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The current period of disruptive social change is inextricably bound up with new means and modes of communication, information, and media streams. The Communication, Information Technologies & Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS) locates these factors at the center of our collective interests, investigating them through a plethora of methods, theories, and empirical cases. Each year, CITAMS runs a special issue in ICS showcasing select works presented at the previous year's American Sociological Association conference and the affiliated Media Sociology preconference. Papers in the 2022 CITAMS Special Issue reflect a social context defined by a prolonged global pandemic and wrought by democratic uncertainty. Across these social circumstances, technology and media loom large. Simultaneously, everyday life continues and classic CITAMS scholarship sustains relevance for the ways people interact, construct identity, consume, and mobilize. All of this and more are contained in the pages of this year's Special Issue, from which readers can get a sense of what CITAMS has to offer and consider how their own work may fit within the broad CITAMS umbrella. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Networked information technologies have brought about extensive changes in the production and distribution of creative cultural work. Inspired by the widespread success of Free-Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), many proponents of open access advocate reconceptualisation of existing legal protection frameworks in creative works. This paper traces the attempted appropriation of Creative Commons (CC) licences by filmmakers and the consequent formation of an Open Content Filmmaking (OCF) movement. OCF proponents articulated notions of technology-enabled transformation in content creation and distribution, similar to those that inspire the visions of FLOSS and CC advocates. It examines how these creators attempted to address the relevance of openness to their own activities and develop practical open models for filmmaking. Difficulties experienced in establishing viable livelihoods with OCF (as FLOSS developers had done), created tensions between those with a pragmatic or more ideological orientation. The initial vision of a consistent OCF movement, enabled by CC, thus became fragmented. In contrast to FLOSS, where many actors were able to find ways to develop sustainable careers within the industry while contributing to Open Source Software, such generic strategies have not readily emerged for OCF. Drawing insights from Sørensen's (1996) Social Learning framework (Learning technology, constructing culture. Sociotechnical change as social learning: University of Trondheim, STS working paper 18/96) in this paper we untangle the elaborate but often messy strategies deployed by Open Content Filmmakers (OCFs) and trace the multiple and often partial ways they have worked out to utilise CC elements and tools in producing, monetising and distributing their films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how marginalized youth in Morocco use YouTube to contest hegemonic discourses of state power and institutional practices of social exclusion. The paper analyses a user-generated, YouTube web-series,Tales of Bouzebal, as a performance of marginality and a social critique of state bureaucracies and institutions in the context of post-Arab Spring Morocco. Using a combined method of textual and discourse analyses, the paper argues that the new media practices of producing and consuming user-generated video are best understood as practices of cultural citizenship that contribute to social change through the production of counter-discursive political subjectivities among youth in MENA. The paper posits that the concept of citizenship needs to be expanded to account for citizen participatory media practices that contest the conditions of marginality and inequality sustained by normative definitions of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grievances and an urgent awareness of the need for social change are necessary but insufficient catalysts for the formation of powerful and robust social movements. While this realization has led observers of social movements to attend to a wide variety of structural and subjective factors, in the alchemy of radical social change and the grassroots collective action that fuels it one of the most important yet under considered elements is the radical imagination. In this paper, I map the concept of the radical imagination and the methods necessary to study it in action. A collective activity produced through dialogic encounters rather than an individual possession or faculty, the radical imagination is our capacity to conceive of the world as it might be otherwise, and it animates successful movements for social change. Since the radical imagination is something people do together it is also a profoundly social phenomenon bearing the marks of the activist culture and political context in which it is enmeshed, and the forms used to mediate and circulate it. This, in turn, has profound consequences for the way activists sustain themselves, organize for social change, and connect with others beyond their ranks. Drawing on research conducted since 2010 with radical activists in Halifax, Canada seeking to 'convoke' – collectively summon into being – the radical imagination, I reflect on the relationship between the radical imagination, activist culture and context, and movement building in the age of austerity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins from the basic premise that in considering digital media and its multifarious relations with forms of protest and political mobilization, we are interested in social change. Yet, too often, the key ingredient of protest and political mobilization – the radical politics itself – is left out of our analyses. How can we begin to tackle the