Organizing an “organizationless” protest campaign in the WeChatsphere

Abstract

The introduction of digital technologies in collective actions seems to have transformed the dynamics of movement organizing and enabled divergent forms of protest organizing. While some studies emphasize “organizationless” organizing in which traditional organizational forms—social movements organizations and formal-bureaucratic structures—have been pushed into the margins, other studies showcase how traditional forms have assumed alternative features, for example, connective leadership and organizations with fluid boundaries. While existing research correctly points out the evolving organizing dynamics and forms in digital activism, few studies have accounted for why digitally enabled protests take certain organizing forms over others among multiple modes of interaction between protesters and digital technologies. Using a case study of a protest campaign organized by Chinese American immigrants, this study illustrates why immigrant activists struggled to keep the campaign “organizationless” on WeChat, a China-based digital platform that afforded other forms of organizing over such an organizing mode. Building on the mechanism-based approach in social movement studies, the findings show that immigrant activists’ emotional–cognitive responses to the changing digital environments became the driving force behind the relational choices to maintain the protest “organizationless.” The study, therefore, may not only inform future studies to explore why certain structures of protest networks emerge and develop but also contribute to the mechanism-based approach by foregrounding emotional–cognitive mechanisms, which mediate environmental and relational mechanisms.

Organic online politics: Farmers, Facebook, and Myanmar's military coup

“…Here, we draw upon frameworks for approaching networked publics as both digital spaces of interaction and practices of imagining oneself within a larger collective body (Boyd, 2010). Digital movements are recursively linked to the physical dynamics of offline space (Beer, 2022) and to the contested processes of forging collectives (Cao, 2022; Schum, 2022; Sinpeng, 2021). Offline cultures matter for online movements (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015; Tufekci, 2017), as analog communication infrastructures (Elyachar, 2014), imperial and colonial power relations (Aouragh and Chakravartty, 2016), and intersectional inequalities (Benjamin, 2019; Elwood, 2020; Noble, 2018) shape how distinct constituencies experience and interact online.…”

Privacy and anti-surveillance advocacy: the role/challenge of issue salience

“…Daskal (2017, p. 4) for instance, identifies how the collectivist disposition of the Israeli society could hinder the unmeasured elevation of a campaign for the protection of the privacy of the individual. Cao (2022) adds that the contextual attributes of emotional–cognitive mechanisms even shape the kind of activist organization pursued – formal, informal, led, leaderless, organized or “organizationless.”…”

Digital organising

“…Fridays4Future. From that perspective, organising as collective action may develop into organising as globalised action; which is both desirable and necessary against the backdrop of globally interrelated grand challenges such as poverty, wars, and climate change (Cao, 2022;Leong et al, 2020). In the process, global activity has been enabled by the evolution of organisational processes from one that requires the physical presence of physical activities to one that is virtual via websites, digital tools, and platforms, or even digital worlds such as Second Life or the Metaverse.…”

“…On the other hand, digital technologies alleviate and enable linking and coordinating across boundaries. For instance, protests around the World Climate Summit can be organised decentrally in the digital global space; supporters are sought and coordinated online, tasks are distributed via social media, and strategies are openly developed and discussed (Cao, 2022;Leong, Faik, Tan, Tan, & Khoo, 2020). Thus, digital organising captures empirical phenomena where digital technologies simultaneously centralise and decentralise decisionmaking and coordination in our societies.…”