Publication
Digital technologies have created a new playing field for social movements—they have impacted how movement actors organize, how we think about social movements, and how we study them. In terms of organizational strategies, activists leverage online affordances, such as efficiency and scalability, to spread their messages and coordinate action. As social movements have adapted to the digital environment in these ways, new theories have been introduced to describe them, including the “connective action” and “networked counterpublic” frameworks. Finally, the digital environment offers new opportunities for the study of social movements, from the kinds of data available to the techniques applied. It is important that scholars take up this work so that social movements may be documented, and their tactics may be shared; it is equally important that they do so thoughtfully, without reproducing the injustices these movements aim to resist.
