10-05-2013, 01:56 PM
Cyber Social Networks and Social Movements
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Abstract
While communication scholars suggest that cyber
social networks can serve as an important resource for social
movement communication, few studies examine which and
how special features of these social networks actually can
intensify social movements and weaken government’s
authority. However, our study highlights the importance of
various key factors affecting the interaction between cyber
social networks and social movements. The most important
factors are ongoing network leadership, user practices, and
online –offline participation. Furthermore, we considered
prominent factors of third space and virtual societies related to
Tehran citizens that can lead cyber activism to social
movements. This article also seeks for considering a key
question for socio-political pluralists in the digital era and
virtual societies.
INTRODUCTION
n the era of virtual communication, increasingly
Cyber Social Movements (CSMs) seek for organizing
and campaign online, the question arises how and
which characteristics can bring about a new form of
socio-political activism along with consequences for
constituting social demonstration in real-physical public
places. Here, at first, we will discuss some arguments
for and against CSMs and the role of internet by this
way. The CSMs, like many new technologies before it,
has been imbued with a sense of optimism that can
somehow go beyond the trends of politics. It is now
home to a multitude of groups, races and religions
dedicated to resist and campaign against particular
issues and politics.
COLLECTIVE IDENTITY
Melucci (1996) sees collective identity as a
continuous, dynamic and self-reflexive process defined
by its multiplicity of interactions, negotiations and
conflicts among fellow participants. The internet, relying
as it does on a network of networks can assist collective
identity and reinforce solidarity. It takes part in the
process of meaning construction. The nature and scope
of the technology affects not only the way the movement
communicates its aims and objectives but also its
geographical scale, organizing structure and collective
identity. The decentralized, non-hierarchical modes of
organizing allow for diverse political agendas and
identities to exist. Collective identity is a ‘shared
definition produced by several interacting individuals
who are concerned with the orientations of their actions
as well as the field of opportunities and constraints in
which their actions take place’ (Melucci, 1989).
FEATURES
New Social Movements share common
characteristics with web-based communication: they
lack membership forms, statutes and other formal
means of organizing; they may have phases of visibility
and phases of relative invisibility; NSMs may have
significant overlaps with each other and are liable to
rapid change in form, approach and mission.
Furthermore, the ability of new communication
technologies to operate globally and respond to global
economic agendas in a swift and timely manner is a key
to their contemporary capacity to mobilize against the
vagaries of global capital. In these cases, Redden
(2001) argues ‘the Internet is used as a kind of
metaconnection between more traditional local-level
organizational activities such as meetings, telephone
trees, leafleting, and posting flyers and stickers’.
According to Castells’s (1997) notion, the three essential
activities in which the cyberspace community engages
to create a virtual nation are: working on a political
project (behavioral); maintaining the signification of the
nation (cognitive); and maintaining a sodality (affective).
These elements should be present in the construction of
a virtual nation. To develop a design pattern of how
social movements are affected by new ICTs, we must
first understand exactly how and why activists acquire
complex technical skills—or, alternatively, how and why
technically skilled individuals or communities become
activists.
USER PRACTICES
One of the more effective features of social
networks is user practices in technical changes. A large
number of studies in the history of technology underline
the fact that extremely important shifts can be initiated
not only by highly skilled designers, developers, and
corporations but also by less-skilled users of technology
(Bijker & Law, 1992; Fischer, 1992; Landauer, 1999).
Since nowadays, democracy experience, social
movements and collective identity are created in a daily
practice through new media, it is essential to notice the
specific ways in which activists put technologies into
practice.
NETWORK LEADERSHIP
Leadership arises within communities of
practice whenever people work together and make
meaning of their experiences and when people
participate in collaborative forms of action across the
dividing lines of perspective, values, beliefs, and
cultures (Drath & Palus 1994; Drath 2001)” (McGonagill
& Reinelt, 2010).So no longer did you have a situation
where blind commands were issued which the others
obediently had to carry out. The leaders were now
properly informed of the situation inside the country and
any suggestions they made could be corrected by those
“in the field.” (Jenkin, 1995, Garrett & Edwards, 2007)
EFFECTS OF CSNS ON SOCIOPOLITICAL
MOVEMENTS
It is obvious that CSNs would play a pivotal role,
fundamental to the social movement’s success. Protest
activity and alliances of social movements on the
ground can impact upon the way in which the internet is
used and structured on the various and multiple
websites. In other words interactivity is both between
groups and between online and offline forms of
organizing. Scholarship in this area has demonstrated
that new technologies can reduce a state’s capacity for
repression and open up access to elite allies. For
example, the Mexican Zapatistas used the high-speed
global communication capacities afforded by the
internet to coordinate with elite allies internationally and
to exploit differences between their own government and
that of the United States (Schulz, 1998). Scholars also
suggest that the Internet can be used to avoid
surveillance and to circumvent state regulation
(Denning, 2001; Kidd, 2003; Scott & Street, 2000).
Changes such as these alter activists’ political
opportunities, enhancing their ability to organize,
mobilize, and influence elites (McAdam, 1996). Such as,
the People’s Global Action (PGA) organization, formed
in 1998 by activists protesting in Geneva against the
second Ministerial Conference of the WTO which is an
attempt to create a worldwide alliance against neoliberal
globalization on an anti-capitalist platform.
CONCLUSION
New media can become the location for counter
reflexive political deliberation and activity – but only if
they embody democratic practice. The use of new
communication technology to spread radical social
critique and alternative culture is the realm of New Social
Movements marked by fragmentation. Fragmentation
has been variously interpreted as multiplicity and
polycentrality when focusing on the potential for social
agency and disaggregation and division when focusing
on the potential for increased social control.
Computer networks can provide the means to
create new ‘virtual’ places that offer functionally similar
forms of localized informal interaction. These virtual third
places should not be designed merely to reconstruct a
hyper real image of a nostalgic small town embedded in
our mediated collective memory. Further, these virtual
third places should not be designed as ‘futuristic’ virtual
realities created to realize fantastic visions from science
fiction films and novels requiring elaborate equipment
and sophisticated technical knowledge. Rather, virtual
third places should be designed to fit into the
participants’ ‘mundane’ and ‘ordinary’ lived experiences.
The virtual third place should feel like a place for the
here and now, a place that is integrated seamlessly into
the existing textures and details of our lived communal
experiences.