the political uses of mobile phones in their struggle for freedom of information flow, social justice, and the rule of law, while seeking to build an inexpensive counter-public sphere. These processes destabilize China's conventional national public sphere by shaping political identities on an individual level as well as the notion of citizenship within the evolving counter-public sphere. The political significance of mobile phones in the context of contemporary China's political environment can be observed by various social forces that communicate their struggles with the aid of this technology, pose challenges in governance, and force the authorities to engage in new kinds of media practices.
The proliferation of portable, networked and location-aware devices has drastically changed how the city is represented and interpreted in general and during specific events in particular by enabling new practices of digital curation and networked audience activities. These extend the urban realm from the physical into the virtual, which provides a space for global and dispersed, often naive audience activities. This article uses the case study of the Fiesta de Santo Tomás, which is an annual festival that takes place during the week leading up to Christmas in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, to illustrate how digital curation, (re)presentation and (re)interpretation of festive events occur in a hybrid urban space. By documenting the ways that the modern day version of this festival has made its way into the larger digitally mediated sphere of urbanism, the study looks at three groups of curators and how their ways of encoding the event provide a multiplicity of representations to be decoded by the members of the ephemeral networked audience.
Drawing upon participant observation and interviews with white power movement (WPM) activists, this article explains how members materialize, communicate, and sustain white power identities under highly antagonistic social conditions. We emphasize the role of the movement's free spaces in movement persistence. In particular, we contrast the social ties and cultural practices that various types of free spaces in the movement both enable and inhibit. WPM members construct two main types of free space. “Indigenous-prefigurative” spaces involve small, local networks where political socialization, boundary marking, and other cultural practices allow members to participate in relationships that “prefigure” Aryan dominance. These practices are collapsed into otherwise benign, everyday activities in settings such as family homes, Bible study groups, informal parties, and crashpads, where members perform them in relative safety from social controls. “Transmovement-prefigurative spaces” offer opportunities to draw otherwise unconnected local actors and networks into broader webs of white power culture. Intentional Aryan communities, music festivals, and cyberspace connect individuals to extra-local movement networks which help reinforce solidarity and commitment to the WPM. These free spaces contribute to the persistence of white power activism by creating a bi-leveled infrastructure of spaces that support distinct kinds of network ties and practices to sustain collective identity.
Purpose
This paper discusses how netnography can be applied in order to conduct covert research on sensitive research topics. An analysis of a Danish internet message board on cosmetic surgery illustrates suggestions concerning modifications of netnography guidelines.
Design/methodology/approach
Owing to the relevance of studying sensitive research topics – in particular when access to informants is difficult – netnography has been applied in an analysis of cross consumer online‐communication about cosmetic surgery on a Danish internet message board. Methodological stages and procedures including entreé, data collection, analysis and interpretation have been followed. In terms of research ethics and member checks, however, the suggested guidelines have been modified.
Findings
Empirical findings verify that consumers use internet message boards in order to exchange information and advice about cosmetic surgery. Especially the opportunity to masquerade and to cover their identities allows them to express attitudes, opinions, and experiences freely – and hence to study these in order gain deeper insights into consumption motives, concerns, and experiences.
Originality/value
The paper suggests that netnography is a suitable methodology for the study of sensitive research topics, enabling the researcher in an unobtrusive and covert way to gain deeper insights into consumers' opinions, motives, and concerns. Based on a discussion of netnography's position in between discourse analysis, content analysis and ethnography, it is argued for the legitimacy of covert research, including a revision of existing guidelines for research ethics with regard to informed consent when conducting netnography.
