Abstract
Research suggests that social media is a nascent movement towards an interactive and collaborative web due to its opportunity for online social participation and the creation of networked publics. The enhanced connectivity experienced between social media users has deepened and threaten democracy and changed the nature of the public sphere. Currently, there is a surge in academic scholarship around the democratizing power of the internet and social media, however, literature on how social media protests result in offline mobilization has not received much attention. This study examines how some Ghanaian netizens leveraged on social media, precisely Twitter, as a public sphere to launch, sustain and mobilize publics for the #fixthecountry online campaign and offline protest. Through the lenses of the public sphere theory and network society theory, the study utilizes cyber-ethnography to track how various online publics converged to embark on the social protest. The study established that through deliberate and random acts of curating, engaging, and selective reposting of opinions and news, netizens mobilized diverse publics with different socio-economic interest around the common campaign. The study also reveals that due to the convergence of traditional and social media, visible and consistent online issues informed discussions on traditional media which ultimately triggered offline attention and mobilization. This study adds to the literature by tracking how the #fixthecountry online mobilization manifested offline.
Presenters
Bismark Odum SackeyStudent, Master of Philosophy in Communication and Media Studies, University of Education, Winneba, Central, Gibraltar
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
SOCIAL MOBILIZATION, NETWORKED PUBLICS, PUBLIC SPHERE, TWITTER, ONLINE, OFFLINE
