ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses the role of materiality in protest. A key starting point is the assumption of a relational emphasis in the study of social media materialities and protest. The deeply felt and ingrained platformization of daily life makes the processes defining the relationship between social media materialities and protest even harder to pin down. Social media are rife with gaps and silences, as a result of design choices that over-represent certain content and activist strategies of self-censorship and avoidance. Making a deliberate effort to pursue theoretical nuance and empirical breadth is particularly important at a time in which social media pervade ever more dimensions of social life, the role of popular protest is becoming increasingly ambiguous, and both are the objects of attention across disciplines with very different analytical concerns.