Drawing on the Hong Kong case of Occupy Headquarters between 30 August and 8 September 2012, this chapter examines how public support was engendered through the movement’s social media activities. It aims to enhance our understanding of how various forms of public engagement manifested in the current networked environments in response to the student protest. Although much research tends to focus on the technical affordances of digital media in social movements, this chapter invokes the concept of ‘movement scene’ to analyze the cultural and experimental dimensions of social media use underpinning the public’s self-joining efforts and discusses their impact on the student protest. As revealed in the analysis, the clusters of social media activities that characterized the public’s networked activism can be seen as joint practices of scene making, with digitally enabled individuals and groups involved in creative and networked forms of countercultural support of Occupy Headquarters. In turn, the co-creation of movement scenes provided frames of reference and movement structures for wider public engagement and sparked a series of popular protests that ignited a citywide campaign for the movement in Hong Kong.
This chapter examines the emergence of urban contention against inbound tourist shoppers in the Chinese global city of Hong Kong. Drawing on netnography of citizens’ digitally enabled activities and qualitative analysis of news coverage, this chapter discusses how the local residents self-mobilised on the internet and engaged in a series of contentious activities, ranging from confronting shopping tourists, storming stores in major tourist nodes and nurturing political consumption in the communities. Moving beyond conventional protest demonstrations, the analysis of these networked acts of urban contention adds to our understanding of how bottom-up attempts are assembled with the use of mobile social media to balance neoliberal, tourist-oriented planning of urban spaces and livelihoods. With the case of Hong Kong, this chapter illustrates the impact of shopping tourism on local communities as well as the critical responses it prompts from digitally savvy urban dwellers. It informs the study of New Urban Tourism by revealing the growing tension between local communities and inbound travellers through the lens of cross-border consumption and mundane networked politics.
Focusing on ordinary people’s political talk the paper contributes to the study of deliberative democracy from a systemic perspective. By examining citizens’ everyday communication, it focuses on an object that is rarely studied from a deliberative perspective, but crucial for the deliberative system’s democratic character. By investigating the couplings between different arenas of political talk between citizens, ranging from informal private, semi-public and public conversations to formalized discussions at public events, it provides evidence on the appropriateness of the systemic conception of deliberative democracy. Analyzing data from two high-quality face-to-face surveys by means of structural equation modeling the paper demonstrates how these venues are connected to one another. The linkages between these discursive spheres create opportunities for bottom-up information flows from informal everyday conversations into formalized public discussions. To some extent, informal conversations also empower citizens for participation in these more demanding organized discussion events. Informal political conversations between strangers, a type of political talk largely neglected by extant research, emerge as a crucial nexus that funnels the motivational and capacity-building influence of everyday political talk within people’s social networks into active participation in formalized public discussions.
In recent months, masses of Hong Kong citizens have taken part in a remarkable wave of protests, known as the Water Revolution. Ignited by the Hong Kong government’s attempt to pass a bill that would have allowed extradition to mainland China, and later in response to police brutality and rights abuses, hundreds of thousands of protestors abruptly gathered in various parts of the city to rise up against the encroachment of the incumbent regime. Through novel uses of social media and mobile technology, they acted in concert to confront riot police in wildcat actions. In effect, they exhibit a contemporary type of smart mob, as digitally savvy citizens engage with each other in largely ad hoc and networked forms of pop-up protest. This article illustrates both the continuity and changes in the recent development of a nascent smart mob in Hong Kong. It fleshes out how its protest repertoires and movement objectives have emerged and evolved vis-à-vis state suppression in the global city of East Asia. With a focus on changing contours, this article brings to the fore the pragmatic and temporally emergent properties of the smart mob to consider the widespread and protracted movement in Hong Kong.
