2010/03/16 Andreas Jungherr

Blast from the past No. 5: Twittering Activists: the Uses of Twitter for Political Activism

Again to the archives, again a paper on Twitter: Twittering Activists: the Uses of Twitter for Political Activism. This is actually the first paper that I presented at a scientific conference, organised by the SFB Changing Protest and Media Cultures SFB/FK 615 Media Upheavals at the University of Siegen in late 2008. For a short recap of the conference have a look at this post.

In this paper I use four case studies to illustrate potential uses of Twitter for political activists. The paper was drafted in early 2008 and written in the autumn of the same year. So unfortunately I didn’t address Twitter’s Iran-moment. Still, although some of the examples in the paper may seem dated I hope the lessons drawn from the case studies are still relevant. Judge for yourself.

The paper runs at around 3900 words. If that is a bit daunting have a look at this presentation. This should contain the main idea of the paper. The complete text can be found here.

This paper laid the groundwork for the DigiActive Guide to Twitter for Activism. It also contains other ideas like the use of Twitter as an information distribution tool or as a communication backchannel which also found their way in other papers.

Andreas Jungherr (2008) “Twittering Activists: the Uses of Twitter for Political Activism“. Paper presented at “Social Web: Towards Networked Protest Politics?” Organized by the SFB Changing Protest and Media Cultures SFB/FK 615 Media Upheavals University of Siegen, Germany on 7-8 November.

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