Riots and Twitter: connective politics, social media and framing discourses in the digital public sphere

From Digital Culture & Society

Article Title: Riots and Twitter: connective politics, social media and framing discourses in the digital public sphere

Find article online: https://journals.scholarsportal.info/details/1369118x/v22i0002/213_ratcpsditdps.xml

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2017.1366539

Contents 1 Context 2 Overview 3 Strengths and Weaknesses 4 Assessment

[edit] Context

Twitter is a social media platform that enables a new form of ‘connective action’. Connective action is explained as the rethinking of established ideologies and expressions in the age of social media. However, to establish connective action, collective action needs to be considered; social media users cannot be organized and mobilized if they are not working towards a similar goal. Political movements and ideologies are presented on Twitter through the aid of hashtags, memes, and personalized action frames. These tools are all used for successful connective actions; Pond and Lewis (2019) elaborate further on this through the UK riots in the 2011.

[edit] Overview

The article by Pond and Lewis (2019) highlights the difference between connective and collective action. They go on to explain collective action as individual actors collaborating towards shared goals or products. Whereas Connective action is a personalized approach towards social media. The reason why these definitions are made clear is because later they go on to discuss the limitations of the connective model. Those limitations include (i) underplaying the differences between different internet technologies; this is a limitation because different internet technologies and social platforms cause users to interact differently. (ii) connective action does not prioritize how social action is shaped; this means that democracy is looked at more as a communication act. (iii) personalized expression; this makes it insufficient to shape a connection with others. The case that is focused on in this paper are the riots in the UK that took place during 2011. The case is studied through the dissection of different hashtags that were circulating and used at the time like #Kony2012 and #BlackLivesMatter. Following the increased numbers of riots in cities across the UK in August 2011, a group of people was formed through connective action through the collectivization of personalized action frames to clean up the streets of the cities that have been damaged. This is important to highlight to understand how effective connective action could be when collectivized. There were seven frequently used hashtags throughout this period. Pond and Lewis undertook a task to categorize all the tweets under these hashtags. Those categories were; information, media sharing, adjunctive discussion, help and support, meta, spam. Furthermore, those same tweets were analyzed again for either being productive or emotional tweets. Hashtags and the frequency of tweets added to them were recorded in a bar chart displaying how productive or emotional they were. Another study is then made over the themes in the tweets. Those themes ranged from categorization of what information was being shared, status in the country, cultural norms, political education, etc.

[edit] Strengths and Weaknesses

A strength that is important to note is differentiating between the ways social media users can engage with the technology. The explanations drawing between connective actions and collective actions while discussing the limitations of the connective model. While highlighting those limitations, the writers suggest ways these limitations can be countered; after each limitation is mentioned, a suggestion that tackles that weakness to turn to a strength is detailed. The studies that are conducted are thorough in their explanations and their presentations.

The weaknesses worth noting?

[edit] Assessment

In conclusion, when revisiting cases like the UK riots and how social media can be used to mobilize and rebuild a community, we discover the ability the internet has in helping people to coordinate themselves in an organized fashion. However, the more social media gains popularity and all forms of discussions are being had in these new public spheres, users start personalizing their engagement. This limits collectivism. When all these personalized engagements are utilized in a collective manner, they start having the ability to make a difference offline.

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--Am16yp 11:46, 19 March 2019 (EDT)