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The persistence of collectivity in digital

protest
a
Paolo Gerbaudo
a
Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries and
Department of Digital Humanities, Kings College London, London,
UK
Published online: 28 Jan 2014.

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To cite this article: Paolo Gerbaudo (2014) The persistence of collectivity in digital protest,
Information, Communication & Society, 17:2, 264-268, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2013.868504

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 Information, Communication & Society, 2014
Vol. 17, No. 2, 264–268, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.868504

COMMENTARY
The persistence of collectivity in digital protest
Paolo Gerbaudo*

Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries and Department of Digital Humanities, Kings
College London, London, UK

‘How are technology-enabled crowds activated, structured and maintained in the absence of
recognized leaders, common goals, or conventional organization, issue framing, and action
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coordination?’ The question Lance W. Bennett, Alex Segerberg and Shawn Walters ask in the
‘Organization in the Crowd’ article published on this issue of Information, Communication
and Society is a crucial question for all those interested in the intersection between digital com-
munication and social movements, as it has been manifested in a number of recent protest move-
ments, from the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street. Asking how ‘crowds’ hold together, without
the presence of familiar forms of ‘social glue’, formal leaders, bureaucratic organizations and the
like, is fundamentally posing the question of unity, coherence and order of protest action at a time
of social complexity and ‘liquidity’ (Bauman, 2000). How do thousands of participants, often
acting at a distance from one another come to perceive themselves, and to be seen by others as
part of a common actor? How do dispersed internet users come to feel part of a collective
actor that goes under the name of convenience of ‘crowd’?
The answer to these probing questions put forward by Bennett, Segerberg and Walker concen-
trates on the role played by a number of networking micro-operations, on ‘the many small and
fitful contributions of the crowd’, as manifested in Twitter behaviour of the type of tweeting,
retweeting, posting links or utilizing multiple hashtags. Through a multitude of these small trans-
actions internet participants, constantly contribute in weaving together different pieces of cloth
into a common texture, different networks into a ‘network of networks’, bestowed with a
certain degree of coherence and rationality. Looking at social media messages, and in particular
at the Twitter conversations of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Segerberg, Bennett and Walker
convincingly demonstrate how such operations are responsible for ‘connecting different networks
in a meaningful way’ allowing such networks ‘to demonstrate a strong degree of coherence
despite their complexity and diffuseness’.
I find this an important contribution to the discussion about digital communication in contem-
porary protest movements and in particular the huge debate about networking. It is a piece that
needs to be understood in connection with the influential work developed in recent years by
the authors, and in particular with Bennett’s and Segerberg’s theorizing about ‘connective
action’, as a contemporary substitute for collective action, based on digitally personalized
action frames, rather than traditional collective action frames. Bennett, Segerberg and Walker

*Email: paolo.gerbaudo@kcl.ac.uk

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

 Information, Communication & Society 265

skilfully demonstrate how in contemporary movements traditional organizational mechanisms are

not relevant, and how a series of assumptions about the need for central coordination and a strong
identity are under question. Yet, in my contention, the authors fall short from developing in the
positive a theory of the new organizational forms, capable of accounting not only for the molecu-
lar transactions of networking and re-networking but also for large-scale or molar processes, of
identity-building and leadership, that, I would strongly argue, remain as relevant as ever to
analyse the practices of current social movements. In this commentary, I concentrate on these
two critical points, before raising the question of the relationship between the individual and
the collective, which is crucial for evaluating Bennett, Segerberg and Walker’s article.
Before going onto the critical aspects of my commentary, let me however start with the posi-
tive. What I find particularly powerful about the authors quantitative analysis is their ability to
identify a number of recurrent communicative operations that are involved in stitching networks
with one another and to establish a typology of communicative forms that can be useful for
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researchers trying to make sense of the differences between various types of social media mess-
ages. For example, they demonstrate how apparently trivial actions, such as including links in
tweets, using multiple hashtags, or retweeting, serve the purpose of constructing coherent organ-
ization in what they call ‘large-scale crowd-enabled networks’. Using the conceptual framework
introduced by Yochai Benkler (2006) to describe ‘peer organization’, they identify three stitching
mechanisms: production, curation and organization. Production revolves around the creation of
symbolic resources. Curation involves the ‘preservation, maintenance and sorting of digital
assets’. Integration, what appears in the course of the article as possibly the most important mech-
anism, entails instead ‘contact, transmission and switching across different actors’.
Bennett, Segerberg and Walker’s analysis makes use of a monstrous data set of 20 million
tweets connected to Occupy Wall Street. Analysing this material, they demonstrate how these
different mechanisms intervene in organizing the ‘crowd’. They identify the emergence of a
labour division in social media production, whereby certain Twitter accounts focus on specialized
contents, while others produced more diversified ones. Moreover, they argue that forms of com-
munication change in different phases of the movement. For example, they argue that retweets
and favouriting are often used to ‘boost signal’ in moments of confrontation and emergency.
When the protest curve tails off instead, we see an increase in the use of links, and of multiple
hashtags, allowing participants to be connected with other resources and networks. These and
similar operations contribute to the crucial task of connecting different networks in a meaningful
way. It is through these micro-operations that according to Bennett, Segerberg and Walker, ‘tech-
nology-enabled crowds’ demonstrate ‘coherent organization in the form of resource-allocation,
responsiveness to external conditions and long-term adaptation over time’.
The question to ask is though: are these micro-operations really the most important element to
understand why digital protest movements demonstrate a strong degree of coherence despite their
complexity? Is there really no other source of unity than the one bestowed by the individual small
acts of engagements with a common technological apparatus? The risk in network analysis of this
type is that we start with a God’s eye view, and a network topology map, but soon we get lost into
details, and we lose sight of the larger picture, of the great collective processes without which,
individual acts appear as trivial and repetitive tasks. Undoubtedly, there are micro-, molecular
operations in place through which individual participants contribute to a collective communi-
cation. But these micro-operations can only be understood as contributions to a collective endea-
vour, as participation in a collective subject that is more than the sum of its individual parts, and is
bestowed with a certain identity and intentionality. If coherence in digitally enabled social move-
ments is to be found somewhere is not much in the micro-operations described by Bennett,
Segerberg and Walker but rather in new forms of identity, collective solidarity and leadership
that accompany the emergence of contemporary social movements.
 266 P. Gerbaudo

