Commitment in the Cloud? Social Media Participation in the Sunflower Movement

• In Event: Understanding the Influence of Social Media and Messaging on Engagement and Participation

Abstract

Social media participants in digitally enabled protests have long been criticized for their lack of commitment. Many bypassed this issue and argued that social media participation is a functional or central aspect of protests. Nevertheless, commitment can be critical in explaining continued participation over time, which is often necessary to achieve fundamental social change. We empirically test the lack of commitment claim in the case of the 2014 Sunflower Movement in Taiwan. Using survey data from a sample of 801 participants, we find a group of highly active social media participants – what we described as the “cloud activists” -- who operated exclusively online during the movement. In contrast to previous studies, we find that the commitment of the “cloud activists”, in terms of both identification and sense of efficacy, is at least in par with, if not always necessarily higher than, most offline participants. Furthermore, contrasting previous findings on the positive relationship between social media use and offline participation, we find the offline mobilizing effect of social media is conditioned by the level of social media activity – social media does not mobilize “cloud activists” offline. We suggest that the identifying “cloud activists” may help us achieve a better understanding of protest leadership and peer production process by the crowd, as well as how digitally enabled protests persist and transform over time.

Authors

• Yuan Hsiao, U of Washington

• Yunkang Yang, U of Washington