A Three Essay Dissertation on Social Movements and Social Media

Abstract

Users of social media are now empowered to self-organize in new ways. In particular, participants of social movements have used social media to spread their message, organize their activities, and recruit others. For example, people against the Stop Online Piracy Act used Twitter as one mode of communication to generate momentum for their cause. The stakes of the SOPA movement were quite high as a large number of people were concerned about their privacy rights. However, the same social dynamics can occur in low stakes situations such as brand communities. For example, within the Starbucks brand community, people attempted to motivate Starbucks management to bring back old customer service rewards programs. I used text analysis in each of the three essays to dissect the messages and reveal the underlying social dynamics. The first essay investigates the use of influence tactics within text messages. The second essay is a grounded theory piece to understand how affective and cognitive processes evolve in a social movement based on the Twitter messages of the Stop Online Piracy Act. The theory developed in the second essay is re-visited in the third essay in a movement that can trace its roots back to the movement against the Stop Online Piracy Act. In doing so, this dissertation provides insights into understanding how the use of affective and cognitive words influences the trajectory of a social movement.