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DIGITAL MEDIA AND THE PERSONALIZATION OF COLLECTIVE ACTION

2011; Routledge; Volume: 14; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1369118x.2011.579141

1468-4462

W. Lance Bennett, Alexandra Segerberg,

Social Capital and Networks

Abstract Changes related to globalization have resulted in the growing separation of individuals in late modern societies from traditional bases of social solidarity such as parties, churches, and other mass organizations. One sign of this growing individualization is the organization of individual action in terms of meanings assigned to lifestyle elements resulting in the personalization of issues such as climate change, labour standards, and the quality of food supplies. Such developments bring individuals' own narratives to the fore in the mobilization process, often requiring organizations to be more flexible in their definitions of issues. This personalization of political action presents organizations with a set of fundamental challenges involving potential trade-offs between flexibility and effectiveness. This paper analyses how different protest networks used digital media to engage individuals in mobilizations targeting the 2009 G20 London Summit during the global financial crisis. The authors examine how these different communication processes affected the political capacity of the respective organizations and networked coalitions. In particular, the authors explore whether the coalition offering looser affiliation options for individuals displays any notable loss of public engagement, policy focus (including mass media impact), or solidarity network coherence. This paper also examines whether the coalition offering more rigid collective action framing and fewer personalized social media affordances displays any evident gain in the same dimensions of mobilization capacity. In this case, the evidence suggests that the more personalized collective action process maintains high levels of engagement, agenda focus, and network strength. Keywords: globalizationpersonalizationnetworksdigital mediacollective action Acknowledgements This paper builds on the work supported by the Swedish Research Council grants Dnr 435-2007-1123 and Dnr 421-2010-2303. The authors wish to thank Nathan Johnson, Allison Rank, and Marianne Goldin for their research assistance. The paper benefited from the comments received on the earlier versions presented at the ECPR General Conference 2009, the iCS Networking Democracy Symposium 2010, from Sidney Tarrow, and from the anonymous reviewers. Notes Available at: http://www.g20.org/Documents/final-communique.pdf (26 July 2009). The keyword analysis was performed using Wordsmith, which identifies words that characterize a text by comparing a research text with a larger research corpus. By running Dunning's log-likelihood test, a cousin of the chi-square test, words are identified, which appear more prominently in the research text. This test identifies not just frequency, but similarity of word ratios. If a word appears in a statistically significant higher proportion in the research text than in the research corpus, it is marked as a keyword. This provides word clusters that are significant to interpret. The complete cluster was 'Put, people, first, putting, we, public, essential'. The keyword cluster included 'Crisis, economic, economies, financial, finance'. 'Bank, bankers, financial, executives, bankthink, shareholders, shares, horsemen, wave, public'. 'Meltdown, crises, crisis, crunch, anniversary'. 'Revolution, mobilization, rescue'. 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