Location Matters? How Activists Navigate between Space, Scale and Digital Media

Baran, Zozan

Contemporary scholarship on digital activism posits that the advent of digital media has substantially reduced the cost of connectivity for movements. Lately, scholars advocate for a unified consideration of the online and offline facets of activism (Treré, 2018). This body of work highlights the persistence of mobilization dynamics and underscores the importance of integrating offline data to comprehensively understand digital activism. Drawing upon prior research, this paper proposes an interdisciplinary framework that employs hybrid data to uncover the offline underpinnings of digital activism. By synthesizing the geography of communication, spatial sociology, and social movements literature, this study poses two central questions:

How do activists leverage social media to bridge contentious issues and places?
What are the individual, societal, and spatial determinants that affect the scope of connectivity on social media platforms?

To address these inquiries, this research examines a cohort of Twitter/X users engaged in co-hashtagging contentious places as a method of scaling up their activism. This analysis delineates the scale of individual engagement—local, national, or transnational—based on such co-hashtagging practices. Subsequent in-depth interviews with a subset of these users (N=16) were conducted to delve into the personal, political, and spatial mechanisms underpinning these phenomena. Preliminary findings indicate that while the scope of engagement is predominantly dictated by the users' political/ideological stances, their social media use is shaped by their spatial positions and the role they attribute to themselves in mobilization. Therefore, by combining online and offline data and investigating the offline dimensions, this study critically scrutinizes innovations of social media in facilitating activism. It posits that broader dynamics, including ideological commitments and spatial positioning, influence the manifestations of activism on social media, as much as the architecture and affordances of digital platforms.

Reference

Treré, E. (2018). Hybrid Media Activism: Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms. 1st ed. New York: Routledge.