Role of Social Media in Social Protest Cycles: A Sociomaterial Examination

Abstract

Contemporary social media fueled social protest is self-organized, rapidly dynamic, and decentralized, constitutes vast populations, and is shaped by multiple and concurrent channels of information flows. Such protest activity is captured in the concept of social protest cycles, which are short periods of intense and contentious protest activity characterized by temporal dynamics, a large repertoire of protest action, confrontation and potential violence, and possible institutional action. Social protest cycles are the microfoundations of long-term social movements. They contain the seeds of potential societal transformation because their intense collective action can be constructively harnessed toward change. This paper examines the role of social media in social protest cycles. Drawing from the theoretical concept of sociomaterial assemblages, we conceptualize the social media enabled social protest cycle as an assemblage having social (e.g., people, elected leaders, police, judges) and technical (e.g., social media applications, online petition applications) components. We analyze how the social protest cycle transforms through performative intra-actions. The empirical context for the study is a social media enabled social protest cycle that emerged after a fatal rape incident in New Delhi, India. Data pertaining to the social protest cycle over the period December 17–25, 2012, were collected from social media activity on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, online blogs, and newspaper websites. Through mixed methods analysis we identify three intra-actions, consolidation, expansion, and intensification, and theorize how they transform the social protest cycle over time. The paper contributes to the information systems literature that studies social media–enabled social protest action. As theoretical contributions, it develops (1) the notion of intra-actions as organizing mechanisms and (2) a relational ontology for social media–enabled social protest action. Through these contributions, we suggest that the power of social media lies in its socially produced and emergent relationships with other entities in the social protest cycle.