The tendency in some technological analysis of social movements, like Bennett’s, Segerberg’s
and Walker’s or Castells’ is to see technology not only as an independent variable from which all
the other variables (organizational practices, objectives and tactics) depend, but also as the only
thing that can unite otherwise egotistical individuals. It is my contention that in analysing digital
protest we need to go beyond this methodological individualism and this obsession with micro-
operations in technical networks. At the same time, we need to recuperate an appreciation of col-
lective processes, as those processes without which the micro-operations Bennett, Segerberg and
Walker’s study appear in the guise of an haphazard and disjointed jumble of minuscule acts,
which despite the lack of a common project and any sense of collective agency, somehow hold
together miraculously. It is time to go beyond purely aggregative visions of social movements,
as the sum of thousands of small acts, and to appreciate instead how the coherence in protest
communications, originates from collective phenomena and in particular the presence of
(a) a common protest identity and protest culture and of (b) forms of collective leadership.
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First, we need to bring back issues of culture and identity to avoid being caught in purely tech-
nical discussions that run the risks of reducing movements to their infrastructures. This is not
because technology does not matter. But because it matters only insofar as it is ‘appropriated’
by movement actors, assigning it specific meanings and uses. Technology is not simply instru-
mental. It is also symbolic. Its operations involve the deployment of specific languages and its
use comes to be associated with specific social groupings, demographics and their identities.
Just think about Twitter. Twitter is not only a technology with certain affordances. It is also a
tool that we associate with a certain demographic, a cosmopolitan, urban middle-class youth,
of the type that largely corresponds with the typical constituency of contemporary protest move-
ments. Thus, it is relevant to see how some Twitter tropes and in particular hashtags have come to
be appropriated in contemporary protest cultures: from the very name #occupywallstreet being
originally launched as an hashtag, and combinatory and ironic use of the #occupy meme into hun-
dreds of different hashtagged expressions including #occupycongress, #occupyeverything and
#occupyyourcouch.
What we find in these examples is the way in which certain technological features are appro-
priated as part of a specific protest jargon and of a connected protest culture. These expressions,
whose full meaning is only accessible to those who are ‘in the know’, and appreciate their irony,
are accompanied by the rise of mass names, such as Anonymous, Occupy, or indignados, which
act as new forms of identity, and which are often used as collective labels in social media conver-
sations. In this context, social media, as a language and a terrain of identification, becomes a
source of coherence as shared symbols, a centripetal focus of attention, which participants can
turn to when looking for other people in the movement. Unless we account this large cultural
framing, and the symbolic character of technology in protest culture, it is difficult to appreciate,
how it is possible for the micro-operations described by the authors to just fall in place somehow.
The second contention I have with Bennett, Segerberg and Walker’s article is their neglect of
the question of leadership. I have previously argued in my book Tweets and the Streets (2012) that
instead of eliminating leadership, as some internet evangelists would lead to believe, the use of the
internet and social media within contemporary social movements brings about new forms of soft
and distributed leadership. Bennett, Segerberg and Walker are definitely not naïve believers in the
power of the internet as a great equalizer of sorts (besides death naturally). They account for the
presence of power law distributions in the production of content, and talk about the presence of
‘core producers’, whereby ‘a small core set of participants contributed more intensely than others
and produced all elements of the organizational package’. Yet, they do not develop fully the impli-
cations of this finding. They do not reflect on the way in which this continuing presence of hier-
archy puts into question the imaginary of network they rely on, and their aggregative view of
protest communications, as something reducible to small and easily analysable building blocs.
 Information, Communication & Society 267

