ABSTRACT
In our contemporary panmediated society, social media have become an integral part to fomenting, organizing, and spreading social movements. Thus, media must be foregrounded in this research. Media scholars such as Benkler, Shirky, Morozov, Castells, and Lovink have attended to this need in their work by examining the ways in which media is transforming protests and movements through case studies of social movements across the globe. Our aim in this chapter is to further this work by proffering a new conceptual vocabulary for communication and social movement scholars that takes seriously media’s impact and function. This new conceptual vocabulary, which includes affective winds, force majeure, decentered knots of world-making, weaves together media theory with theories of event, tracing, networks, assemblages, and affect that draw from scholars such as Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, Shaviro, and Whitehead. We deploy these concepts using a range of examples in China, from the 2007 anti-para-Xylene protests in Xiamen, China to the 2016 anti-air pollution protests in Chengdu, China. In so doing, we trace changing social movements in a variety of media environments that range from BBSs and blogs to wild networks of social media, including bulletin board systems (BBS), Weibo, and Weixin.
