This video drew national attention when “Right Wing Radio Duck” was denounced by Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and other Fox News commentators who refused to accept the idea that it was produced by a young media maker and circulated by grassroots networks, rather than being secretly funded and distributed by the Obama campaign.
There Are No Twitter Revolutions: Understanding Transmedia Mobilization
Malcolm Gladwell (2010) claims so-called Twitter revolutions build on weak social ties and do not motivate participants to put their lives on the line. Make no mistake—what we are describing here is not a Twitter revolution. Gladwell’s historical analysis rests on the unfair comparison between platforms (Twitter or Facebook) and social movements (whether the civil rights movements of the 1950s or today’s Arab Spring and Occupy movements). A fairer comparison might have been between today’s Twitter revolution and the telephone revolution of the 1960s, since we know that Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and other black leaders used the telephone as a key tool for coordinating activities among other black church leaders, freedom riders, and a range of other dispersed sets of supporters. Yet few readers would reduce the civil rights movement to the effects of long-distance phone calls. Rather, the telephone was one tool among many this movement deployed toward its aims. Aniko Bodgroghkozy (2013) documents the various strategies the civil rights movement’s leaders deployed to get their messages onto network television, often by staging protests in sites they felt would be most likely to provoke aggressive responses so that they could force racists to reveal their true faces to the public watching CBS, NBC, and ABC. And, of course, these civil rights leaders translated their cause into cultural references they felt would touch those who did not speak the languages of establishment politics—including even publishing comic books to translate nonviolent resistance into a youthful vernacular (Fellowship of Reconciliation 1955)—while using the communication infrastructure provided by the historically black press to address more focused messages to their supporters.
Similarly, today’s civil rights leaders—for example, the undocumented youth who have rallied in support of the DREAM Act—act across diverse media platforms as well as through face-to-face conversations and street protests. Like many previous generations of civil rights activists, they use conference calls to connect and coordinate among various groups, but they also use social media to coordinate action across a more dispersed network and circulate online video or internet memes to dramatize their political narratives for not just current but also potential supporters (Zimmerman 2012).3 Sometimes, they bypass broadcast media, other times, they seek mainstream coverage.
Whatever inequalities remain in terms of access to technologies, skills, and other social resources, we have found many instances where new media has provided tools and infrastructures by which marginal groups engage and participate in the public sphere. By claiming such space, subordinate groups can use networked media to expand the civic domain, even as elite groups seek to constrain the definition of what is “legitimate” in the public arena. For subordinate groups, these spaces of “everyday talk” are crucial for the development of political consciousness, for reinforcing shared cultural norms, and for working out alternatives to the dominant culture’s views of their identities and interests (Harris-Lacewell 2006 4).
Our focus on fostering change “by any media necessary” is informed by current discussions of transmedia activism and mobilization. Lina Srivastava (n.d.), who originated the concept, defines “transmedia activism” as “a framework that creates social impact by using storytelling by a number of authors who share assets and create content for distribution across multiple forms of media to influence social action.” The Transmedia Activism website argues that transmedia practices may deepen the public discussion over topics of shared concern: “Multiple entry points allow donors, activists, partners and audiences to have a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex issue, and co-creation allows increased engagement with an issue and greater movement toward action.”
Writing in regard to the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles, Sasha Costanza-Chock (2010) notes important generational differences between older activists who seek to centralize the production and flow of messages and younger activists—including the DREAMers—who want to multiply and diversify both the messages and the channels through which they flow: “Transmedia mobilization thus marks a transition in the role of movement communication from content creation to aggregation, curation, remix and recirculation of rich media texts through networked movement formations” (114). Throughout the book, we will use Costanza-Chock’s term “transmedia mobilization” as more or less interchangeable with the concept of transmedia activism discussed above.
Transmedia mobilization expands what counts as participation. Because digital media practices can be participatory, transmedia mobilization requires co-creation and collaboration by different actors. Because it is open to participation by the social base of the movement, transmedia mobilization is the key strategic media form for an era of networked social movements. The theory of transmedia mobilization does not view media as apart from, but rather a part of social movement formation. Media, Costanza-Chock argues, is no longer solely serving the purpose of messaging; it also involves “strengthening movement identity formation and outcomes” (115).
Some forms of media production and participation are designed to help cement bonds within an emerging social movement, creating a context for shared identities or mythologies which, as we will discuss, enables participants to act collectively to achieve their shared social agenda. Drawing on ideas from Robert Putnam and Francis Fukuyama, Sabina Panth (2010) explains:
Bonding in social capital is referred to as social networks between homogenous groups. Bonding can be valuable for oppressed and marginalized members of the society to band together in groups and networks and support their collective needs.… The shared social norms and cooperative spirit from bonding also provide social safety nets to individuals and groups to protect themselves from external invasion.
So in the case of undocumented youth, media production helped to connect together a group of dispersed participants who had been forced to hide their common identities and experiences; we will discuss this in terms of the creation of “coming out” videos in Chapter 6. Other media production is designed to reach beyond the counterpublic to identify and educate potential supporters as part of an attempt to shape public opinion, a set of practices more closely associated with Putnam’s “bridging social capital.” As Panth continues, “Bridging allows different groups to share and exchange information, ideas and innovation and builds consensus among the groups representing diverse interests.”
Historically, social movement players might have chosen different strategies and communication channels to achieve bonding and bridging functions, but the current media environment is increasingly porous. Content produced for one audience and one purpose can easily be accessed in a networked environment by quite different groups, including those hostile to the original intent. danah boyd (2014) and Michael Wesch (2008) describe such occurrences as “context collapse.” Writing about video sharing in the age of YouTube, Wesch explains what happens when a video reaches unintended audiences: “The problem is not lack of context. It is context collapse: an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time.”
As a consequence of context collapse, language crafted in order to speak to the shared assumptions and norms inside a group are made public to those outside the critical counterpublic, both potential supporters and potential haters. All of the groups we’ve studied grapple with this reality, that an expanded communication capacity can also result in expanding conditions of exposure and vulnerability. Context collapse recurs across the book, but especially in relation to Kony 2012 in Chapter 2 and the play between publicity and privacy as experienced by American Muslim youth in Chapter 4.
Many groups are now experimenting with what alternative
