مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد رسانه های اجتماعی و جنبش اجتماعی – الزویر 2020

During the recent wave of pro-democracy movement across the world, new media technologies play a vital role in mobilizing participants. Much scholarly attention has been paid to the role of social media in empowering grassroots movements, but the rise of alternative media was somehow ignored. This study examines the impacts of social media and alternative media on social movement participation. The data came from a survey of 769 students from eight public universities in Hong Kong at the height of the Umbrella Movement. The findings revealed that acquisition of political information from social media and alternative media is associated with social movement participation through different mechanisms. Specifically, social media serve as an echo chamber where people are motivated to participate by perceiving a homogeneous opinion climate and forming a pro-protest attitude. In contrast, alternative media serve as an attitude intensifier to facilitate social movement participation.

Introduction

The recent wave of pro-democracy movements in many parts of the world would not be that influential or even possible without the help of new information technologies. Many of these movements display unique characteristics that differentiate them from conventional forms of engagement: occupying public spaces by unplanned and spontaneous actions (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). The new social movements operate in a decentralized way made possible by digital media technologies that can be used to connect and to mobilize individual citizens (Tufekci and Wilson, 2012). Researchers have argued that digital media should not be considered as a monolith because different types of new media outlets exert varying levels of influence over individual actions (Pasek et al., 2009). In recent years, scholarly attention turns to the growth of online alternative media, and many studies examined the content of alternative media. But few have explored the impacts of exposure to alternative media on social movement participation (Downing, 2000). Alternative media are characterized as critical and radical: they challenge the dominant power in society and have an intertwined relationship with protest groups (Downing, 2000). Due to such content features of alternative media, alternative media use seems to be capable of facilitating individuals’ social movement participation by cultivating alternative political cognition and attitude such as oppositional knowledge and support for civil disobedience (Lee, 2015a; Leung and Lee, 2014).