Gonzalez, Victoria M.. Where is the "we" in online social movements? : Rethinking the role of collective identity in online activism. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-rwk6-ev16
DescriptionThe relationship between social movements and social media has been the subject of much speculation and research. The literatures that resulted often put forth inconsistent conclusions about how significant this relationship is and how it may be changing social movements. This is compounded by the fact that analysis of newer social movements is consistently based on constructs and theories that derive from analysis of conventional offline social movements. These kinds of analysis commonly conclude that online social movements lack many of the basic tenets of what makes a genuine and successful social movement. This dissertation analyzes two online social movements, the Occupy Wall Street and Swan Queen movements, through the lens of social movements and communications theories in order to identify where these theories continue to apply and where they do not. From this analysis, I suggest that these movements are evidence of a paradigm shift in social movements. Online social movements have translated aspects of social movements into a model that blends both the online and the offline. I believe that these online social movements are developed through the construction of hybrid identities, where the activists display and negotiate a balance between their offline and online identities throughout their identity markers, images and narratives that digitally represent who the activists are and what social movement they belong to. In their identity markers, images and narratives, activists are displaying strategies that bridge the gap between personal (identities, images and narratives) and collective (identities, images and narratives). Collective identity proves to still be a significant aspect of movement development, but it is does not dictate the “we” of the movement as it once did. It is hybrid identity that does this instead. It can be argued that social movements in general are a hybrid identity developed in order to make activism intelligible in the relatively boundaryless realms between the offline and online.