The Role of New Media in Protest Organisation

Awareness

Raising awareness is mainly achieved through the distribution of information and by talking about the event to as many people as possible. This is done by the organisations first and foremost by publishing the information of the organisation’s website and spreading the word via e-mail lists, as done by Action Aid and CACC. The organisations post relatively little plain information on the SNS profiles, they rather post links that direct the user to the information. This directs further traffic to the websites of the organisations in addition to those users that already have an interest in the organisation and access the website or subscribe to e-mail lists (Ward et al., 2005: 654).

Especially little information is generally found on Twitter which could be an indicator that Twitter is foremost used for updating and motivating followers to go to the information, rather than posting information on the march directly. It could be interpreted that Twitter is used more as a tactic for binding existing followers with updates, rather than recruiting new ones, as those will become aware of the march through other media and will then be linked to Twitter. On Facebook, on the other hand, 30 out or 30 posts by SCCC contain information. As Facebook allows for longer messages than Twitter, it is used more dominantly for the distribution of information, a traditional strategy by organisations (Costanza-Chock, 2003).

It was important for the organisations to also reach beyond their classic constituency in order to create a successful Wave protest. All organisations value face-to-face communication whenever possible, thus Action Aid spoke to young people at music festivals and Envision sent their volunteers to talk about the march with students. Nevertheless, all organisations have at least mentioned The Wave on their SNS profiles. As has become clear above, not all organisations have the resources to engage with social media on the same level. Still, organisations such as Envision or CACC have hardly used SNS in comparison with the larger organisations, thus not exploiting the full potential for interactivity, which could lead to higher awareness. This could have allowed for direct communication on an online and offline level, which still seems to be the most effective method for raising awareness. SNS are very effective in direct communication, because it is possible to distribute messages that sound personalised as if directed at an individual, but are received by all subscribed users (“Splashdance TONIGHT! If you’re in London, come on down! (Wear blue please) http://bit.ly/70MHyE 1:37 AM Nov 30th, 2009 from Facebook” by SCCC). This is especially possible on Facebook, as its interface is created for chat like communication. Also by engaging with the users on a personal level, as done by the SCCC by directly answering questions and also signing off the post by the author, the organisation is connected to the user on an individual level, which does not only raise their awareness, but could also lead the user to be more inclined to attend the march. Furthermore, through SNS one can potentially reach millions of people, more than would ever be possible via face-to-face communication.

A more traditional method for raising awareness is through mainstream media outlets, such as television, radio or print media. The coalition members have also pursued this method, while once again the larger organisations were more successful. Oxfam was involved in two art projects that were both featured by major newspapers. For a smaller organisation, access to the artists and the newspapers would have been much more difficult.

As media attention was already focused strongly on issues around climate change with the UN climate summit being one of the biggest international meeting of 2009, the political opportunity (Tarrow, 1998) was given to create The Wave and promote it as the biggest climate change march in the UK ever (which it achieved). Furthermore, the larger organisations linked the news stories to their SNS profiles, so that users had access to them. By publishing these links, SCCC in a way legitimises the march, as it has reached “traditional” media and has entered the offline world. This refers to Baudrillard’s criticism (1981: 176) that mass media distort the message of the protesters in their reporting. He suggests that street posters are the true protest communication as they provide protesters with clear information. This concept can be projected onto the posts of Facebook and Twitter. Here, the organisations have the possibility to publish their information without the filter of mass media and can reach a wide public of SNS members. Furthermore, the people who will be protesting can add their comments and suggestions to the discussion. This spoken word is what is crucial for Baudriallard, as it happens among the protesters. Both, street posters and SNS messages, certainly have a short lifespan, so they can also be compared in this aspect. As climate change is a very intangible phenomenon, at least in the Western hemisphere, people have to rely on the representation of the problem by the media (Howard-Williams, 2009: 9). Social media allow organisations to represent the problem in their own words. Although no formal cooperate partnership was established, the Guardian became a “fan” of the movement and featured the developments on their especially created UN climate summit section on the website. They actually had their own Guardian team twittering and posting messages from the march, without being related to the coalition (L. Brinicombe, 2010). This support was beneficial for the coalition of course, yet Tom was keen to stress that no cooperation existed. He argued that the event was not created to be staged as a media event, but was planned as a purely political march with the focus of putting pressure on the UK government, as “the whole idea was we wanted government to hear all those voices of all those people who feel passionately about climate change” (T. Allen, 2010).

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