Undermining Anarchy resubmission.pdf (126.07 kB)
Undermining anarchy: Facebook’s influence on anarchist principles of organisation in Occupy Wall Street
journal contribution
posted on 2017-04-06, 11:18 authored by Thomas Swann, E. HustedThis paper contributes to debates around the political potential of social media by examining Occupy Wall Street and activist’s use of Facebook. Drawing on concepts rooted in cybernetics and anarchist political theory, the paper argues that the shift in Occupy Wall Street from being a physical protest camp in late 2011 to an online movement in 2012 coincided with a shift in social media activity. On the one hand, analysis of Facebook activity suggests a move from functional to anatomical hierarchy; on the other, it points towards a move from many-to-many communication to one-to-many communication. In conclusion, we argue that this development has served to undermine the movement’s anarchist principles of organisation.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Politics and International Studies
Published in
The Information SocietyVolume
33Issue
4Citation
SWANN, T. and HUSTED, E., 2017. Undermining anarchy: Facebook’s influence on anarchist principles of organisation in Occupy Wall Street. The Information Society, 33(4), pp.192-204.Publisher
© Taylor & Francis (Routledge)Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-02-23Publication date
2017-06-02Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Information Society on 02 Jun 2017, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2017.1318195ISSN
1087-6537Publisher version
Language
- en