Paper short abstract:

By infusing social movement theories with media materiality theories, new approaches to studying social movements and social media begin to emerge. Examples of insights gained from this approach include the idea that participation in protests becomes independent from geography. Also we begin to see that our individual worldviews and shared communication structures are shaped by the nature of the technologies we use to communicate to bring protests into existence.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the role that media have played in shaping the structure and outcomes of political revolutions and revolutionary events. Inspired by the debate about the role of social media tools like Twitter and Facebook in recent protests and revolutions in northern Africa and the Middle East, this paper turns to existing literature on social movements by sociologists, in which communication tools go largely unnoticed, and puts it in dialogue with the work of media materiality theorists. Setting these theoretical bodies next to one another enables a different kind of discussion to emerge; a discussion which offers a new lens through which to see social movements in the digital age. Theories of media materiality help augment existing social movement theories by making the experience, image and outcome of a social movement dependent (to an extent) on the communication technologies used to make it happen. Findings suggest that geography becomes just another aspect of the story told about, or experience of a social movement today as our worldviews increasingly adopt characteristics of the technologies we use to communicate.