Blog

The final speaker at this ECREA 2012 session is Marco Bräuer, whose interest is in rural protests in Germany against the extension of major powerlines. These protest could be seen simply as a NIMBY phenomenon, but they involve a wide range of participants and protest repertoires; they appropriate innovative protest repertoires of global protest movements.

Local protest groups can be seen as part of the wider environmental movement, but this view can be challenged – they involve protesters who would not see themselves as aligned with such movements. As these groups emerge, they build on framing processes (conscious strategic efforts …

We move on to Stefania Milan as the next presenter at ECREA 2012. Her interests are in the social organisation of protest movements, especially through social media; what is the role of such media in the overall process, both at micro and meso levels? Collective action is a social construct which results for the interactions of social actors; their meaning construction is contextually embedded.

Social media and mobile devices are not only tools in this, but are also actors in their own right. This leads to the potential for a form of cloud protesting, representing a potential evolution of …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Julie Uldam, who shifts our focus to the climate change debate, in the context of the UN climate change conferences. When the conference came to Copenhagen in 2009, it generated a substantial amount of activity by the climate change activists who are based in London, but the same cannot be said for the 2011 conference in Dublin.

There is a difference here between the radical and the reformist end of climate change activism – the former performs a wider critique of global capitalism, while the latter is seeking to effect change …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Tessa Houghton, who begins by noting the 2009 New Zealand blackout of Websites and avatars, in protest against new copyright legislation. This is a form of spectacular viral publicity, and has been repeated in a number of national contexts over the past years – variously protesting copyright or Internet regulations. The anti-SOPA/PIPA blackout of early 2012 is another example for this.

Socially mediated antagonistic publicity is increasingly characteristic for such protests; for all the differences between the specific publics involved in the protests, it highlights contemporary configurations of power. This departs …

For the next ECREA 2012 session, I'm attending a panel which starts with Christian Christensen's presentation on WikiLeaks. His interest is in how WikiLeaks has been engaging with mainstream media in its publishing of leaked content; WikiLeaks relied on mainstream outlets as a means of summarising and promoting such materials.

This relationship with mainstream journalism might position WikiLeaks as a form of radical media, subject to some very aggressive rhetoric from the US government and other interested parties which refuse to classify it and its participants as journalists (which would afford it constitutional protection in the US, of course). …

The second ECREA 2012 keynote speaker this morning is Clemencia Rodríguez, who will be shifting our focus further towards citizens' media. She notes that it is important to take historical precedents seriously – reacting against the popular representation of recent political unrest as driven and determined by social media, and as leaderless revolutions.

But media have always played a role as mediators, of course – in political communication, social actors negotiate their identities through interaction; media effects theory has this wrong. The visibility of today's ICTs has led to a resurgence of media effects theory, and this needs to be …

From the excitement of a thoroughly inspiring AoIR 2012 conference, I've now made my way to Istanbul for this year's European Communications Conference, ECREA 2012. We open the conference with a keynote on e-democracy by Donatella dells Porta, considering the types of democracy which new social movements are envisaging.

Donatella begins by highlighting questions over the traditional role of parties – the have been seen as distancing MPs from the electorate, which are no longer strictly necessary in an era of more direct communication between voters and politicians. Political activists at the beginning of the current millennium have also …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Sheetal Agarwal, whose focus is also on Occupy-related Twitter networks. Is Occupy a networked organisation, and if so, what kind of networked organisation? How might its organisational features be assessed? There are plenty of theories about organisation, from organisational sociology to political economy, which have been applied to the study of communication networks, international relations, and digital media. Such theories variously see organisations as bounded or unbounded, intentional or emergent, membership-driven and/or issue-focussed.

Common to organisations are strategies for resource allocation, responsiveness to external environments and flows, and capabilities for long-term …

The third speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Sharon Strover, who begins by noting a racist YouTube video which complained about Asian students in the UCLA library and rapidly generated a substantial number of response videos; this can be seen as a form of civic engagement which must be distinguished from political participation.

Online spaces generally aren't very good at sustaining Habermasian qualities of political discourse – reciprocal, open, equal and rational discussion – but rather enable the formation of ephemeral groups which actualise interaction through content production and consumption in networks of information flows. This does not usually …

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Sky Croeser, co-presenting with the very busy Tim Highfield. Her focus is on Occupy Oakland, a subset of the overall Occupy movement, and its use of the #oo Twitter hashtag. Occupy Oakland is shaped by the radical history of Oakland – the Black Panthers emerged here, and there have been more recent public protests in the city as well.

Fairly violent clearouts of the campsite took place across the timeframe of the Occupy Oakland campaign, since October 2011. The local movement has gained a particular reputation within the overall Occupy movement.

Tim and …