Digital Misaffordances: Social Media Mobilizing and Organizing in the 2018 Teachers Strikes

• In Event: 1545 - Media Influences on Social Movements

Abstract

The impact of new information communication technologies (ICTs) on social movements has become a central point of scholarly debate. I show that key components of the existing literature are challenged by the 2018 educator strikes in Oklahoma and Arizona, which were initiated by rank-and-file teacher Facebook groups.

Through a comparison of the divergent ways the administrators of these groups used social media in the two states, this article analyzes what I term ICT misaffordances.

Drawing on a unique data set of the entire Facebook corpus of these movements and dozens of interviews with strike participants and leaders, I show that ICTs can profoundly alter protest dynamics, including in high risk, high effort, and strong-tie actions. But, as the relatively negative experience of Oklahoma illustrates, new technologies can be counterproductive for movement effectiveness by enabling two misaffordances: 1) inexperienced leadership and 2) mass mobilization without organization. These problems become especially salient in struggles such as strikes that, unlike in self-selecting social movements, must win a majority of a bounded constituency and that thus require strong, and targeted, organization to succeed. Arizona’s successful work stoppage, in contrast, demonstrates that these misaffordances can be avoided by activists who are consciously oriented towards harnessing new technologies to strategic organizing.

By demonstrating the divergent impacts of ICTs on social movement outcomes, and the mechanisms through which the counter-productive powers of digital technologies become manifest or are avoided, this paper intervenes in the ongoing controversy over if, and how, contemporary social protest is being transformed by digital platforms like Facebook. I show that while ICTs do tend to radically alter movement dynamics, the impact of digital misaffordances depends to a significant degree on choices made by protest leaders as well as the nature of the social movement in question.

Author

• Eric Benjamin Blanc, NYU