Civic engagement and social media : political participation beyond the protest

The Occupy movement and the Arab Spring have brought global attention to the potential of social media for empowering otherwise marginalized groups. This book addresses questions like what happens after the moment of protest and global visibility and whether social media can also help sustain civic engagement beyond protest. The recent wave of protests, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement and austerity protests, have reinvigorated hopes for the democratic potential of the Internet, and particularly social media. With their popular appeal and multimodal affordances social media such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have generated both media and scholarly interest in their possibilities for granting visibility to and facilitating the organization of activism. However, the role of social media in sustaining civic engagement beyond protest and fatalism remains under-explored. How can social media contribute to sustaining longer-term involvement of civil society? What is the potential of social media for making available alternative social imaginaries? And what role may social media play in facilitating social change through cooperation with business? This volume offers answers to these questions by providing empirical examples of civic engagement and social media in different societal contexts that explicitly address conceptions of civic engagement Front Matter....Pages i-xvii Introduction: Social Media and Civic Engagement....Pages 1-20 Front Matter....Pages 21-21 Online Activism, CSR and Institutional Change....Pages 23-43 Why Some Political Opportunities Succeed and Others Fail: Bridging Organizational Levels in the Case of Spanish Occupy....Pages 44-62 Responsible Retailing in the Greek Crisis? Corporate Engagement, CSR Communication, and Social Media....Pages 63-84 Front Matter....Pages 85-85 Technologies of Self-Mediation: Affordances and Constraints of Social Media for Protest Movements....Pages 87-110 When Narratives Travel: The Occupy Movement in Latvia and Sweden....Pages 111-130 Corporate Management of Visibility: Social Media and Surveillance....Pages 131-152 From Creation to Amplification: Occupy Wall Street’s Transition into an Online Populist Movement....Pages 153-173 Nurturing Dissent? Community Printshops in 1970s London....Pages 174-193 Back Matter....Pages 194-199