Abstract
Social movements often make an important contribution to the normative order within social life but how are their dynamics changing under conditions of social morphogenesis? It is clear that the emergence and normalisation of social media entail affordances for mobilisation that have important implications for social movements. However there is little agreement upon precisely what these implications are and whether they can or should be evaluated in general terms. This chapters takes a novel approach to this question, exploring the technological dimensions of social morphogenesis and their consequences for the ‘distracted people’ who comprise social movements. Using the relational realist theory developed by Margaret Archer and Pierpaolo Donati, I offer a novel account of the constitution of social movements that invites us to ask questions about the emergence and durability of new movements that are obscured by alternative theoretical approaches which fail to recognise both the emergent and relational constitution of collectives.
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Notes
- 1.
For instance what effect a particular movement had upon the lives of the activists who participated in it or how the movement was shaped by the particular route of these activists into it.
- 2.
Who can of course seek to evade such a call by retreating from the complexity of political questions.
- 3.
This popular phrase is being avoided for reasons which will hopefully become clear as the chapter progresses.
- 4.
For instance in concerns over tax avoidance or in outcries over the most egregious cases of oppression against those workers producing mobile consumer technology.
- 5.
General Motor’s profits are adjusted for 2015s money and Apple’s profits are projected by Lanchester on the basis of their first quarter results.
- 6.
See also Crouch (2004).
- 7.
See Crawford and Schultz (2014) for a conceptual discussion of the harms produced through such interventions.
- 8.
We should not be satisfied with an account of the user experience of digital technology but such a taxonomy can prove a useful starting point for elaborating a sociological account of the mechanisms underpinning these changing experiences.
- 9.
That these metaphors, which were so vividly represented within a popular culture that they permeated for some time, now seem so jarringly anachronistic illustrates the necessity of getting beyond empiricism in the study of Digitalization. See Lupton (2014: 168–175) for a perceptive discussion of digital technology and the phenomenology of embodiment.
- 10.
This technological possibilities opened up by web 3.0 raise important questions about intellectual property: Lanier’s (2014) pessimistic analysis could be combined with Archer’s (2015) account from the previous volume to forecast that this ‘computationalization of everyday life’ will intensify the advantages accrued through computational superiority, offering both motive and means to pursue further closure.
- 11.
For sake of brevity, a substantial discussion of the diffusion dynamics of these technologies was removed from this chapter. Suffice to say, it is not being assumed that these technological changes impact evenly upon all users (or for the matter that people respond to them in the same ways). The framework offered in this section will be developed at a later date into an empirically richer account of these changes as temporally and spatially sequenced.
- 12.
The potential costs of this approach for reflexivity are considered in the final part of this section.
- 13.
As Wajcman (2015) notes, aspects of our mundane domestic apparatus tend to be overlooked by theorists of technologically driven acceleration.
- 14.
All the available data suggests that the “working woman is much busier than either her male colleagues or her housewife counterpart” (Wajcman 2015: 68).
- 15.
For instance the diffusion of washing machines accompanied an increasing expectation about how regularly clothes were washed (Wajcman 2015: 119–120).
- 16.
See Wajcman (2015: 78–82).
- 17.
There is nothing inevitable about this failure to make additional time available for new responsibilities. However, it is less likely under conditions when roles expand through innovation-led drift. It will also be less likely when, as discussed later in the section, the novelty in turn weakens the position of employees vis-à-vis employers under circumstances where labour unions which might organize to pursue such a goal are already weak.
- 18.
To be clear, digital technology is far from the only factor leading to employees in many sectors being asked ‘to do more with less’.
- 19.
This is likely to reach its apotheosis with entirely metricised research assessment within the UK, reflecting a broader tendency towards the metricisation of the academy that has been building for many years (Burrows 2012).
- 20.
At least in the sense of external goods.
- 21.
In a work of journalism which nonetheless compares well with much qualitative research by academic social scientists.
- 22.
Though the strain of living this way may very well lead to the development of expressive reflexivity over time.
- 23.
The fact it is possible to participate in social movement events without feeling in any way part of the social movement in question is an interesting phenomenon that it would be valuable to explore empirically.
- 24.
Obviously, any ‘we’ will necessarily have a symbolic component in so far as that there is a reciprocal recognition of being known to one another as a minimum condition of being a ‘we’ rather than a disconnected aggregate of anonymous strangers. The point is that a sense of who ‘we’ are and what ‘we’ are doing is much more durable when a genuinely collective project has emerged to which individuals orientate themselves as evaluative beings. Participants in an online crowd action, or even strangers coming together for a flash mob, might recognize themselves as one of a (temporary) collective in which they are fallibly aware of others having a corresponding recognition but an absent relational history means any such collective is fragile, as well as fleeting, even if the collective project might be a meaningful accomplishment for those concerned. This experience would likely contrast to that of the non-governmental organization team who planned and enacted such a successful online campaign. The familiar rhetoric of openness is belied by a surreptitious privatism when collective activity is reliant upon existing closed networks to co-ordinate the action of strangers.
- 25.
This phrase is used as a place holder for the diverse range of personal motivations which contribute to social movement participation. This chapter necessarily proceeds at a level of generality which does a disservice to the empirical variability of the topic. Hopefully this is justified because of the potential utility of the account developed for later empirical work into this topic.
- 26.
That is to say these are questions about how to organize one’s life, how to prioritize one’s work and establish ‘productive’ routines as opposed to matters of psychopathology, putative or otherwise.
- 27.
For those unfamiliar with Twitter, a hashtag is a stamp that indexes individual messages as sharing a topic. By affixing a hashtag (e.g. #JeSuisCharlieHebdo) a user signifies that their tweet relates to a broader trend. The most popular hashtags are displayed prominently as ‘trending’ and this encourages users to adopt them when sending messages. The contents of a hashtag can be read in real time by any user, as I found myself doing obsessively late on the evening of the attacks.
- 28.
- 29.
Rather than the familiar dichotomy of individual action and collective action, we are talking about how present collective action might shape future individual action and, in turn, contribute to future collective action. The fact the category itself is impossible to sustain without a stratified ontology makes it easy to see how this could be overlooked.
- 30.
Under these conditions, it is possible that collective reflexivity at the micro level might thrive. In fact this might be something deliberately sought by those who wish to preserve the evacuation of the political sphere.
- 31.
Compounding the communicative escalation to which, as discussed at the start of the conclusion, the logic of competition in which ‘good causes’ are enmeshed gives rise.
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Carrigan, M. (2016). The Fragile Movements of Late Modernity. In: Archer, M. (eds) Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity . Social Morphogenesis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28439-2_9
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