The article draws on Gezi protests that took place in Turkey during the summer of 2013, inquiring the extent to which they were part of a global cycle of contention that has shocked the world the last 5 years. In this regard, concepts and constructs of social movement, new media, networking, and public sphere provide analytical tools to probe into the area. Issues that are addressed and critically discussed include the evaluation of the contemporary protest movements in terms of the global diffusion of neoliberal capitalism, the intersection of social media and collective action, and the critical reflection on the interplay between physical and mediated facets of action.

The article draws firstly on theories that question the exclusionary nature of mass communication in terms of the emancipatory potential of 'new media'; of the democratization of communication; or even in terms of advancing alternative forms of communication. By probing specifically into various small-scale, decentralised media projects, issues concerning the social as well as the cultural context of their implementation; their creation, production and dissemination; the employment of new technologies; and, instances of the very mediation process itself, across both the production and reception process, are addressed. From the perspective of a non-essentialist account of such media projects, the paper draws finally on approaches that evaluate these projects on the grounds of their 'lived experience', in terms of their social actors, agents; acknowledging thus an overall framework of understanding the practice of such projects, as instances of the constitution of citizenship. Beyond mass communicationVarious theoretical approaches on the media of communication, and their diverse applications, have evaluated their emancipatory role in terms of either promoting participatory communication, or advancing the democratization of communication, or even encompassing modes of subversive action. Whether the interest of such concerns is focused on large or small-scale media, their considerations have pointed out the need of setting the very communication process beyond the realm of mass communication, acknowledging thus a wider field of its practice, where the communication process is addressed not only in representative terms ('for the people'), but in participatory terms as well ('from the people').

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The advent of social media has revived the discussion on media engagement/participation and the role of citizen-user in the democratic innovation, in terms of both building divergent cultures of communality and experimenting, individually and collectively, with new ways of ‘claiming’ and ‘doing’. In this context, the article probes into the interplay between social and technological, public and private, collective and individual, civic and commercial practices at networked platforms, reviewing relevant challenges and questions set for the enhancement of the democratic activity. It draws on the deliberative and the radical democratic approaches, evaluating discursively the dynamics of civic engagement/participation in the realm of mediated and networked communication, in regard to the interactional dimension of the public sphere (and the connections with the private sphere), as well as on the lines of the development of a new sociality (a mixture of both the personal and the political). From this perspective, the article critically reflects on the normative principles of rational deliberation and goal-directed action as exclusive arenas of the constitution of the democratic process, proposing instead a broader and dynamic framework that takes into account the intersection of differing and conflicting forms of engagement, both deliberative/active and monitorial/reactive ones.

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