Background

Social activism consists of efforts to promote, or intervene, with the goal of bringing about social change. Networked online environments can effectively supportthe infrastructuring of social movements, and have the potential to enable more inclusive and decentralized power structures. In this regard, the popular appeal of social media has made such online environments central for social activists’ communicative strategies (Askanius et al., 2011; Neumayer et al., 2016). The environmental movement has, in the past, made use of social media to engage a broad public around substantive issues (DeLuca et al., 2016; Goodwin & Jasper, 2014; Pang & Law, 2017). Other examples of activism where social media has played a central role include the Arab Spring (AlSayyad & Guvenc, 2015; Smidi & Shahin, 2017), the Occupy Movement (Kavada, 2015), and the #MeToo movement (Askanius & Hartley, 2018; Eilermann, 2018). More locally situated examples are movements such as the Gezi protests in Turkey (Haciyakupoglu & Zhang, 2015), Ukraine’s Euromaidan Uprising (Bohdanova, 2014), Indignados movement in Spain (Anduiza et al., 2014), the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong (Chan, 2014; Lee et al., 2015; Tsui, 2015)and the Save KPK movement in Indonesia (Suwana, 2019).

All these dynamic movements are characterized by a liquid organization, where membership is performative and informal, and where leadership is value-based rather than based on institutional structures (Gerbaudo, 2012). A salient aspect of such social movements lies in the technologies and cultural practices that are involved, what in design contexts can be called the infrastructuring (Björgvinsson et al., 2010; Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013), describing the socio-technical setting that supports, for example, a public. In this article we show how the infrastructure arrangements serve to circumvent hierarchies, strategize and act horizontally toward inclusion, while also lowering the cost of political participation (Dahlberg-Grundberg, 2016; Earl & Kimport, 2011). Rather than being part of a formal structure, political participation is here seen as a way to work in parallel towards shared goals and issues that are articulated by a scattered public and communicated broadly through shared manifests (Milan, 2017). Another aspect of these movements is the way transnational activism intersects with the national configuration of political work, such as, for example the feminist movement, where shared values can unite diverse national contexts (Sadowski, 2016; Scharff et al., 2016).

While these socio-technical arrangements often use a hybrid of media and methods to organize and reach out, some elements of the technologies in use are more dominant in their action repertoires (Dahlberg-Grundberg, 2016). Social media has also made the quantification of data easier by putting that data to new uses (Milan, 2017; Milan & Velden, 2016)or by providing activists with new forms of arguments when surveys can extend to millions of people enabling a “rhetoric of collection” (Pickard & Yang, 2017). #Metoo demonstrates how activists crowdsourced data that made a massive impact on the public sphere. This has also been labeled as a scientizationof activism (Kimura, 2017), and provides an interesting link between activism and citizen science (Paulos et al., 2008).

Furthermore, campaigns such as #metoo also show how online spaces provide opportunities for victims of discrimination, harassment and abuse to come out and receive support from other victims, and also to participate in public debates around these issues. Simultaneously, research also points at the negative consequences, which may render digital activism risky, exhausting and overwhelming (Mendes et al., 2018).

Yet activism has always been risky and those who make a stand put themselves in harm’s way one way or another. In particular, digital media may amplify such vulnerability that characterizes activism, by exposing and surveilling and contributing at times a digital panopticon, or a means to spread disinformation about activisms (Bradshaw & Howard, 2017; Pickard, 2017; Uldam, 2018). Social media exposition makes it easier for companies and authorities to monitor activists’ activities (Dencik et al., 2016; Trottier and Fuchs, 2015; Uldam, 2016). Through technological affordances, user regulations and social norms these platforms are shaping and controlling the ways in which we communicate (Klang & Madison, 2016), such as by censoring LBTQ activism, or through breastfeeding activism on Facebook.

Most often, social media users are aware of the limitations of the technology, but less aware of the potential social implications(Klang, 2016). The system of metrics that measure success in the number of friends, likes, retweets and shares, the reach of a message, helps to effectively map out the network of supporters by creating a perfect overview of the activism range and participants. Activism in social media thus creates new sorts of risks: the risk of relying on a technology that also is a mean for surveillance; the risk of relying on a crowd you might never meet face to face; the risk of disinformation especially linked to the unreliability of user-generated data. This might include, for example, a situation where activists mistrust official information, such as during the Gezi protests in Turkey (Haciyakupoglu, 2015). In this particular case, the technology created instead an opportunity to “aggregate trustworthiness” (Jessen & Jørgensen, 2011)from a large number of sources, where social trust and technical affordances are interdependent (Haciyakupoglu, 2015).

Following Haraway (1991), technology can be seen as a kind of prosthesis, which extends our “arms” and allows us to stretch beyond our bodies and reach what was previously unreachable. Looked at this way, trust is about trusting that the arms can reach out and carry what we expect them to do. There is always a risk that the prosthesis will fall off, but most of the time it goes well. The moment of risk means that trust is required, which is why risk and trust are closely linked. The more risk, the greater is the trust needed.

Dahlberg-Grundberg(2016)suggests the concept of media ecologyas a lens to capture the coexistence of, and interdependence, between human actors and technologies and to point out the dynamic and fragile interrelations of people, processes, practices and artifacts. From a media ecology perspective, the technology involves not just extensions or prostheses through which activists operate; they also embed us and define the range of actions possible, indicating that media structure our actions, just like cultural norms and practices.

These media ecologies are thus not primarily artifacts but also consist of social beings structured by cultural norms – sometimes very large numbers of people who might not even have a personal relationship, but who share a common interest that brings them together. In these cases, trust is not so much a matter of trust in technical systems, trust in authorities, trust in information or trust in particular people, but trust in shared values and practices. For example, it may be about belonging to an idea, or a shared experience, which is sufficiently strong or revolutionary to motivate the individual to, for example, take the risk of trusting strangers in publics (Wang & Emurian, 2005).

Against this background, the question is how we can understand and conceptualize these media ecologies, while also contributing to the development of useful tools for activism.

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