ABSTRACT
The relationship between the media and social movements has attracted a huge and growing amount of attention from communication scholars and social scientists in the wake of recent social protests across the world, most notably the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados, and Occupy Wall Street. These protest campaigns exhibited several common and often unconventional characteristics. They employed the occupation of public space as the main form of collective action and simultaneously involved a wide range of actions taken by individuals and small groups. The actions were often unplanned, and the participation of individuals was spontaneous. Nevertheless, the protests scaled up very quickly. They had a decentralized formation, and social movement organizations did not play a strong leadership role. Digital media technologies constituted an important platform for participants to coordinate among themselves and mobilize each other. These movements have become the objects of empirical research and innovative theorization, with Castells’ ( 2012 ) conceptualization of networked social movements and Bennett and Segerberg’s ( 2013 ) explication of the logic of connective action being arguably the most in uential accounts to date.
