Abstract
Inspired by the concepts of Arrested War and actor–network theory, this study has traced and analyzed four main actors in the wars and conflicts in the social media age: social media platform, the mainstream news organizations, online users, and social media content. These four human and nonhuman actors associate, interact, and negotiate with each other in the social media network surrounding specific issues. Based on the case study of Sino-Indian border crisis in 2017, the central argument is that social media is playing an enabling role in contemporary wars and conflicts. Both professional media outlets and web users employ the functionalities of social media platforms to set, counter-set, or expand the public agenda. Social media platform embodies a web of technological and human complexities with different actors, factors, interests, and relations. These actor-networks and the macro social-political context are influential in the mediatization of conflict in the social media era.
Highlights
Inspired by the concepts of Arrested War and actor-network theory (ANT) (Actor-Network Theory), this study has traced and analyzed four main actors in the wars and conflicts in the social media age: social media platform, the mainstream news organizations, online users and social media content
Based on the content studies of Sino-Indian border crisis in 2017, the central argument is that social media is playing an enabling role in contemporary wars and conflicts
Both professional media outlets and web users employed the functionalities of social media platforms to set, counter-set or expand the public agenda
Summary
The author proposes the following model (Figure 1) to study the actions, reactions and interactions of four main actors in the news network in times of conflict and crisis – social media platform (non-human actant), the news organization (human actor) and the web users (human actor) via texts-based discourses (non-human actant). This model integrates Arrested War phase of mediatization with the ANT. How do the web users respond to the professional media’s coverage on social media?
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