In debates on digital affordances, mobile devices and social media platforms are often treated as separate (physical or digital) objects which function independently from each other and from the environments in which they are used (‘platform-centrism’). However, mobile phone use has increasingly been dominated by social media apps while social media are frequently accessed via mobile devices, particularly in Global South contexts where users often rely on mobile-only internet access via subsidized/zero-rated social media data bundles. Furthermore, the affordances of mobile social media are shaped by the physical, mediated and political contexts in which they are used. Technological affordances are far from universal (‘digital universalism’) but take on different shapes across the globe. Drawing on research carried out during the September 2011 Zambian elections, this article introduces the notion of ‘relational affordance’ to emphasize the interplay between mobile social media, users and their varied contexts. Despite the relatively low number of mobile internet users at the time, the Facebook group of the popular, privately-owned Zambian television station, Muvi TV, quickly emerged as a fast-paced forum for the sharing of information on the elections. Three ‘relational affordances’ – infrastructure, home-based access and temporality – help to explain the emergence of this active mobile social media public. This analysis challenges previous accounts of mobile social media publics which identified negative (constraining) affordances like the control exerted by Facebook page administrators and positive (enabling) affordances such as the ‘always-on’ nature of mobile social media use and their ‘on-the-go’ access in public spaces.
This article shifts attention from elite actors’ Internet uses to self-joining citizens’ everyday networked activism at the grassroots. Stepping beyond conventional technocentric accounts, it expands on contemporary practice theory to examine the role of digital media in recent movement protests, focusing on their embeddedness and (re)productiveness in everyday practices. Based on the case of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, this article investigates the ways in which activist digital media usages were enacted and retained as part of people’s daily routines, work patterns, and habitual activists. It presents qualitative findings to explicate how, through the reworking of mundane routines with digital media, the ordinary engaged in everyday networked activism traversing quotidian activities and movement participation. By situating activist media in the increasingly mediated mundane, this article offers insights into the emergence and expansion of contemporary networked activism and reveals the nuanced interplay between contentious politics and everyday life therein.
New middle class tourists, especially those consumption-driven, urban dwellers from emerging economies, have acquired a taste for shopping tourism and quickly become the majority of the inbound visitors who bring business niches to the post-industrial, host societies. In this trend, scant scholarly attention has been paid to the corresponding reactions, confusions, and concerns in the host societies. This article offers a critical reflection on the manifestation of ‘unwelcome shopping tourism’ as well as its local resistance and conflict in the context of changing consumption milieu contributed by the growth of shopping tourism. In this article, we discuss and challenge the neoliberal presupposition guiding much of today’s shopping tourism agenda that tends to maximize short-term business interests at the expense of local consumers’ mundane lifestyles and native cultural identities. We propose a typology of conflicts pertaining to the growing tensions between local residents and shopping tourists, which should inform issues regarding local residents’ political consumptions and sustainable tourism development in global cities.
Recent protest movements worldwide have painted a picture of youth striving in times of crisis to secure self-determination and justice for more democratic futures. While traditional theory of collective behaviour has viewed youth activism as the result of structural strains or collapse of order, recent studies have focused attention upon the role of future orientations merely as movement strategies. What is missing from these accounts and what this article seeks to address is the initiatives of youth to carry out their future-oriented agendas and struggles at the grassroots. Drawing upon interview data with young citizens, who took part in recent political activism in response to a democratic crisis in Hong Kong, this article illustrates how young people involved in political struggles as they enacted life goals and identities. Rather than static political ideals, these visions of future were constantly reconstituted in the activist practices alongside unfolding crises. This article thus re-theorizes youth activism simultaneously as the manifestation as well as the constitution of alternative futures in practice. Moving beyond the notion of youth activism as passive reaction to repression or abstract political anticipation, it leverages for youth agency and everyday experience to understand youth’s political imagination and commitment to social transformation.
The article tackles two main aspects related to the interaction between social movements and digital technologies. First, it reflects on the need to include and combine different theoretical approaches in social movement studies so as to construct more meaningful understanding of how social movement actors deals with digital technologies and with what outcomes in societies. In particular, the article argues that media ecology and media practice approaches serve well to reach this objective as: they recognize the complex multi-faceted array of media technologies, professions and contents with which social movement actors interact; they historicize the use of media technologies in social movements; and they highlight the agency of social movement actors in relation to media technologies while avoiding a media-centric approach to the subject matter. Second, this article employs a media practice perspective to explore two interrelated trends in contemporary societies that the articles in this special issue deal with: the personalization and individualization of politics, and the role of the grassroots in political mobilizations.
