Hashtags, ruling relations and the everyday: institutional ethnography insights on social movements

Abstract

The role of social media (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) in social movements has become the subject of academic and media discussion. This attention can be framed as debates over whether social media use encourages political participation, and whether the use of social media can be considered as a form of political activism. We suggest that analysis of social media in social movements can benefit from drawing on the work of Dorothy E. Smith. In this article we explain how paying attention to these media using an Institutional Ethnography perspective allows for insights on the activities of social movements and recognition of the use of social media without sliding into technological determinism. Following D. E. Smith, we argue that understanding contemporary social movements and their organisations in terms of the lived everyday/everynight experiences and interactions of historically situated people, texts and technologies provides a fruitful line of inquiry for further empirical research. We demonstrate the possibilities of such an approach by presenting examples from the Occupy Movement and the use of Twitter during political protests in Egypt (2011) and Iran (2009–2010). Taking this perspective allows us to identify and challenge the implicit boundaries drawn around what it means to be acting ‘politically’ in academic and media debates over social movements and social media.