Fluid Movements? How Contemporary Social Movements Hail Each Other via Social Media

• In Event: Building a Comparative Framework for Addressing the Role of Media in the Turkish and Brazilian 2013 Protests

Abstract

Drawing on Burawoy’s (2000) concept of fluid movements, which has been coined to characterize the contemporary social movements of the last 5-6 years, this paper examines the use of common collective action frames across these movements with a specific focus on Gezi protests in Turkey. By comparing the similarities and differences among the ways in which these movements use various memes, images, symbols and slogans recognizable in the global public sphere, I illustrate how these social movements achieve fluidity by hailing each other through various mediated activities. I argue that this fluid structure, in turn, contributes to the formation of a global social movement culture, which is negotiated collectively and shared symbolically, mostly via social media. This paper will also address the complex role of global media corporations in facilitating the information and artistic expressions produced at the local level during the protests to a larger national and transnational audience despite these corporations’ close ties and relationships with state governing bodies.

Burawoy, M. (2000). Grounding Globalization. In Burawoy et. al (2000). Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Author

• Ece Algan, California State U - San Bernardino