This article argues that the definition of the political and its role in on- and offline public spheres calls for a conceptualization that takes into account the networked connections established between lay and professional political actors, mass media and mobile media. While acknowledging the importance of popular and mass media’s impact on participatory and democratic processes, this article focuses on the cultural citizen and proposes that a rethinking of publics affords a new understanding of the idea of networks as a series of connection points fostering a dynamic and relational view on the political. We illustrate this conceptualization through a case study mapping the agonistic and antagonistic frontiers in communication in a variety of publics and counter-publics in the context of Danish minority culture and politics.
The spread of smartphones triggers the universal use of smartphone-based social networking services (SNS) by satisfying users' needs for maintaining seamless, constant connection and developing intimate relationships with others, such as family, friends, and acquaintances. Under the circumstances, this study examines the consequences of ubiquitous connectivity, considering that it is a typical characteristic of mobile technologies. More specifically, this study addresses both sides of ubiquitous connectivity due to smartphone-based SNS namely, social presence and privacy concern. Furthermore, the study verifies the role of enjoyment which has been argued as a key determinant of the continued use of hedonic IS. The results show that first, ubiquitous connectivity increases social presence and privacy concern simultaneously. Second, enjoyment derives from not only ubiquitous connectivity but also social presence and privacy concern. Finally, smartphone-based SNS continuance intention is determined by enjoyment, social presence, and privacy concern. Discussion and implications on the results are presented.
The concept of consumer citizenship relates to two discourses in contemporary political philosophy. In particular, the concept of citizenship is currently in three central traditions in political philosophy: the traditions of political liberalism, of civic republicanism and of deliberative democracy. Yet, against each of these backgrounds, consumer citizenship looks like a degraded form of citizenship. Because of this result of the first section, I shall take a different stance on consumer citizenship. This concept is in one line with recently explored ‘qualified concepts of citizenship’, i.e. ‘ecological citizenship’. Section two discusses the implications of this approach to consumer citizenship. A third section first states that as a result of the first two approaches, consumer citizenship looks like a self-contradictory concept. Yet, a more thorough look at the tensions in that concept contributes to another interpretation: Consumer citizenship highlights tensions of the concept of citizenship more generally. In particular, consumer citizenship provides an antipode to the concept of consumer sovereignty.
Using ethnographic methods, this article explores social media as a contested public space for diverse young people at the margins of politics, focusing on social media use in a school walkout held in solidarity with Ferguson protesters. The article offers a conceptualization of what are termed artifacts of engagement-the photos, messages, and other materials signaling political involvement that young students of color shared with peers through Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter. Shared artifacts of engagement are described as key to how individuals personalize expressions of a movement's goals in what Bennett and Segerberg termed connective action. But the sharing of such artifacts in online spaces is not unproblematic, as this article attests.
In the last ten to twenty years, conflicts have developed in advanced Western societies that, in many respects, deviate from the welfare-state pattern of institutionalized conflict over distribution. These new conflicts no longer arise in areas of material reproduction; they are no longer channeled through parties and organizations; and they can no longer be alleviated by compensations that conform to the system. Rather, the new conflicts arise in areas of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization. They are manifested in sub-institutional, extraparliamentary forms of protest. The underlying deficits reflect a reification of communicative spheres of action; the media of money and power are not sufficient to circumvent this reification.
This article explains the networked sociality of young Wa migrant workers made possible through the use of mobile phones and social media when these youths are on the move. Troubled by poor economic conditions in their rural homelands in southwest China, many Wa youth seek work in the urban manufacturing districts in southeast China. Most now rely on mobile phones to connect with the social media, QQ. Mobile networks promote a set of networked socialities which are integral to the continuity and development of Wa migrants’ ethnic ties. Their networking practices show both the constraints they face and the potentiality they develop for voicing social inequality and reconfiguring the dominant Chinese language ideology in urban work environments. Their networked sociality is virtual and yet rooted in their real-world activities involving fragmented engagements with mobile devices and everyday language use. The sociality that emerges is partly a matter of free-will and partly structure-constrained.
