Research on activism and the media.
Activism and protest in news and online media is a significant area of research. How activists and protesters use the internet, social media and other methods to support their protests is key to understanding how social movements work and progress their causes.
Against them the mainstream news media and its journalists police their actions and efforts, significantly affecting public opinion.
This collection of communication research looks at the internet and its potential for activists and social movements. It also looks at governments and the state and how they react to protest and activism, as well as how protests are covered in the mainstream media.
Online Protest and Social Movements
This seminal piece of research on activism and protest in news and online media looks at Habermasian theory and the public sphere. It looks at how the internet might help social movements and how they can use online media. Democracy, New Social Movements and the Internet: A Habermasian Analysis in Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice Publisher: Routledge Editors: Martha Mccaughey (Editor, Michael Ayers (Editor)
Research on social movements and radical media – how media practices are social practices, and how they can create activist communities. This research looks especially at Indymedia: The Goods of Community? The Potential of Journalism as a Social Practice, Philosophy of Management, 2015
Research on technology and social the limits of democratic participation in online social movements Democracy & Online News: Indymedia and the Limits of Participatory Media, Scan Journal of Media, Arts, Culture, 2006
Student Protest and Occupations.
This research paper reports on an ethnographic research project on student occupations in the UK The UWE Student Occupation, by Kay and Salter, Social Movement Studies, 2011
Activism and the state – the limits of online protest.
Research into how the law limits activism online, looking at how law and the police tried to repress the Indymedia radical media project Indymedia and the Law: Issues for Citizen Journalism, Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, 2009.
Although activists in protest movements online feel free they are always active within a state, its laws and repressive agencies. This research looks at the challenges this presents to activists Crises, Radical Online Journalism and the State in The Handbook of Global Online Journalism, 2012
A later look at how activists use online media to protest and form social movements, and the problems they face Emergent Social Movements in Online Media and States of Crisis: Analyzing the Potential for Resistance and Repression Online in Cyberactivism on the Participatory Web, Edited by Martha McCaughey, 2014
This analysis looks at how the government and mainstream media create frames that position activists and protesters Journal article by Kay and Salter in Journalism: Framing the cuts: An analysis of the BBC’s discursive framing of the ConDem cuts agenda
Technology, protest and activism.
This research looks at the history of the internet and how its technological structure might help activists. It shows how the development of a technology comes to frame different types of use Structure and Forms of Use, Information, Communication & Society, 2004
Although technology might seem to be autonomous, it is socially shaped. This research shows how the world wide web is developed, and whose interests it follows Colonization tendencies in the development of the world wide web, New Media & Society, 2005
This book research looks at the history of the internet, radical media, protest and activism. It shows how corporations have developed the internet and what this means for social movements. Conflicting Forms of Use: The Potential of and Limits to the Use of the Internet as a Public Sphere, PhD Thesis, 2007