challenges posed to democratic politics if we do not talk about actual politics as part of our research? This problem is both conceptual and practical. A politics requires a practice. We cannot understand the nature of the practice without understanding its politics; we cannot understand the politics without appreciating its processes and organization. Yet, so many studies do just this. This paper argues that a fugitive politics limits our abilities to take progressive thought and action forward. By ignoring the actual politics, we end up depoliticizing counter politics because we offer precious few suggestions as to how we can do democratic politics better. Without an understanding of the conditions under which a Left progressive politics could develop then the politics itself threatens to remain ill defined. What might it mean then to put the development of a counter politics at the heart of our analyses? What are the conditions required (including the communicative conditions) for radical political organizations/collectives to endure, build capacity and effect social change? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are changing the ways in which activists communicate, collaborate and demonstrate. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, among them sociology, political science and communication, are working to understand these changes. The diversity of perspectives represented enriches the literature, providing an abundant repertoire of tools for examining these phenomena, but it is also an obstacle to understanding. Few works are commonly cited across the field, and most are known only within the confines of their discipline. The absence of a common set of organizing theoretical principles can make it difficult to find connections between these disparate works beyond their common subject matter. This paper responds by locating existing scholarship within a common framework for explaining the emergence, development and outcomes of social movement activity. This provides a logical structure that facilitates conversations across the field around common issues of concern, highlighting connections between scholars and research agendas that might otherwise be difficult to discern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public/private distinction is one of the fundamental categories of modern social life. Historically, the two functioned as a dichotomous pair both theoretically and practically. During the height of the separation of public and private, 'private' was code for the home, personal, and non-professional contexts; 'public', on the other hand, stood for the professional world outside the home. This dichotomous treatment of public and private informed many aspects of social life ranging from gender relations and the division of household labor to the development of suburbs as purely residential (private) areas geographically separate from the public sphere of work. Recently, however, this dichotomous vision of the public/private divide has become outdated. It no longer accurately describes the ways in which public and private operate in contemporary social life; where the two spheres were once separate, there is now significant overlap and interaction. This breakdown in the public and private divide has occurred at many levels and has a strong relationship with the development and ubiquity of information and communications technologies such as mobile telephones and the Internet. This paper describes the ways in which public and private are changing and proposes a new way of theorizing the public/private distinction, as a continuum rather than as a dichotomy. This way of thinking about public and private reflects contemporary social life much more accurately than does the dichotomous conception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased flexibility facilitated by Information and Communication Technologies has enabled anti-war activists to garner great control over representations of their arguments. This paper explores the value of the symbolic dimension of collective action through three cumulative forms of analysis: understanding how the symbolic domain is used; explaining the strategic choices behind this use; and, finally, linking these representational choices to the subjective experience of the individual and their processes of political identity construction. Many groups lacked a coherent online strategy. The reasons for this are threefold. First, use reflects the organizational structure and ideological principles of the groups. Second, by emphasizing diversity and inclusion most groups wanted their online material to be as accessible as possible and as a result censored anything too opinionated or deemed too radical. Third, there was an enduring emphasis upon local place and face-to-face communication. This made groups' online interventions lack coherence because they were often aiming their representations at particular populations. In a study of Muslim anti-war activism the relationship between these representational choices and the processes of identity construction were explored. Muslim activists sought support by asserting a collective religious commonality and by aligning with sympathetic others to counter stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists. This re-ignited a historical tension as to the place of religion within anti-war activism. Consequently, Muslims struggled to articulate their claim to multiple identities, and online representations limited those who attempted to develop overt and complicated new religious political identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements often seek news media attention as a means to garner public attention to social problems; social movements may also attempt to circumvent traditional media channels through the use of social networks. The role of social media in cultivating political and social change is an area of increasing interest to scholars studying the politics of