This project explores consumer evaluations on Yelp.com as “commodity activism” - the politicization of market activities for the purposes of social change and/or cultural resistance. A textual analysis of consumer evaluations (n = 1972) and interviews (n = 18) reveal that commodity activism on Yelp most commonly appears as a positive bias toward localism. Consumers discursively construct an aesthetic of authenticity around localism that functions in accordance with the logic of corporate branding; in turn, “brand local” is appropriated by reviewers as part of their own authentic “self-brand” grounded in the civic duty to one’s community. The implications of this logic are critiqued against commodity activism’s commitment to individual, personalized forms of self-empowerment over identification with larger collective and community struggles. In this sense, Yelp is favorable to neoliberal discourses of consumer capitalism, where consumption serves as a stand-in for citizenship and localism’s political potential reconfigured in market terms.
Much research on online activism has shown that the Internet enhances social mobilisation by lowering the costs of information, mobilisation, and participation. The Internet thus facilitates the rise of citizen self-mobilisation (CSM) - organisation of and mobilisation for collective actions by ordinary citizens unaffiliated with social and political groups. However, the rise of CSM does not render social movement organisations (SMOs) irrelevant to protest movements. Rather, many collective action campaigns in contemporary societies are constituted by the dynamic combination of CSM efforts and SMO-based mobilisation processes. This study conceptualises the complementary relationship between CSM and SMO from a resource mobilisation perspective. It then illustrates, through two environmental collective actions in Hong Kong, how Internet-based CSM and SMO-based processes may interact with each other to drive the evolution of collective action campaigns, and adds to current understanding of the impact of emerging online mobilisation phenomena on existing movement organisations and industries.
The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals. Exceptions have explored collective identity, 'free spaces' and prefigurative politics, but such processes are framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence. This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and politicizing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres. Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The variety of political forms - adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non-activists. An approach which focuses on practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive.
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2014.
Social network sites have gained tremendous traction recently as a popular online hangout spaces for both youth and adults. People flock to them to socialize with their friends and acquaintances, to share information with interested others, and to see and be seen. While networking socially or for professional purposes is not the predominant practice, there are those who use these sites to flirt with friends-of-friends, make business acquaintances, and occasionally even rally others for a political cause. I have been examining different aspects of social network sites, primarily from an ethnographic perspective, for over six years. In making sense of the practices that unfold on and through these sites, I have come to understand social network sites as a genre of "networked publics." Networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies. As such, they are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics serve many of the same functions as other types of publics – they allow people to gather for social, cultural, and civic purposes and they help people connect with a world beyond their close friends and family. While networked publics share much in common with other types of publics, the ways in which technology structures them introduces distinct affordances that shape how people engage with these environments. The properties of bits – as distinct from atoms – introduce new possibilities for interaction. As a result, new dynamics emerge that shape participation. Analytically, the value of constructing social network sites as networked publics is to see the practices that unfold there as being informed by the affordances of networked publics and the resultant common dynamics. Networked publics' affordances do not dictate participants' behavior, but they do configure the environment in a way that shapes participants' engagement. In essence, the architecture of a particular environment matters and the architecture of networked publics is shaped by their affordances. The common dynamics fall out from these affordances and showcase salient issues that participants must regularly contend with when engaging in these environments. Understanding the properties, affordances, and dynamics common to networked publics provides a valuable framework for working out the logic of social practices.
Media use and talking with others have been found to have positive effects on citizens’ civic participation according to Wyatt, Katz, and Kim (2000). Recent research links informational uses of the mobile phone to increased involvement in civic and political life. Building on this line of research, this study explores the effect of smartphone use on civil discourse engagement in China, with its nearly 900 million mobile phone users. Results reveal the smartphone’s role as an outlet of public information, which fosters political talk with others, but also suggest use of government-controlled traditional media stifles open civic discourse. Hierarchical regression analyses show that talking politics in private, extensive use of the smartphone, and mobile tweeting were positive predictors of engagement in online civic discourse.
