(Un)Changing Infrastructures: What is New in Contemporary Social Movements (and What is Not)

When discussing the latest developments in media, technology and democracy at such a contentious juncture, unfettered emergent machinery and escalating warfare understandably captures all attention. However, it is crucial to recognize and contest the fundamental issues that persist despite the allure of newness—not everything under the sun is new.

At a time marked by armed conflicts and rapid advancements in AI, the 2024 Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy promptly addressed the theme of “Bots, Bombs, and Bilateralism: Evolutions in Media and Diplomacy.” The discussions ranged from the global decline of free speech to exploring transnational governance solutions for AI, and even imagining the consequences of fictional, dystopian butterfly assassin robots. While much of the seminar, understandably from the perspectives of diplomacy and governance, focused on regulating evolving technological apparatus and stabilizing the current fragile global order, an unexpectedly inspiring session on the second morning led participants to explore new developments in grassroots collective struggles and social movements at this critical point.

What was once new: the rise and promises of networked social movements

Collective actions, protests, and social movements are deeply woven into human history and have historically been a major source of social, political, and cultural changes. The rapid transformation of communication technologies at the turn of the century, especially the emergence and proliferation of network technologies, has brought corresponding changes in the organization of movements.

This evolving form of activism and resistance, profoundly shaped by emergent technologies and intrinsically linked to global capitalism, has attracted significant attention both within and outside academia. Many, in their excitement over this novelty, distinguished this new type of movement from the traditional paradigm, claiming a fundamental change in the structure and logic of social movements.

Sociologist Manuel Castells has been one of the earliest and most prominent theorists on the intersection of technological development and social movements. In his Information Age trilogy, Castells (2011a; 2011b) offered that in the network society, globalized digital networks and the growth-centric informational development affect the traditional process of collective identity construction. The rising identity politics of the socially isolated, harnessing the emerging network technologies, leads to new forms of social resistance and movements which Castells in later work termed “networked social movements” (Castells, 2012).

One most salient feature of these new movements is their networked structure. Traditional social movements are predominantly top-down and hierarchical in their organizing, with a political party or politicians controlling the objectives and strategies from the top. In contrast, networked social movements are much more horizontal and decentralized. The capacity for each individual to engage in and even initiate issues has been, to a certain extent, democratized by the introduction of digital infrastructures. From the Occupy movement to the more recent Yellow Vest movement, we increasingly witness leaderless social movements, where an issue-based, bottom-up structure replaced the traditional leader-based, top-down model (Tufekci, 2014).

Apart from its novel horizontality, these emergent social movements and their outcomes are increasingly simultaneously global and local due to the borderless nature of digital networks, which is evident in the transnational resonance found in waves of Black Lives Matter and #Metoo movements. Lastly, drawing on Castells’ (2012) conceptualization, as collective actions always require some kind of public space of deliberation, networked social movements expand this “space of autonomy” to include a hybrid of both urban public spaces and various digital milieus.

As the emergent digital infrastructure was domesticated into activist toolkits, a popular assumption arose that the digital media positively facilitated the mobilization, organization, and demonstration in social movements. However, this opinion has become increasingly contested over the last decade as various problems within digital movements have surfaced.

The new struggles: governmental response and a rising digital/analog impassé

While digital tech and networks continue to play an integral role in each stage of contemporary resistance, an impassé concerning technology use has gradually emerged.

Government and other adversary actors have evolved alongside the tech-savvy activists. Governments have adopted an array of strategies to cope with the vibrant public sphere and activism in cyberspace, ranging from indirect disruptions to forceful crackdowns. This arsenal includes flooding resistance messages with paid trolls (and more recently, bots), rendering social movements invisible through content moderation (blocking, shadow banning, algorithmic manipulations, etc.), to demonize the new media and movements with propaganda, to legal punishment towards higher-profile dissidents (Tufekci, 2014). A striking example of the government's repressive response to digital dissidents is the network shutdown in the 2011 Egyptian revolution, when the Mubarak regime cut down nearly all internet access in the country in response to escalating protests. Similar repressive acts of disconnection, which target specific websites, platforms, or individuals (see Kaun & Treré, 2018), illustrate the fragility of online spaces in the face of political power.

Apart from governmental actors, the digital platforms on which networked social movements heavily rely can also inhibit participation. As revenue-seeking enterprises, large-scale social media platforms used for mobilization are often subject to governmental pressure to limit anonymity, ban certain content, and encourage community policing (Youmans & York, 2012). For instance, in China, the state’s strategy to infiltrate and surveil is manifested through tacit power-sharing and delegation to private service providers such as Tencent, resulting in a multilayered, dynamic interplay of top-down authoritarian control, power sharing and relative tolerance (Sun and Zhao, 2021). Such hazardous media environments naturally impair participation in online protests. As Chu and Yeo’s study (2019) demonstrated, following the 2014 Umbrella Movement, the frustrations experienced by politically active young adults in Hong Kong during their online participation led them to favor more cautious and selective online engagement and to largely return to offline activism.

It is not only that the operation of contemporary social movements is threatened by adversarial institutional actors. Some critics also observed inherent weaknesses associated with harnessing digital infrastructure. One is the long-contested charges of “slacktivism”, which suggests that online participants tend to engage in easy actions like clicking and liking rather than taking concrete actions (Morozov, 2011). Another critique points out that the technology-enabled style of networked movements– being horizontalist, participatory, and leaderless– facilitate protesters to decentralize without dealing with “the inevitable tensions around deliberation at scale, delegation of representation, and negotiation with authorities”, ultimately crippling the movement’s ability to yield meaningful outcomes (Tufekci, 2014, p.13).

