Big Data, Social Media, and Protest: Foundations for a Research Agenda
Big Data, Social Media, and Protest: Foundations for a Research Agenda
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大数据、社交媒体和抗议：研究议程的基础
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发表时间：
2016
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通讯作者：
Tracy Ann Desovich
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作者：
Tracy Ann Desovich
在过去的十年里，社交媒体的使用在全球范围内迅速增长。对于政治学家来说，这是一种亟待理解的现象。有人一再声称--通常是在缺乏可靠数据的情况下--这些社交媒体资源正在深刻地影响对社会运动的参与，包括抗议运动(见Bond，Fariss，Jones，Kramer，Marlow，Setting，&Fowler 2012；Cha等人)。2010年；Jungherr，Jurgen，&Schoen 2012；Lynch 2011；Shirky 2011)。社交媒体通常被认为会影响非常广泛的个人层面的行为，包括与朋友和家人交流政治，为政治活动和事业捐款或募集资金，投票，以及参与集体形式的抗议。然而，事实上，研究界对社交媒体的使用是否(尤其是如何)系统性地影响政治参与知之甚少。或许，在政治抗议问题上，这种缺乏知识的情况最为明显。近年来，社交媒体的使用与世界各地城市的政治抗议活动的蔓延有关，这些城市包括莫斯科、基辅、伊斯坦布尔、安卡拉、开罗、的黎波里、雅典、马德里、纽约和洛杉矶。显然，社会抗议本身远不是什么新鲜事，但潜在的抗议参与者以及远离地理位置的观察员有可能通过微博(如Twitter)和社交媒体(如Facebook)网站获取记录和存档的抗议行为的实时描述，这是一个新现象。抗议活动由参与者自己在Twitter上用独特的标签标记。因此，作为政治学家，社交媒体上的这些活动实际上如何影响个人参与抗议活动的决定，似乎是一个研究的时机已经成熟的问题，就像社交媒体如何改变抗议活动本身的性质这样一个宏观问题一样。就像在流行和学术评论中经常出现的情况一样，新的现象不可避免地会产生反驳，声称这种现象要么不是新的，要么不重要。在这方面，社交媒体的崛起--以及各种媒体对其同时产生的吸引力--及其与大规模抗议运动的关系也不例外。
INTRODUCTION The past decade has witnessed a rapid rise in the use of social media around the globe. For political scientists, this is a phenomenon begging to be understood. It has been claimed repeatedly – usually in the absence of solid data – that these social media resources are profoundly shaping participation in social movements, including protest movements (see Bond, Fariss, Jones, Kramer, Marlow, Settle, & Fowler 2012; Cha et al. 2010; Jungherr, Jurgens, & Schoen 2012; Lynch 2011; Shirky 2011). Social media are often assumed to affect an extremely wide range of individual-level behaviors, including communicating about politics to friends and family members, donating or soliciting money for political campaigns and causes, voting, and engaging in collective forms of protest. In truth, however, the research community knows remarkably little about whether ( and especially how ) the use of social media systematically affects political participation. Perhaps nowhere is this lack of knowledge more clear than in the matter of political protest. In recent years, the use of social media has been linked to the spread of political protests in cities around the world, including Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, Ankara, Cairo, Tripoli, Athens, Madrid, New York, and Los Angeles. Obviously, social protest itself is far from new, but the fact that it is possible for potential protest participants, as well as geographically removed observers, to access real-time accounts of protest behavior documented and archived through micro-blogging (e.g., Twitter) and social media (e.g., Facebook) websites is a novel phenomenon. Protest activities are flagged by participants themselves with distinctive hashtags on Twitter. As political scientists, then, the question of how these activities on social media actually affect the decision of individuals to participate in protests would seem to be a subject ripe for research, as too is the macro question of how social media changes the nature of protest itself. As is often the case in both popular and scholarly commentary, new phenomena inevitably engender a counternarrative, claiming that the phenomenon is either not new or not important. The rise of social media – and the concurrent level of fascination accorded to it across the media spectra – and its relationship to mass protests movements have been no exception in this regard.