What we see in the current wave of digital movements is the rise of what can be best called as
a ‘digital vanguard’. These are digital communication teams, often bound together by links of
friendship and comradeship who take the lead in initiating and steering relevant internet conver-
sations. Terming these people simply as ‘core producers’ misses the point that the difference
between these people and ‘common participants’ is not a difference in degree but a difference
in kind. It is true that digital communication technologies make it possible for new leaders to
arise fast, and thus make leadership more meritocratic, and it is also true that it expands possibi-
lities of participation. But this does not elide that classic social movement distinction and asym-
metry between organizers and participants. It only makes the dividing line more porous and
renders leadership positions unstable. It is only if we hold to a notion of leadership that we
can account for questions of power in contemporary social movements, and to maintain a
sense of social movements as bestowed with a certain intentionality. There is no doubt that con-
temporary digital social movements are participatory. But what does participation mean? It is not
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a boundless expression of creativity, but rather the involvement in and contribution to a collective
space, that leadership groups, and digital vanguards are largely responsible for setting up, by
giving movements collective names, by coining a series of hashtags, of icons, of internet
memes, and in so doing constructing a basic operational identity.
As Bennett, Segerberg and Walker say ‘the many small and fitful contributions of the crowd
are all potentially important’ (p. 29). But to grasp their importance we need to understand them in
connection with a common culture and a common leadership. Indeed, we are witnessing the rise
of digital communication technologies in social movements, and this process is recasting organ-
izational forms along participatory lines. But this recasting should not be interpreted in the classic
post-modern way, inaugurated by Lyotard, as meaning the end of all grand macro- or molar
process, including the presence of a common culture and common forms of leadership. These
elements remain as important as ever, and need to be given more weight to depart from a
purely technical or instrumental interpretation of social movements and to from methodological
individualist views that see people as egotistical rational actors.
Bennett, Segerberg and Walker’s article also raises for me a fundamental sociological and
I would dare say philosophical question, of the relationship between the personal and the collec-
tive. The article reflects Bennett and Segerberg’s previous theorizing on ‘connective action’ as an
action that involves ‘individualised and technology organized sets of processes that result in
action without the requirement of collective identity’ (2012 p. 749). This logic according to
the authors ‘does not require strong organizational control or the symbolic construction of a
we’ (p. 748). The affirmations open the question of how it is then possible for social movements
to act coherently. And it is precisely to this question that Bennett, Segerberg and Walker try to
answer in Organization in the Crowd, and to do so, precisely by focusing on the role of the indi-
vidual participant in the ‘crowd’.
But is not the popularity of this jargon term ‘crowd’ Bennett, Segerberg and Walker, as many
others, have started to use as an alternative to the notion of network pointing us to an different way
to get to grips with the question of coherence in digital movements? The idea of ‘crowd’ as popu-
larized by phenomena such as crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding reinserts in our imaginary, an
idea of mass, of a collective force, that different from networks, cannot be reduced to a number of
individual nodes, in which individuality is fused into a collectivity. We see this type of imaginary
across different manifestations of contemporary digital culture. Just take the hacking group
Anonymous, which perfectly embodies the ‘digitally networked’ properties discussed by
Bennett, Segerberg and Walker. When Anonymous says ‘we are legion, we do not forget, we
do not forgive’, is it not precisely constructing that sense of ‘we’ that according to Bennett, Seger-
berg and Walker is not relevant anymore? And when different Twitter accounts use the icon of V
from V for Vendetta, or different variations on the name Anonymous and Occupy to name a
 268 P. Gerbaudo

Twitter account (@OccupyWallStreet, @OccupyNYC and @OccupyPhilly) are not they also
claiming participation in a ‘we’, as an entity that is not simply a network of connected individuals,
but a collective creature that is more than the sum of its parts? These practices are all in my con-
tention very clearly identity claims, by means of which an identification of the individual in the
collective is constructed through a fusion of the individual into a formless and enigmatic collec-
tive entity. This is a collectivity which has nothing to do with the collectivity of a Communist
Party or of a trade union, but which is no doubt a form of collectivity.
I profoundly agree with Bennett, Segerberg and Walker that contemporary forms of protest
action are personalized and utilize ‘personal action frames’. This reflects young people’s suspi-
cion towards traditional forms of collective organizations such as political parties or trade
unions. But this trend does not entail the irrelevance of collective identity, but rather the rise of
new forms of collective identity. What we are witnessing in fact, in this time of economic and
political crisis and instability, is a new desire for collectivity, in which individualized social
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media communications are often perceived simply as a springboard for a process of social and
physical recompositions. The new forms of collectivity that are manifested in the communications
of Occupy or Anonymous have little to share with the politics of the Old Left. They are ad hoc and
are characterized by evanescence and a certain enigmatic character. Yet, they are forms of collec-
tivity in which individual users through the internet and beyond come to develop a sense
of belonging to something bigger than themselves, and in which ‘the small and fitful contributions
of the crowd’, such as choosing a certain profile picture, posting certain hashtags or retweeting
certain messages appear in the guise of identity subscriptions, acts through individual internet
users assert: I belong.

Notes on contributor
Paolo Gerbaudo is Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London. He has worked as a
reporter for the Italian Left newspaper ‘il manifesto’ and has been involved in anti-corporate, global
justice and ecologist campaigns. [email: paolo.gerbaudo@kcl.ac.uk]

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