The Geospatial Characteristics of a Social Movement Communication Network
Open Access
- 6 March 2013
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Public Library of Science (PLoS) in PLOS ONE
- Vol. 8 (3), e55957
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0055957
Abstract
Social movements rely in large measure on networked communication technologies to organize and disseminate information relating to the movements’ objectives. In this work we seek to understand how the goals and needs of a protest movement are reflected in the geographic patterns of its communication network, and how these patterns differ from those of stable political communication. To this end, we examine an online communication network reconstructed from over 600,000 tweets from a thirty-six week period covering the birth and maturation of the American anticapitalist movement, Occupy Wall Street. We find that, compared to a network of stable domestic political communication, the Occupy Wall Street network exhibits higher levels of locality and a hub and spoke structure, in which the majority of non-local attention is allocated to high-profile locations such as New York, California, and Washington D.C. Moreover, we observe that information flows across state boundaries are more likely to contain framing language and references to the media, while communication among individuals in the same state is more likely to reference protest action and specific places and times. Tying these results to social movement theory, we propose that these features reflect the movement’s efforts to mobilize resources at the local level and to develop narrative frames that reinforce collective purpose at the national level.Keywords
This publication has 30 references indexed in Scilit:
- Modular networks of word correlations on TwitterScientific Reports, 2012
- Beating the news using social media: the case study of American IdolEPJ Data Science, 2012
- Social media evolution of the Egyptian revolutionCommunications of the ACM, 2012
- Competition among memes in a world with limited attentionScientific Reports, 2012
- Social Features of Online Networks: The Strength of Intermediary Ties in Online Social MediaPLOS ONE, 2012
- The Dynamics of Protest Recruitment through an Online NetworkScientific Reports, 2011
- Geographic Constraints on Social Network GroupsPLOS ONE, 2011
- Extracting the multiscale backbone of complex weighted networksProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009
- On electronic civil disobediencePeace Review, 1999
- Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial TheoryAmerican Journal of Sociology, 1977