City Research Online

Abstract

Transnational activism endures as a political practice turning a mirror onto the world's powerbrokers. We analyse a variety of transnational activism best characterized as serial by virtue of an observed systematic time and border-spanning commitment to protest communication. Following statistical disambiguation of a dataset of 2.5 million unique Twitter users, we identified a subset of exceptionally prolific communicators and interviewed 21 of them. We show that a noted prominence in networked communication of otherwise unremarkable Twitter users may be an upshot of purposive strategies intended to publicize, support or help orchestrate collective action. Accordingly, we propose the term “engagement compass” to address the relationship between activists' life-patterns and their personal investment in protest over time.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Mercea, D. & Bastos, M.T. (2016). Being a Serial Transnational Activist. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 21(2), pp. 140-155., which is published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12150. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.
Publisher Keywords:	Transnational Activism;Social Media;Diffusion;Celebrity;Frame Clouding;Disengagement
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs > Sociology & Criminology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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