Digital Media and the Personalization of Collective Action

Abstract

Changes related to globalization have resulted in the growing separation of individuals in late modern societies from traditional bases of social solidarity such as parties, churches, and other mass organizations. One sign of this growing individualization is the organization of individual action in terms of meanings assigned to lifestyle elements resulting in the personalization of issues such as climate change, labour standards, and the quality of food supplies. Such developments bring individuals' own narratives to the fore in the mobilization process, often requiring organizations to be more flexible in their definitions of issues. This personalization of political action presents organizations with a set of fundamental challenges involving potential trade-offs between flexibility and effectiveness. This paper analyses how different protest networks used digital media to engage individuals in mobilizations targeting the 2009 G20 London Summit during the global financial crisis. The authors examine how these different communication processes affected the political capacity of the respective organizations and networked coalitions. In particular, the authors explore whether the coalition offering looser affiliation options for individuals displays any notable loss of public engagement, policy focus (including mass media impact), or solidarity network coherence. This paper also examines whether the coalition offering more rigid collective action framing and fewer personalized social media affordances displays any evident gain in the same dimensions of mobilization capacity. In this case, the evidence suggests that the more personalized collective action process maintains high levels of engagement, agenda focus, and network strength.Several broad trends are associated with the globalization of social and economic issues such as labour market inequities, trade practices, and climate change. First, government control over many issues has become both complex and dispersed, reflecting the need for social pressure to be applied to diverse national and transnational governing institutions as well as to corporations that have used global business models to gain autonomy from government regulation. Second, both within nations and transnationally, political issues are interrelated in ways that may cut across conventional social movement sectors: labour and human rights often occupy common agendas, and economic development initiatives may align with environmental causes. The resulting organizational incentives for greater flexibility in defining issues and protest strategies are magnified by a third factor involving the growing separation of individuals in late modern societies from traditional bases of social solidarity such as parties, churches, and other mass organizations.One sign of this growing individualization is the tendency to engage with multiple causes by filtering the causes through individual lifestyles (Giddens 1991;Inglehart 1997;Bennett 1998;Touraine 2000;Beck & Beck-Gernsheim 2002;Micheletti 2003;della Po...

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