Research piece #1: Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (book)

This book is useful to my research mainly because it gives me several perspectives on my topic of social media’s relationship to social protesting. It gives several examples of social media successfully helping some small-er nations, such as Egypt and Chile in 2011, as well as an example of social media failing to help bring about change in a large nation, specifically the United States and the Occupy Wall Street movement. This is very useful to me because I want to have a major focus of my paper regarding how social media doesn’t help in countries like our own and this book offers me a great example of just that. I’ll use this as a major part of the negative half of my research. I’m going to use the analysis the book offers regarding Occupy Wall Street and why it failed and compare it to my other researches examples where social media was helpful and their reasons why it was helpful.

Research piece #2: Unpacking the Use of Social Media for Protest Behavior: The Roles of Information, Opinion Expression, and Activism (peer-reviewed article)

This article is interesting because not only does it go over the positive relationship between social media and protesting activity, it also breaks down this phenomena into 3 explanations: information, opinion expression, and activism.  All of this is useful because it’s develops the positive part of my topic and goes into detail how social media is a positive driving force in protesting. In addition to this, this article features quantitative data gathered from protests in Chile in 2011, which will be helpful in justifying the positive half of my research.

Research piece #3: Social media’s legitimacy as protest (news article)

I find this article very helpful to my research because it addresses the type of question that brought me to want to research this topic in the first place: is tweeting and/or re-tweeting about a social issue actually doing anything? The author digs into this question by analyzing the definition of protesting and how tweeting your opinions relates to this. According to the definition, protesting is inciting discussion, and tweeting does that. In other words, protesting doesn’t need to be a physical event, it’s all discourse about a topic. If this is completely true, then social media would make up a major part of all protests. Although, this brings up more questions to me, such as ‘Is social media protesting as effective as physical protesting’, and ‘Has reform ever been accomplished through social media discourse alone?” All in all, this article is helpful to me because it brings up perspectives I haven’t initially considered and could possibly determine the future research I’ll be conducting.