Social movement is a group action in reaction to a dominant power in the society. They can be large groups of people or organizations that focus on social issues, demanding a social change from the bottom. As in any organization of any time, communication is among important keys of social movement in exchanging information, orienting directions in operating, and nurturing the spirit. In the digital time, modern social movements are evolved from the energy of the crowd, thanks to technology development, they do work differently from those in the history.
In the history, there are several prominent social movements – workers’ rights movement, the environmental movement, peace movements, and women’s movements. In today’s world, a new wave of social movements arrived that has become more powerful than the previous ones. In the past, in order to spread the words and the fire, activists had to gather members in the social movement in a specific place and time, sometimes even in secrecy. Nowadays, via internet and social media, anyone can get involved in the ad-hoc network, in which individual devices communicating with each other directly. Communication becomes more flexible yet not as tight as the commitment in the past and reaches more people from all over the world.
Social movement in the digital world might not be as obviously influential as those in the history yet it smolders through daily online activities. Various networked social movements can take place at the same time in any digital personalized conversation, without officially launching campaigns. Participants can be anyone online, having common counteractions towards the dominant power – ignoring political parties, distrusting the mainstream media, and largely rejecting formal organization. On the internet, people have freedom to speak it out loud via various forms: political debate as written discussion or videos or entertainment as memes or gifs. They are transmitted via multimodal forms – the “global hypertext” content that includes networked text, images, videos and relationships.
Any social movement would eventually needs human direct interaction to boost the effectiveness and bring life to demanded changes. Before that, the public have the taste of the social movements when they threaded through online activities, sometimes without much notice about it. In contrary, with those in the past, they demand strict commitment, formal membership, and the practice of full ideologies that sometimes, people might be hesitant to jump right in. With connective actions in the digital world, personal action frames are used as a perspective of personal freedom and independence from formal organizations. Connective action is such an elastic bonding of individuals in which core dynamics of the action is carried throughout the digital groups. It is such a wise strategy in that participants are co-producers and co-distributors of ideas. There are neither leaders nor chains of responsibility in involvement. Therefore,
Such movements are highly empowered from the start, because they already live in the hearts and minds of the participants, who now also connect in large-scale networks.
Simon Lindgren
On the other hand, social movement in the digital society operates on the foundation of codes and protocols. Keywords and hashtags are used widely to spread ideas effortlessly to the crows that governments and businesses might have no difficulty in tracing the movements of activists, censoring, blocking, or even shutting down internet services. There came tactical media – a successful movement as to disturb the protocol, which is interesting to say that social movements rely on the internet and now to develop more, it had better have a trick on their supporters.
Hien Phan 