Abstract
This article explores how Twitter has emerged as a signifier of contemporary protest. Using the concept of ‘social media imaginaries’, a derivative of the broader field of ‘media imaginaries’, our analysis seeks to offer new insights into activists’ relation to and conceptualisation of social media and how it shapes their digital media practices. Extending the concept of media imaginaries to include analysis of protestors’ use of aesthetics, it aims to unpick how a particular ‘social media imaginary’ is constructed and informs their collective identity. Using the Gezi Park protest of 2013 as a case study, it illustrates how social media became a symbolic part of the protest movement by providing the visualised possibility of imagining the movement. In previous research, the main emphasis has been given to the functionality of social media as a means of information sharing and a tool for protest organisation. This article seeks to redress this by directing our attention to the role of visual communication in online protest expressions and thus also illustrates the role of visual analysis in social movement studies.
Highlights
Protest movements that straddle virtual and physical space are on the rise across the world, with activists increasingly able to engage with media technologies to become more visible and to ensure their voice is heard (Mason, 2014)
The article puts two lines of enquiry into dialogue: how do protest movements imagine their relationship to the corporate social media technologies they use? And how is this expressed visually? We suggest that how activists imagine the potential of media technologies determines how they use them and that the relationship of protestors to the social media they use can be theorised productively through a social media imaginaries lens
Using the concept of media imaginaries, a term derived from earlier sociological conceptualisations of ‘the social imaginary of information and communication technologies’ (Lesage and Rinfret, 2015), to investigate how social media is ‘pictured’ and visually represented by protestors, their sympathisers and others, we argue, can offer new insights into social movements’ engagement with media technologies and how they ‘imagine together alternative media appropriations as an ongoing enactment of their social and political engagement’ (Trere, 2018: 108)
Summary
Protest movements that straddle virtual and physical space are on the rise across the world, with activists increasingly able to engage with media technologies to become more visible and to ensure their voice is heard (Mason, 2014). This article seeks to redress the lack of attention given to images in social movement and activist media studies beyond the study of citizen photojournalism by directing our attention to the role of visual communication in digital activism, and as a specific case study it investigates how ‘the symbol of social media’ is inscribed into the visual discourse of protest. The article puts two lines of enquiry into dialogue: how do protest movements imagine their relationship to the corporate social media technologies they use? We seek to examine how social media is symbolically implied in protestors’ self-image, with the aim of forming an understanding of how Twitter is imagined as a technology of protest both by activists and by other actors
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