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

From Digital Culture & Society

(Difference between revisions)

Am16yp (Talk | contribs)
(New page: 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/...)
Next diff →

Revision as of 11:46, 19 March 2019

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

1 Context
2 Overview
3 Strengths and Weaknesses
4 Assessment

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 **. Political movements and ideologies are presented on Twitter in the form of hashtags, memes, and personalised action frames.

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 collective action empowered by the logics of 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 prioritise how social action is shaped; this means that democracy is looked at more as a communicational act that only explains social effects. (iii) personalized expression; this makes it insufficient to shape a connection with others. The case that is focused on most 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 to clean up the streets of the cities that have been damaged. 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.

Strengths and Weaknesses

A strength that is important to note is mentioned 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 weaknesses worth noting with this article is that it doesn’t take into account what people would be typing if they are not using the hashtags that are mentioned.