Identity and collective action via computer-mediated communication: A review and agenda for future research <s> Adopt multidisciplinary, mixed-methods approaches <s> This work sketches out an exploration on some challenges that digital environments pose to social movements studies. While transformations in the technology available for communication among movement networks quite obviously reconfigure their organisational patterns, the current use of the notion of collective identity, less obviously, is also called into question. Drawing on a dataset of tweets collected during the early stage of the worldwide Occupy protest wave, the outcomes of different possibilities of analysis are presented. The discussion of the results challenges various aspects of recent trends in Social Movements Theory, including the persistent distinction between organisational and identitary elements. A socio–semiotic observation is then acknowledged: to a certain extent, in contemporary protests, signifiers have acquired distinctive importance with respect to signified, in mediating the assemblage of contentious networks. The notion of 'social movement brand' is consequently suggested as fitting these phenomenon's better than the classical one of collective identity. <s> BIB001 </s> Identity and collective action via computer-mediated communication: A review and agenda for future research <s> Adopt multidisciplinary, mixed-methods approaches <s> ABSTRACT This article analyzes the political form of Occupy Wall Street on Twitter. Drawing on evidence contained within the profiles of over 50,000 Twitter users, political identities of participants are characterized using natural language processing. The results find evidence of a traditional oppositional social movement alongside a legitimizing countermovement, but also a new notion of political community as an ensemble of discursive practices that are endogenous to the constitution of political regimes from the “inside out.” These new political identities are bound by thin ties of political solidarity linked to the transformative capacities of the movement rather than thick ties of social solidarity. <s> BIB002 </s> Identity and collective action via computer-mediated communication: A review and agenda for future research <s> Adopt multidisciplinary, mixed-methods approaches <s> This study provides an empirical account of how an online community has employed social media to mobilize people for a political goal. The case explored is a Twitter-based community in South Korea that calls for the elimination of a conservative national daily newspaper and whose activism is contextualized in the political history of Korea. Based on the mixed-method approach, the research results suggest that the role of the group organizer as an information provider and coordinator contributed to the sustainability of the group, and that group members formed a collective identity through the framing process of discourse. In addition, massive “retweeting” and “culture jamming” tactics were found to be strategically employed to enhance group solidarity, to broaden the base of support, and to crystallize involvement into political acts with other offline actions. Rather than decaying to an echo chamber or “slacktivism”, the online community seemed to demonstrate a new form of collective activism through the... <s> BIB003 </s> Identity and collective action via computer-mediated communication: A review and agenda for future research <s> Adopt multidisciplinary, mixed-methods approaches <s> This paper examines the process through which Occupy activists came to constitute themselves as a collective actor and the role of social media in this process. The theoretical framework combines Melucci's (1996) theory of collective identity with insights from the field of organizational communication and particularly from the ‘CCO’ strand – short for ‘Communication is Constitutive of Organizing’. This allows us to conceptualize collective identity as an open-ended and dynamic process that is constructed in conversations and codified in texts. Based on interviews with Occupy activists in New York, London and other cities, I then discuss the communication processes through which the movement was drawing the boundaries with its environment, creating codes and foundational documents, as well as speaking in a collective voice. The findings show that social media tended to blur the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the movement in a way that suited its values of inclusiveness and direct participation. Social media users could also follow remotely the meetings of the general assembly where the foundational documents were ratified, but their voices were not included in the process. The presence of the movement on social media also led to conflicts and negotiations around Occupy's collective voice as constructed on these platforms. Thus, viewing the movement as a phenomenon emerging in communication allows us an insight into the efforts of Occupy activists to create a collective that was both inclusive of the 99% and a distinctive actor with its own identity. <s> BIB004 </s> Identity and collective action via computer-mediated communication: A review and agenda for future research <s> Adopt multidisciplinary, mixed-methods approaches <s> The emergence of network-movements since 2011 has opened the debate around the way in which social media and networked practices make possible innovative forms of collective identity. We briefly review the literature on social movements and ‘collective identity’, and show the tension between different positions stressing either organization or culture, the personal or the collective, aggregative or networking logics. We argue that the 15M (indignados) network-movement in Spain demands conceptual and methodological innovations. Its rapid emergence, endurance, diversity, multifaceted development and adaptive capacity, posit numerous theoretical and methodological challenges. We show how the use of structural and dynamic analysis of interaction networks (in combination with qualitative data) is a valuable tool to track the shape and change of what we term the ‘systemic dimension’ of collective identities in network-movements. In particular, we introduce a novel method for synchrony detection in Facebook activity to identify the distributed, yet integrated, coordinated activity behind collective identities. Applying this analytical strategy to the 15M movement, we show how it displays a specific form of systemic collective identity we call ‘multitudinous identity’, characterized by social transversality and internal heterogeneity, as well as a transient and distributed leadership driven by action initiatives. Our approach attends to the role of distributed interaction and transient leadership at a mesoscale level of organizational dynamics, which may contribute to contemporary discussions of collective identity in network-movements. <s> BIB005 </s> Identity and collective action via computer-mediated communication: A review and agenda for future research <s> Adopt multidisciplinary, mixed-methods approaches <s> On 24th July 2013, feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez's petition to the Bank of England to have Elizabeth Fry's image on the UK's £5 note replaced with the image of another woman was successful. The petition challenged the Bank of England's original plan to replace Fry with Winston Churchill, which would have meant that no woman aside from the Queen would be represented on any UK banknote. Following this, Criado-Perez was subjected to ongoing misogynistic abuse on Twitter, a microblogging social network, including threats of rape and death. This paper investigates this increasingly prominent phenomenon of rape threats made via social networks. Specifically, we investigate the sustained period of abuse directed towards the Twitter account of feminist campaigner and journalist, Caroline Criado-Perez. We then turn our attention to the formation of online discourse communities as they respond to and participate in forms of extreme online misogyny on Twitter. We take a corpus of 76,275 tweets collected during a three month period in which the events occurred (July to September 2013), which comprises 912,901 words. We then employ an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of language in the context of this social network. Our approach combines quantitative approaches from the fields of corpus linguistics to detect emerging discourse communities, and then qualitative approaches from discourse analysis to analyse how these communities construct their identities. <s> BIB006 </s> Identity and collective action via computer-mediated communication: A review and agenda for future research <s> Adopt multidisciplinary, mixed-methods approaches <s> This study examines the potential for alternative and social media to stimulate the core antecedents of protest participation (identity, efficacy, and anger) in the context of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Findings from a representative sample supported the social identity model of collective action (SIMCA), such that all antecedents predicted intended protest participation. Identity and anger mediated the relationship between online alternative news and protest intention, while anger and efficacy mediated the relationship between social media news and protest intention. The findings demonstrate the benefits of theoretical integration from related disciplines to better understand the mobilizing potential of collective action through news media use. <s> BIB007
In answering RQ1, we looked at the perspectives and methodological approaches used in the literature. First, we found three main perspectives and a broader fourth group showing the variety of approaches and results identified in empirical research. Bridging scholars predominantly conducted multidisciplinary research by combining theories from various domains, such as sociology, social psychology, anthropology, media and communication studies. Thus, more multidisciplinary research might prove valuable to grasp the dynamics between identity and collective action via CMC. For example, combining social psychology theories on identity and media theories might provide a better understanding of the mobilising potential of social identity through media use (e.g. BIB007 . Linguistic, socio-semiotic and discourse studies might offer insight to explore the dynamic phases of the collective identity process and their interplay with collective action (e.g. BIB001 BIB006 . The combination of social movement and organisational communication theories might allow simultaneously taking dynamic collective identity processes, collective action organisational structures and CMC into account (e.g. BIB004 . Second, we found that methodological approaches varied according to the analysed identity type. Qualitative methods were preferred in the study of collective identity as they provided tools to focus more in depth on expression and formation phases. By contrast, studies on social identity were mainly quantitative because scholars were interested in explaining the causal relation between social identity and collective action. Mixedmethods research was largely multidisciplinary and not very frequent. We recommend that future studies adopt mixed-methodological approaches to deal with both the necessity of quantitative tools for the analysis of big data coming from CMC platforms and the qualitative need to understand individual, social and collective identities as shared meanings, frames and narratives. For example, combining machine-learning techniques and traditional social science methods might help to deal with the complexity of large datasets from social media (e.g. BIB002 . As individual, social and collective identities are often expressed in texts and language, quantitative methods might be used to detect emerging discourses and subsequently qualitative methods for more in-depth analysis (e.g. BIB006 . Data triangulation combining network analysis, quantitative (e.g. statistical analysis, webometrics, randomised field experiments) and qualitative (e.g. digital ethnography, interviews) methods could prove valuable to address the interplay between (individual, social and collective) identity, networks and CMC structures (e.g. BIB001 BIB003 BIB005 .