Table Of ContentCivic Engagement
and Social Media
Political Participation Beyond Protest
Edited by
Julie Uldam and
Anne Vestergaard
Civic Engagement and Social Media
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Civic Engagement
and Social Media
Political Participation Beyond Protest
Edited by
Julie Uldam and Anne Vestergaard
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Julie Uldam
and Anne Vestergaard 2015
Individual chapters © Respective authors 2015
Foreword © W. Lance Bennett 2015
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2015 by
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Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii
Foreword viii
Notes on Contributors xiv
Introduction: Social Media and Civic Engagement 1
Julie Uldam and Anne Vestergaard
Part I Formal Modes of Civic Engagement and Cooperation
with Institutional Actors
1 Online Activism, CSR and Institutional Change 23
Frank G.A. de Bakker
2 Why Some Political Opportunities Succeed
and Others Fail: Bridging Organizational Levels
in the Case of Spanish Occupy 44
Itziar Castelló and David Barberá
3 Responsible Retailing in the Greek Crisis? Corporate
Engagement, CSR Communication, and Social Media 63
Eleftheria J. Lekakis
Part II Informal Modes of Civic Engagement, Enacting
Alternatives and Sustaining Involvement
4 Technologies of Self-Mediation: Affordances and
Constraints of Social Media for Protest Movements 87
Bart Cammaerts
5 When Narratives Travel: The Occupy Movement
in Latvia and Sweden 111
Anne Kaun
6 Corporate Management of Visibility: Social Media
and Surveillance 131
Julie Uldam
7 From Creation to Amplification: Occupy Wall Street’s
Transition into an Online Populist Movement 153
Emil Husted
v
vi Contents
8 Nurturing Dissent? Community Printshops
in 1970s London 174
Jess Baines
Index 194
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
3.1 Facebook feeds at Supermarket A 71
4.1 The appropriation of the V for Vendetta mask
in various parts of the world 93
4.2 Penetration of Internet, Facebook, and Twitter amongst
those older than 15 years 98
4.3 Still from removed You Tube clip called ‘William and Kate’ 103
6.1 The front page of BP’s ‘Major Personality Report’ 2012 142
6.2 Snapshot from top of a profile page in BP’s
‘Individuals of Note’ document 142
6.3 BP email – sender and receiver redacted by BP
and activist names anonymized by author 143
6.4 BP email – sender and receiver redacted by BP
and activist names anonymized by author 143
6.5 BP email – sender and receiver redacted by BP
and activist names anonymized by author 144
7.1 The categorization of Facebook posts as
‘popular demands’ in three timeslots 165
7.2 Reactions to highly active posts by ordinary
members of OWS’s Facebook page 167
Tables
1.1 Typology of activist groups’ online tactics for institutional
change and their type of objective and impact 34
3.1 Top ten retailers in Greece circa (2005–2011) 68
3.2 Retailers in Greece and social media communication 69
3.3 Greek retailers’ CSR communication through social media 75
4.1 Communicative affordances 91
4.2 List of deactivated political Facebook Groups (28–29 May 2011) 102
vii
Foreword
Much controversy swirls around social media as mechanisms for civic
engagement. Some critics dismiss mediated participation as ‘clicktivism’
or ‘slacktivism’. Such attitudes are balanced at the opposite extreme by
overselling the importance of digital media in politics by casually talk-
ing about Twitter or Facebook revolutions. Neither extreme helps us
understand the roles of media in civic processes, as they both miss the
core challenges of developing good questions, concepts, and theories.
This book is an important corrective. The editors and authors of Civic
Engagement and Social Media advance consistent themes and questions
across chapters while offering a rich set of topics and cases to challenge
our thinking.
The first theme that shines through many chapters is that both civic
engagement and the role of media need to be grounded in changing
social structures, arenas of power, and repertoires of action. It is clear
that the forms, arenas, and mechanisms of engagement have expanded
beyond common textbook definitions that lag behind changes in both
politics and communication. For example, popular access to power
and democratic representation in many societies has been disrupted
as political institutions have been corrupted by business pressures and
neoliberal political regimes. As noted by various authors in this book,
a number of interesting forms of civic engagement have flowed from
these disruptions, including direct citizen engagement with business
corporations and entire industrial sectors that have evaded more con-
ventional accountability mechanisms for corporate social responsibility
(CSR) established in earlier political eras. At the same time, the capacity
of citizens to organize with social media has enabled large publics to
be heard and seen in public spaces around the world, including many
authoritarian regimes.
In analysing these developments, the authors in this book raise
a number of key questions, including whether the highly visible
popular uprisings of recent years are limited by the lack of credible
institutional mechanisms for directly engaging with decision-making
processes. Another important question raised in various ways in this
book is whether reliance on social media for engagement diminishes
the organizational and ideological foundations that have typically
defined protest movements and interest-advocacy in past eras. Several
viii
Foreword ix
of the authors, beginning with the introductory chapter by Uldam
and Vestergaard, suggest that these important changes on the political
scene mean that much contemporary civic engagement is ‘informal’,
by contrast with more formal engagement with sites and processes of
institutional power. This is an important topic to which I will return in
my conclusion. First, however, I would like to note a number of very
interesting contributions that recommend this volume to scholars and
students interested in this lively and rapidly changing field of study.
Among the strengths of the entire book is the rich contextualization
of participation and media. Many academic fields tend to reify the sub-
jects of study by fragmenting complex realities into concepts, variables,
and measures that take on lives of their own, often without returning
to ground the resulting analyses in social and political contexts. In the
analyses here, actors and processes are respected as complex and holistic
entities, enabling concepts and frameworks to illuminate key problems
and perform the necessary work of simplification and generalization.
This rich contextualization brings a focus to many under-theorized and
taken-for-granted aspects of the contemporary political scene, includ-
ing: the nature of civic engagement in different settings, the limits of
social media networks in focussing action, the problematic aspects of
commercial media platforms, and the ever-present problem of surveil-
lance by corporations who own personal data and governments that
can compel access to commercial data and develop invasive means of
monitoring public communication.
I am also struck by the ways in which several of the authors push an
idea that I have tried to develop in my own work: the paradigm shift
in media research from thinking about communication as sending and
receiving messages to understanding that social media can also act as
organizational processes by providing (more or less) coherent alloca-
tion of resources, creating divisions of labour, curating and retrieving
content, and responding to events and changing ecological conditions.
For example, Castelló and Barberá offer a very useful framework for
understanding the organizational levels of the Spanish M15 movement,
along with many similarly decentred crowds. Inventive variations
on these ideas of communication as organization appear in several
chapters, including Anne Kaun’s rich look at how the ‘Occupy’ meme
became a ‘travelling narrative’ around which very different occupa-
tions became organized, and Eleftheria Lekakis’ interesting look at how
Greek consumers provoked novel forms of civic engagement during a
media campaign against a large supermarket chain. In these and other
analyses in this volume, social media become important to the story
