ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on youth, protest and online communication from a southern perspective. It traces how the past and present of youth-led protests articulate with one another in South Africa, how digital inequalities shape the articulation of protest and how social media can become important to the cross-temporal and cross-spatial mediation, recontextualization and resignification of protest repertoires. The grounded discussion of specific moments of protest during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is complemented by theoretical reflections on the political economy of digital access, the role of generations and intergenerational conflict/solidarity, the interplay of past and present, history and future, as well as the role played by ‘radical alternative media’ (Downing et al., 2001) in protest action.
