Easy data, usual suspects, same old places?
This year is the 50th anniversary of the internet, an event celebrated by a range of news articles and summits. However, 50 years of internet does not equal 50 years of digital activism (= activism that is digitally enabled or enhanced). Digital activism itself is about 25–30 years old — depending on who you ask. A quick web search already shows that there is little consensus on the start of digital activism, although researchers often refer to the Zapatista’s internet use in the mid-90s as the first instance. Thus, although the internet is 50 years old, digital activism is about 24 years old, but in that short timeframe about 4500–6000 articles (depending on search parameters) have been generated.
Given the rapid development of the field across disciplines, as well as Bruns and Burgess’ (2015) claim that the computational turn in social media research has led to the collection of a lot of easy data or what they call “the low-hanging fruit” of Twitter hashtags, we decided to conduct a systematic literature review of the field. The aim was in part to obtain an overview of this vast and interdisciplinary field for an understanding of its historical development (e.g. how terms and foci have developed over the years), and, based on that, what areas are dominant or understudied, as well as to test whether Bruns and Burgess’ hypothesis holds true for this area of internet research.
While the work is still in progress, together with my colleagues Dr. Paul Reilly and Jennifer Hayes we are showcasing our preliminary findings at the 10th International Conference on Social Media & Society (Toronto, Canada, 19.-21.07.2019) under the title “Easy data, usual suspects, same old places? A systematic review of Digital Activism research between 1995–2019”:
Our initial findings show that digital activism literature has only really become mature after 2011 / the Arab Spring, a period of only 7.5 years. We found that visual research, global south case studies, and multi-platform research are still relatively rare. More surprisingly, we found that although most of the prominent research is more recent, digital methods were not actually as common as traditional methods. While Twitter as a platform was prominent, digital methods overall were not. In that sense, preliminary findings indicate that the easy data hypothesis by Bruns and Burgess holds only partially true for digital activism literature.
For researchers studying the political online communications of climate change, this suggests that there are areas that are potentially under-explored and warrant further research. As in a systematic review we conducted for WIREs Climate Change (see Pearce et al., 2019) as part of the ESRC-funded project Making Climate Social (Principal Investigator: Dr. Warren Pearce), research using multiple platforms or focusing on case studies from the Global South was comparatively rare. These areas would benefit from further study in both digital activism and climate change communications literatures (beyond the by now more common Twitter studies), gaps we hope future research will fill.
Suay M. Ozkula is a University Teacher and Post-doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield.
References
Burgess, J. & Bruns, A. (2015). Easy data, hard data : the politics and pragmatics of Twitter research after the computational turn. In Langlois, G., Redden, J., & Elmer, G. (Eds.) Compromised Data : From Social Media to Big Data. Bloomsbury Publishing, London, pp. 93–111.
Pearce, W., Niederer, S., Özkula, S. M., & Querubín, N. S. (2019). The social media life of climate change: Platforms, publics, and future imaginaries, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 10:2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.569