social movements, yet there exist few systematic studies on how social media attention interacts with traditional forms of media to produce public attention to social issues. Using the 2016–2017 protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and allies, we examine how social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) influenced public attention to the NoDAPL protests, demonstrating that engagement with social media has effects independent of traditional forms of media coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts forward a theory of the role of digital media in social change. It begins by criticizing three theories that currently dominate our understanding of digital media and of media generally: network theory, mediatization theory and actor-network theory. It also identifies a gap in current communication theory, namely, that digital media mostly do not fit the divide into mass and interpersonal communication. A further problem is that insufficient attention is given to the difference between political communication and popular culture or everyday life. The article develops an alternative, focusing on four countries that provide a range of relationships between media and society; the U.S., Sweden, India and China. In all four countries, despite their differences, digital media, in contrast to traditional broadcast and interpersonal media, have led to a more differentiated media landscape. Greater complexity in political communication nevertheless runs up against the continuing dominance of elite agenda-setting. In terms of popular culture, all four countries have experienced a proliferation of media offerings and greater tetheredness between people. Hence, new divides are emerging between more active and variegated as against more passive and restricted media uses. The article concludes with implications of digital media for understanding media generally: with new digital media, there is now a need to rethink media theory in terms of fundamental debates about how media transform or preserve the social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written in recent years about Chinese online activism. Although in China Internet use is officially regulated and censored, China nevertheless has the world's largest number of Internet users, with blogs being the largest communication platform. However, most of the research on Chinese use of social media to date has focused specifically on Chinese language Internet sources, with little attention paid to online activity among any of China's 55 officially recognized ethnic minority groups, such as the Uyghurs. Uyghurs are an ethnic group native to China's northwest Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. They speak Uyghur language natively, a Turkic language that utilizes an Arabic script, and most are Moslems. As the largest ethnic group within a region of China noted as among China's most politically sensitive, the Uyghurs provide a rich source for study of the use of the Internet by a potentially contentious group. This research thus seeks to fill a gap in the literature by addressing the question: In what ways do Uyghurs utilize social media as a form of online activism? The findings show that in Uyghur blogs, comments are often posted using veiled language such as metaphors, sarcasm, and humor, or references to traditional Uyghur sayings and culture practices as a means of expressing subversive political communication, in an indirect way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of Facebook by social movement organizations (SMOs) and the ramifications from that usage for their organizational form. Organizational forms have been viewed to be in flux as networked communication becomes embedded in mobilization repertoires. In what follows, it is shown that the utilization of Facebook by networked heterarchical organizations is seen to grant them access to a hitherto untapped demographic for the purpose of mobilization. Concurrently, questions are raised pertaining to organizational form, particularly in relation to the role the Facebook audience plays in movement organizations. Communication on Facebook may catalyze deliberation, information sharing and mobilization. Moreover, evidence was found pointing to its use for the self-organization of protest participation. Yet, engagement between SMOs and their Facebook audience bore little on decision-making within the organizations. Although limited in scope, the emerging contribution of such communication may be by way of channelling items into decision-making agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decline in the size and diversity of American's core networks has been tied to the displacement of face-to-face interaction and to lower societal well-being. Comparing core networks in the United States, Norway, and Ukraine, we reject the conclusions that frequent in-person contact predicts individual well-being and that large/diverse networks predict broader societal well-being. Individuals of lower socioeconomic status (SES) and societies with lower levels of overall prosperity have higher rates of in-person contact. Internet use is associated with higher in-person contact for the socioeconomically advantaged but lower rates of in-person contact for the disadvantaged. In-person and ICT-based contact is generally associated with maintaining a larger network, but in societies of lower well-being frequent interaction impedes the ability to maintain a large network. In contrast to the positive relationship between individual SES and network size, societal prosperity has a negative relationship to network size. Findings are discussed in relation to social support, democratic engagement, and the digital divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares two kinds of socio-technical formations: electronic financial networks and local social activist movements that are globally networked. Both cut across the global/national duality and each has