Paper long abstract:

Recent studies of social movements and social media have proposed that activist groups like Occupy need no longer be defined by a common identity or a cohesive message but only by the "connectivity" of the medium (Bennett and Segerberg 2012) through which often conflicting individual demands are aggregated. Others insist that some notion of "collectivity" or intentionality persists beyond these individual micro-practices. In this paper, I will suggest that these debates may be a product of dichotomies between micro and macro and individual and collective, which can be partially resolved by viewing groups as relational actor networks, which are to some extent enacted through socio-technical, social media platforms.

This debate is also, however a product of methodological (quant and qual) divisions: how do we know groups do not advance or debate collective action frames if we rely primarily on quantitative analyses of patterns of participation rather than discursive analyses of the content of social media messages? To address this I will propose a "quanli-quantitative" technique, which combines social-networks and co-word networks to highlight the dynamic relationship between group participation and the content of messages. Through a pilot study relating to anti-nuclear groups on Facebook, I find that while social movements do not explicitly debate their existence on social media they are constantly discussing their relationship to a variety of external entities (other groups, media outlets, public figures, natural phenomena) and I propose that it is through these shifting associations that the unstable boundaries of the group are policed.