Spreadable Media maps fundamental changes taking place in our contemporary media environment, a space where corporations no longer tightly control media distribution and many of us are directly involved in the circulation of content. It contrasts "stickiness"-aggregating attention in centralized places-with "spreadability"-dispersing content widely through both formal and informal networks,some approved, many unauthorized. Stickiness has been the measure of success in the broadcast era (and has been carried over to the online world), but "spreadability" describes the ways content travels through social media. Following up on the hugely influential Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, this book challenges some of the prevailing metaphors and frameworks used to describe contemporary media, from biological metaphors like "memes" and "viral" to the concept of "Web 2.0" and the popular notion of "influencers." Spreadable Media examines the nature of audience engagement,the environment of participation, the way appraisal creates value,and the transnational flows at the heart of these phenomena. It delineates the elements that make content more spreadable and highlights emerging media business models built for a world of participatory circulation. The book also explores the internal tensions companies face as they adapt to the new communication reality and argues for the need to shift from "hearing" to "listening" in corporate culture. Drawing on examples from film, music, games, comics, television,transmedia storytelling, advertising, and public relations industries,among others-from both the U.S. and around the world-the authors illustrate the contours of our current media environment. They highlight the vexing questions content creators must tackle and the responsibilities we all face as citizens in a world where many of us regularly circulate media content. Written for any and all of us who actively create and share media content, Spreadable Media provides a clear understanding of how people are spreading ideas and the implications these activities have for business, politics, and everyday life.
Twitter has become a major instrument for the rapid dissemination and subsequent debate of news stories, and comprehensive methodologies for systematic research into news discussion on Twitter are beginning to emerge. This paper outlines innovative approaches for large-scale quantitative research into how Twitter is used to discuss and cover the news, focusing especially on #hashtags: brief identifiers which mark a tweet as taking part in an established discussion.
The summer of 2007 marked the growing visibility of blogs and bloggers in the Bulgarian public sphere. A case in point was a spontaneous civic protest spurred by a decision of the Supreme Administrative Court to strip a territory in the south-east of Bulgaria (Strandja Mountain) of its status as a protected natural reserve. Young people and environmentalist groups went out in the streets to challenge the decision, their actions being organized and reported by blogs, websites and text messages. These brief but centrally placed and well-attended civic actions compelled not only the mass media, but also parliamentarians to put the issue on their agendas. This article analyzes the relationship between media messages and street action as well as the dynamics of inter-media exchanges and the profiles of the actors behind them.
The mobile phone has transformed life in the city. Using them, individuals can both receive information about their surroundings through location-based services and contribute to the city as a system. They can participate by sharing location, text, photos, or video about the conditions of the city. This article explores the literature surrounding mobile phone technology in urban planning and city life. Specifically, it explores the potential of mobile phones in sensing, documenting, and exploring the city. This article draws on literature from a wide variety of fields to create a overview of the issues surrounding mobile phones in the city. This article review what we know and what has been speculated about the influence of mobile phones and similar devices on urban life. There is evidence that they alter our sense of individuality, our mobility, our interactions with others, our capacity to participate in and document public life, and our senses of privacy and publicness. The implications and meanings for planning are open, as they were when the mails, the telegraph, and the telephone were first introduced.
From a global perspective, the mobile phone is by far the most widely used information and communication technology (ICT). People in both developed and developing nations have found waysto integrate the mobile phone into their daily lives. Despite the ubiquity of the mobile phone, the cultural impact of the mobile phone in and of itself has not been a major topic within the sociology of culture. To this end, there are two goals of this paper. First, three common uses of the mobile phone are presented. To separate cultural practices associated with mobile phones from practices associated with other domains of social life, the term digital practices is used. Second, this paperwill discuss the domestication of technology approach, and its applicability to the study of mobile phones. Identifying practices and providing a framework for interpreting these practices can help scholars interested in theorizing and teaching the cultural (as opposed to economic or technological) aspects of mobile telephony.