At this juncture, following waves of contentious networked struggles and on the brink of an unknown future shaped by AI intervention, protesters are facing a diminishing optimism in digital activism and a growing dilemma between the digital and the analog.

Same old wine: the communication infrastructure and power of storytelling

Admittedly, digital platforms offer both the promise and perils of social movements. As the seminar session heatedly interrogated issues around governing corporate platforms and evaluating emergent technological infrastructure for social movements, a participant timely pointed out that, apart from striving for democratically accountable media infrastructures, it is also imperative to attend to the development of storytelling as the communicative infrastructure in our tumultuous media ecology.

The coming together of people in social movements are fundamentally communicative– from mobilization to demonstration and to the achieving of objectives. Here, recognizing storytelling and narrative as key infrastructures, alongside digital platforms, could benefit from drawing on studies of another form of civic engagement: community activities. In studying urban communication and community formation in South Los Angeles, Ball-Rokeach et al. (2001) developed communication infrastructure theory (CIT), a grounded framework which proposes that urban communities are constructed discursively through social actors’ storytelling. This storytelling network forms a core building block of the communication infrastructure that positively influences people’s sense of belonging and engagement in the community (Ball-Rokeach et al., 2001). In other words, “the more integrated the storytelling systems, the more likely that urban dwellers will feel that they belong and act accordingly” (Ball-Rokeach et al., 2001, p. 419). As such, from a communication perspective, this approach foregrounds the communication process as integral in sustaining the discursive construction of a collective network and its identity.

Building on this emphasis on communication infrastructure, Kanuga, Funke, and Wolfson (2023, p. 681) argued for the significance of “organizing against and beyond the existing political economy of platform media by building new narrative blocs as bases of power” in social movements. Referencing Gramsci’s work on “historical blocs”, Kanuga et al. (2023) offered “narrative blocs” to describe a new set of social relationships that aim at reconfiguring the organizational and sectoral coalitions to challenge the hegemonic ideology. These narrative blocs are envisioned to be inclusive and enduring, functioning to “integrate various stories and worldviews into something coherent, create a space for a new coalitional consensus, translate across many popular sectors, and offer redirection and alternatives to established, reactionary narratives” (Kanuga et al., 2023, p.692). This cohesive force is particularly urgent and necessary as today’s social struggles of different groups are increasingly fragmented and lack a uniting force capable of achieving broader mobilization and social change in the face of neoliberal framework.

All told, returning to the enduring communication infrastructure of social movement amidst the dazzling and sometimes alarming new technological developments offers vital insights for contemporary social movement investigations. For one, as analogue participation has resurged in recent years, it is valuable to draw on the scholarship in urban studies to explore how a storytelling network, consisting of various micro- and meso-level actors, weaves together an enduring collective identity situated in place. For another, it is imperative to build an inclusive, sustainable, and coalitional narrative that can break out of the algorithmic information cocoons, navigate the cacophony of digital media platforms, and confront the challenges of the hegemonic narratives of institutional authorities.

These are among the most pressing and challenging missions faced by contemporary social movements. Addressing them requires not only remodeling a reliable and accountable technological infrastructure but also a deliberate exploration in building storytelling networks and narrative blocs that unites various social struggles across differences. After all, as Zizi Papacharissi (2016, p. 307) aptly notes, “Technologies network us, but it is our stories that connect us”.

References

Ball-Rokeach, S. J., Kim, Y. C., & Matei, S. (2001). Storytelling neighborhood: Paths to belonging in diverse urban environments. Communication Research, 28(4), 392-428.

Castells, M. (2011a). The power of identity. John Wiley & Sons.

Castells, M. (2011b). The rise of the network society. John wiley & sons.

Castells, M. (2012). Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Wiley.

Chu, T. H., & Yeo, T. E. D. (2019). Rethinking mediated political engagement: social media ambivalence and disconnective practices of politically active youths in Hong Kong. Chinese Journal of Communication, 13(2), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1634606

Kanuga, M., Funke, P., & Wolfson, T. (2023). Narrative Power in an Era of Crisis and Convergence. South Atlantic Quarterly, 122(4), 681–696. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10779406

Kaun, A., & Treré, E. (2018). Repression, resistance and lifestyle: charting (dis)connection and activism in times of accelerated capitalism. Social Movement Studies, 19(5-6), 697–715. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2018.1555752

Morozov, E. (2011). The net delusion: how not to liberate the world. Penguin Books.

Papacharissi, Z. (2016). Affective publics and structures of storytelling: sentiment, events and mediality. Information, Communication & Society, 19(3), 307–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1109697

Sun, T., & Zhao, Q. (2021). Delegated Censorship: The Dynamic, Layered, and Multistage Information Control Regime in China. Politics & Society, 50(2), 003232922110131. https://doi.org/10.1177/00323292211013181

Tufekci, Z. (2014). Social movements and governments in the digital age: Evaluating a complex landscape. Journal of International Affairs, 1-18.

Youmans, W. L., & York, J. C. (2012). Social Media and the Activist Toolkit: User Agreements, Corporate Interests, and the Information Infrastructure of Modern Social Movements. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 315–329. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01636.x