New Technology and Social Movements: Moving Beyond Social Media

• In Event: 300 - Section on Human Rights Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Person Rights and Social Movements

Abstract

This essay is drawn from a chapter of a book under development. That chapter highlights the broader range of digital technologies, devices, and techniques available to social movement actors. The benefits of such an approach are best isolated and identified in relationship to the major theoretical approaches to understanding social movements—especially resources and opportunities—and critical subsequent explanatory variables, including networks, tactics (especially violence and nonviolence), key stakeholders, and repression. I introduce a new variable—-offline technologies—and conclude by suggesting that they are part of a much larger set of technological affordances. Such an approach may open the aperture of scholarship on social movements and collective behavior (CBSM). This essay has been written with collective action scholars in mind. Other readers, perhaps wishing to save themselves a touch of academic tedium, are encouraged to skip ahead.

Author

• Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, University of San Diego