2011/07/01 by Alexandra Segerberg, W. Lance Bennett · 6 citations
Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Social Media and Politics
paper · doi:10.1080/10714421.2011.597250
crossref issued 2011/07/01 · crossref published 2011/07/01 · crossref published-print 2011/07/01 · openalex publication_date 2011/07/01 · crossref published-online 2011/09/09 · crossref created 2011/09/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref deposited 2026/02/06 · crossref indexed 2026/07/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
The Twitter Revolutions of 2009 reinvigorated the question of whether new social media have any real effect on contentious politics. In this article, the authors argue that evaluating the relation between transforming communication technologies and collective action demands recognizing how such technologies infuse specific protest ecologies. This includes looking beyond informational functions to the role of social media as organizing mechanisms and recognizing that traces of these media may reflect larger organizational schemes. Three points become salient in the case of Twitter against this background: (a) Twitter streams represent crosscutting networking mechanisms in a protest ecology, (b) they embed and are embedded in various kinds of gatekeeping processes, and (c) they reflect changing dynamics in the ecology over time. The authors illustrate their argument with reference to two hashtags used in the protests around the 2009 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen.