Technologies of Self-Mediation: Affordances and Constraints of Social Media for Protest Movements

Despite the many critiques (Cammaerts, 2008), it also has to be acknowledged that, in line with some of the more optimistic accounts, social media and so-called Web 2.0 applications have played both an instrumental and a constitutive role for activists worldwide in their efforts to disseminate social movement discourses, to mobilize for direct actions online as well as offline, to coordinate direct action, and to self-mediate acts of resistance potentially leading to movement spill-overs. In this chapter I seek to provide a conceptual framework to make sense of the roles that social media play for protest movements and the interplay between affordances and constraints inherent to social media. The affordances, I will argue, map onto what I call a set of self-mediation logics, which in turn correspond to Foucault’s Stoic technologies of the self: disclosure, examination, and remembrance.