Understanding the Performativity of Networked Activism: A Post-Structuralist Turn

Whereas social movement organizations remain as important mobilizing agents, individual citizens have increasingly constituted themselves as movement actors in experimenting with new information and communication technologies (ICT). However, while the digitally-enabled individuals have been considered at the forefront of the contemporary social movements, extant research has tended to emphasize the technical capacity of Internet as the unifying power of movement recruitment and diffusion, limiting our understanding of the dynamic process by which citizens today engage digital media in coming to protest movements.

This study proposes a post-structuralist approach to understand how networked activism emerges and develops among individual citizens in the digital age. Illustrated with the case of Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, I conceptualize how people’s pathways to networked activism unfold as performative engagements, constantly (re-)constructed in their digitally-enabled practices within real-world situations. In this view, rather than unidirectional outcomes of cheaper and faster computer networks, individuals’ engagement with digital media is simultaneously a way of being, knowing, and acting. This research suggests to shift away from the instrumental view which focuses on analyzing ICT as independent tool for supporting and facilitating contentious politics, to examining how activist identity and action emerge and transform in as well as for digitally-enabled networked activism.