Internet and Social Movements

Abstract

The emergence of new information communication technologies (ICTs) such as the internet and the digital media boom in general have strongly affected scholarship on social movements. The internet has fueled a new source of political energy that posits a new relationship between ICTs, political struggle, and public life. Electronic social movement organizations (SMOs) and online activists are redefining political struggle across the dimensions of contentions politics in terms of recruitment, mobilizing, strategizing, fundraising, and protest activities. The explosion of e‐movements, e‐protests, and e‐activism highlights the importance of the internet as an organization tool for the dissemination of information and wired activism, and shows it has become a significant, if not essential, repertoire for social movement actors. Many scholars therefore argue that the novel intricacies of the ICT‐driven “network society” require a fundamental reconceptualization of social movement mobilization that was originally formulated for face‐to‐face contact.