Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses social media materialities and protest along three axes: spatiality, temporality, and platformization. It provides a critical reflection and conceptual basis for future work on social media materialities and protest. The book offers a historical perspective on social media materialities and in doing so unpack the changing temporalities of protest. It also provides a material perspective on the ways in which protest communication on social media becomes a means of documenting, constructing, and maintaining a record of social movements in time and over time. The book examines how social media logics generate biased online archives of social movements’ communication. Social media archives are open-ended and dynamic, enduringly offering the opportunity for expansion, reconfiguration, and new patterns of meaning-making. The book considers the implications of platformization from a wider societal perspective.