Introduction

In the collective production of communication, rhythms were slow but intense, with activists contributing in different communicative streams with different competences and skills. Digital media have deeply transformed the media opportunities for movements by their very limited costs, immediacy, and global spread. Research on social movements and their communication practices has started to move beyond a vision of alternative media as separated from the broader media field. If attention to practices as a sensitizing concept seems very useful to map what activists do with media, in order to properly build theory, it is however important to combine attention to practices with attention to other elements that affect the communicative practices – technological affordances, norms, and content being central ones. Different social movement organizations thus tend to exploit different technological opportunities, producing communication endowed with different qualities that apparently reflect different organizational models.