Media ecologies and protest movements: main perspectives and key lessons

Trere, Emiliano ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2496-4571 and Mattoni, Alice 2016. Media ecologies and protest movements: main perspectives and key lessons. Information, Communication & Society 19 (3) , pp. 290-306. 10.1080/1369118X.2015.1109699

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Abstract

Studies adopting the media ecology metaphor to investigate social movements form a promising strand of literature that has emerged in the last years to overcome the communicative reductionism permeating the study of the relation between social movements and communication technologies. However, contributions that apply ecological visions to protest are scattered, and only seldom connect their analyses to more general media ecological frameworks. The article critically reviews and classifies the diverse strands of scholarship that adopt the ecological metaphor in their exploration of activism, and connects them with the more general literature on media and communication ecologies. Moreover, it extracts the constitutive elements of this literature that can help scholars to better address the complexity of communication within social movements, and it articulates four key lessons that a media ecology lens brings to the understanding of media and protest. Finally, the article further demonstrates the strengths of this approach through an illustration of the preliminary findings of an ongoing investigation on the 15M movement in Spain.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Journalism, Media and Culture
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Media ecologies, protest ecologies, social movements, digital activism, literature review
Publisher:	Routledge
ISSN:	1369-118X
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	28 September 2017
Date of Acceptance:	25 November 2015
Last Modified:	06 Nov 2023 18:14
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/105040

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