I wrote this write-up for a research journal during May 2012. I am now publishing it on my blog in parts.
2011 MASS UPRISINGS: SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS - PART-VIII
MANAGING MEDIA IS IMPORTANT
Writing in 1993, William Gamson and Gadi Wolfsfeld suggested that social movements rely on the media for three main services, (1) mobilisation of political support, (2) legitimisation (or validation) in the mainstreams discourse, and (3) to broaden the scope of conflicts. Consequently, the quality and nature of the media coverage that social movements obtain strongly influences how they are perceived in the public eye – to the extent that good or bad coverage can help to make or break a social movement.
2011 saw a unique way to managing it.
In India where considerable media autonomy exists and where Internet users are multiplying every year, the first sanctity that the Jan Lokpal movement got was from media.
Once media started taking about it, it had loads full of content available from Team Anna. Team Anna was ready with news, views and interviews. They tried to make media participative and there is no denial that some of the media houses had biased pro-Jan Lokpal media coverage. The Jan Lokpal movement had social networking extensions on almost of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, ‘India Against Corruption’ and other websites and every update was meticulously recorded to keep users abreast of the latest developments.
In other cases, it has been more amorphous.
One of the major anti-Arab Spring logic behind negating a Peace Nobel to the movement was the absence of particular face or a group of particular faces. The mainstream media being a non-entity, activists using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs in these Arab countries played their role honestly and managed to fuel the pro-movement social media buzz by reporting and writing on the developments consistently and appealing more and more to join the protests.
The management dictum here was decontrolling the sphere of activity and delegating the charge to everyone who came forward to use the social media to join and strengthen the protests.
In Tunisia and Egypt, the social media buzz was led by many bloggers. In Russia, again it was by multitude of protestors connecting and raising their voice through the social media platforms. The ‘Occupy’ movement spread to hundreds of cities and every protest is being organized independently at local level while the developments are being updated and reported on different community websites and social networking groups run by larger hubs devoted to the movement to feed the individual supporters and groups.
To continue..