Technology and Social Media

This chapter reviews research on Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) and protest since the inception of this area. Despite early and enduring skepticism about the importance of ICTs to protest by many social movement scholars, scholarship has developed over time, particularly outside of social movement studies in communication, political communication, and interdisciplinary research on ICTs. While early scholarship focused on grand debates, such as whether and to what extent existing social movement theory could address challenges raised by ICTs, more recent research focuses on more meso-level questions familiar to many social movement scholars, such as how ICT usage can affect repression and the effectiveness of digital protest. Continuing debates involve the kinds of cases that should be studied, how to generalize from those cases, and how to understand the hybridity of physical and screen worlds.