Social media, temporality, and the legitimacy of protest

Abstract

This article examines how the rise of social media affects the temporal relations of protest communication. Following a relational approach, it traces how regimes of temporality are constructed and transformed through the entanglement between media infrastructures, institutions, and practices. These regimes involve particular 'speeds' -the rate at which media content is renewedas well as 'temporal orientations' towards present, past, and future. The article questions how specific temporal regimes enable or complicate protestors' efforts to gain public legitimacy. A large body of research suggests that it is difficult to gain such legitimacy in the mainstream news cycle, in which protest is primarily covered from an 'episodic' perspective, ignoring larger protest issues. The present analysis suggests that despite the participatory affordances of social media, it has not become any easier to generate sustained public attention for structural protest issues. Drawing examples from three case studies, it demonstrates that the dominant mode of social media protest communication reproduces and reinforces the episodic focus of the mainstream news. While other temporal perspectives on protest are certainly developed in the alternative and mainstream news, as well as in activist social media communication, these do not fundamentally challenge the prevailing temporal orientation towards the present, towards the event.ARTICLE HISTORY

Suicide on Facebook-the tales of unnoticed departure in Bangladesh

“…Sometimes the same Facebook post carries different meaning to different people and people share fake news or fabricated information to draw the attention of friends, family or the community. This tendency was also observed in Bangladesh, for example people used Facebook as a convenient and affordable medium to protest and draw attention Poell (2018). Moreover, the discussion of suicide and reliability of data related to suicide depends on the political and legal attitude of a particular community and country.…”

Regimes of temporality: China, Tibet and the politics of time in the post-2008 era

“…I also demonstrated the ways in which visual images have become an important ideological tool in producing selective and constructed realities to reinforce official narratives about Tibet's 'proper' place within Chinese time. Following Poell's (2019) work, I argue that these discourses produce a regime of temporality that imposes upon Tibet a narrative of steady linear progression from 'hell on earth' towards Chinese socialist modernity, encasing Tibet within a totalising Chinese national time while also constraining, and discrediting alternative narratives of the region's past, present and future. Exercising tight regulation over the possibilities of imagining Tibetan temporality, these discourses are constantly adapting to new media technologies that enable the production of increasingly sophisticated forms of propaganda to maximise online visibility, attention and audience engagement in order to consolidate state power over Tibet.…”

“…However, media is also a powerful site for generating and disseminating messages about temporality. In his work on political communication, Poell (2019) argues that when specific media institutions, infrastructures and practices come to dominate the media landscape, particular kinds of temporality are produced and become significant in shaping ‘societal sense-making processes during particular periods’ (p. 2). As such, ‘regime of temporality’ describes how media, power and ideology intersect to shape ‘temporal orientations’ towards present, past and future (Poell, 2019: 7).…”

“…Using multimodal discourse analysis, I analyse the various ways in which Chinese state media mobilise time to reinforce Tibet’s place within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Using Poell’s (2019) term ‘regime of temporality’ to describe the convergence of power, ideology and media in the production and ordering of time, I argue that discourses of temporality are an important state media strategy that attempt to manage public opinion about Tibet while also contributing to broader efforts to reinforce Chinese rule over the region. I also examine how Tibetans use online platforms to contest official representations and create new spaces to re-imagine Tibet’s past, present and future.…”

The temporal regimes of HIV/AIDS activism in Europe: chrono-citizenship, biomedicine and its others

“…Benton et al (2017) have argued that 'conceptions of time and temporality configure and reflect power relations in global health' (p. 454), thereby rendering temporal regimes central to understanding notions of difference, health and the self. With the concept 'temporal regimes,' we refer to provisional and situated modes of governance that are dependent on shared understandings of time, experiences in time and orientations to time (Poell, 2020). Rather than universal and stable social and political realities, the temporality of a given temporal regime is induced from the contingent and contested production of time in everyday practices, a process often referred to as temporalization (Munn, 1992;Ringel, 2016).…”