Most conceptions of public and private life within political and social theory do not adequately consider the networks or fluidities involved in contemporary social relations. The distinction of public and private is often conceived of as statically `regional' in character. This article, following an extensive analysis of the multiple meanings of the `public' and `private', criticizes such a static conception and maintains that massive changes are occurring in the nature of both public and private life and especially of the relations between them. We consider flows and networks that enable mobility between and across apparent publics and privates. These mobilities are both physical (in the form of mobile people, objects and hybrids of humans-in-machines) and informational (in the form of electronic communication via data, visual images and texts). We consider the transformations of public and private life that have arisen from `complex' configurations of place and space: the dominant system of car-centred automobility whose spatial fluidities are simultaneously private and public; and various globalizations through the exposure of `private' lives on public screens and the public screening of mediatized events. These mobile, machinic examples demonstrate the limitations of the static, regional conceptualizations of public and private life developed within much social and political theory, and suggest that this divide may need relegation to the dustbin of history.
As practices of social coordination and connectivity shift in contemporary urban spaces, in part because of the increasing hybridisations of technologies and infrastructures of communication and transportation, public life is being reconfigured and respatialised. In this paper I argue that models of 'publicity' have paid insufficient attention to the ways in which publics are deeply embedded in social and machinic complexes involving the mobilities of people, objects, and information. The first half offers an overview of how the converging technologies of mobility and communication have created new temporalities and spatialities for public participation. In the second half I turn to a theoretical programme for rethinking public connectivity and disconnectivity not in terms of the conventional imagery of networks, but as more fluid and contingent social structures that Harrison White has described in terms of coupling and decoupling. Publics are becoming more 'mobile' in two ways: first, there is an increasing tendency to slip between private and public modes of interaction, as a result of the new forms of fluid connectivity enabled by mobile communication technologies; and, second, there are opportunities for new kinds of publics to assemble or gel momentarily (and then just as quickly dissolve) as a result of newly emerging places and arenas for communication.
Introduction Part I. Theory of Collective Action: 1. The construction of collective action 2. Conflict and change 3. Action and meaning 4. The process of collective identity Part II. Contemporary Collective Action: 5. conflicts of culture 6. Invention of the present 7. The time of difference 8. Roots for today and for tomorrow 9. A search for ethics 10. Information, power, domination Part III. The Field of Collective Action: 11. A society without a centre 12. The political system 13. The state and the distribution of social resources 14. Modernization, crisis, and conflict: the case of Italy Part IV. Acting Collectively: 15. Mobilization and political participation 16. The organization of movements 17. Leadership in social movements 18. Collective action and discourse 19. Forms of action 20. Research on collective action.
This article uses social movement and organization theory to develop a set of concepts that help explain social movement continuity. The theory is grounded in new data on women's rights activism from 1945 to the 1960s that challenge the traditional view that the American women's movement died after the suffrage victory in 1920 and was reborn in the 1960s. This case delineates a process in social movements that allows challenging groups to continue in nonreceptive political climates through social movement abeyance structures. Five characteristics of movement abeyance structures are identified and elaborated: temporality, purposive commitment, exclusiveness, centralization, and culture. Thus, social movement abeyance structures provide organizational and ideological bridges between different upsurges of activism by the same challenging group.
This article deals with the rise of prosumer capitalism. Prosumption involves both production and consumption rather than focusing on either one (production) or the other (consumption). It is maintained that earlier forms of capitalism (producer and consumer capitalism) were themselves characterized by prosumption. Given the recent explosion of user-generated content online, we have reason to see prosumption as increasingly central. In prosumer capitalism, control and exploitation take on a different character than in the other forms of capitalism: there is a trend toward unpaid rather than paid labor and toward offering products at no cost, and the system is marked by a new abundance where scarcity once predominated. These trends suggest the possibility of a new, prosumer, capitalism.