altered the economic and political landscapes for, respectively, financial elites and social activists. Using these two cases helps illuminate the very diverse ways in which the growth of electronic networks partially transforms existing politico-economic orderings. They are extreme cases, one marked by hypermobility and the other by physical immobility. But they show us that each is only partly so: financial electronic networks are subject to particular types of embeddedness and local activist organizations can benefit from novel electronic potentials for global operation. Financial electronic networks and electronic activism not only reveal two parallel developments associated with particular technical properties of the new interactive digital technologies, but also reveal a third, radically divergent outcome, which is interpreted as signalling the weight of the specific social logics of users in each case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sarah Ford's recent article, ‘Reconceptualizing the Public/Private Distinction in the Age of Information Technology’ demonstrates how social media shifts our understanding of privacy and publicity and proposes a continuum model instead of a simple dichotomy. In this commentary, we argue that Ford's proposed model does not go far enough to break down the problematic dichotomous thinking and propose a further reconceptualization of privacy and publicity as a dialectic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Zapatista uprising, which started in 1994, and the 'Battle of Seattle' in 1999 are but two iconic examples that are so often used to illustrate how the internet has shaped and is shaping social movements and the tactics they use to pursue their claims. In this article, the authors present the 'state-of-the-art' literature on action repertoires of social movements in an internet age. The article builds a strong case in favour of the internet as it has given social movements new and improved opportunities to engage in social and political action. At the same time, a naive internet-optimism is avoided, by pointing out several limitations. There is the 'classical' problem of digital divide. In some cases, the internet has made collective action still not easy enough, while in others it has made it perhaps too easy reducing the final political impact of a certain action. In addition, it seems that the new media are loosing their newness quickly, and more fundamentally are unable to create stable ties between activists that are necessary for sustained collective action. With the internet, social movements have not become a more powerful force in society. But, as political and economical power has gradually moved to the international level, the internet has enabled social movements to follow that transition and operate more globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As more survey and opinion polling agencies collect their data using the Internet, questions arise about how representative Internet users are of the American population as a whole. We use a targeted module of IT-relevant questions added to the 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006 samples in the General Social Survey (GSS) to analyze differences between Internet users and non-users. We devote particular attention to the issue of whether Internet use is associated with more or less diverse or 'liberal' political opinions and to how these associations have changed since 2000. In general, we found that where differences existed, they were in the direction of Internet users being more supportive of diverse and tolerant points of view than were non-users, consistent with the premise that going online is a way of expressing openness to opposing points of view and new experiences. However, the differences were often non-monotonic - that is, openness did not always increase progressively with the amount of Internet use. Moreover, there were differences for some racial/family/sexual/political attitudes but not others, in patterns that do not fit easily under standard labels such as liberal, conservative or even libertarian. Internet users also expressed slightly more optimistic and sociable attitudes on certain other GSS questions. On most GSS items, however, either there were no differences between Internet users and non-users, or the differences could be explained by age, education, race, gender or income factors. Thus, respondents in Internet surveys can be expected to differ from non-Internet respondents in being selectively more tolerant on certain political issues, but not on most other political issues. The results held about as strongly in 2006 as in 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many observers doubt the capacity of digital media to change the political game. The rise of a transnational activism that is aimed beyond states and directly at corporations, trade and development regimes offers a fruitful area for understanding how communication practices can help create a new politics. The Internet is implicated in the new global activism far beyond merely reducing the costs of communication, or transcending the geographical and temporal barriers associated with other communication media. Various uses of the Internet and digital media facilitate the loosely structured networks, the weak identity ties, and the patterns of issue and demonstration organizing that define a new global protest politics. Analysis of various cases shows how digital network configurations can facilitate: permanent campaigns; the growth of broad networks despite relatively weak social identity and ideology ties; transformation of individual member organizations and whole networks; and the capacity to communicate messages from desktops to television screens. The same qualities that make these communication-based politics durable also make them vulnerable to problems of control, decision-making and collective identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]