TY - JOUR

T1 - Technology for Activism

T2 - Toward a Relational Framework

AU - Liu, Jun

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - While extant scholarship has yielded a nuanced picture of how people have used ICTs during political activism, less is known about why activists have appropriated and maneuvered some technologies but not others for political action, against different contexts. What, especially, would be the reasoning behind activists’ decision on use or nonuse of a specific technology? To answer the question, this study advances a relational approach that dissects the relevant, yet rarely addressed, link between Gibsonian affordance, understood as action possibilities, of technology, which underpins its subsequent (non)use as a ‘repertoire of contention,’ namely the practice and performance of political activism. Along with the relational approach, this study presents an empirical and comparative perspective to examine how and why Hongkongers selected, coordinated, or discarded various ICTs for activism in the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement. The findings reveal that activists hold diverse understandings and interpretations of technology and thereby strategically or tactically turn some technologies or functions of a certain technology into their contentious usage on the basis of affordances. The relational framework helps disclose specific dynamics of affordances behind repertoire selection and constraint.

AB - While extant scholarship has yielded a nuanced picture of how people have used ICTs during political activism, less is known about why activists have appropriated and maneuvered some technologies but not others for political action, against different contexts. What, especially, would be the reasoning behind activists’ decision on use or nonuse of a specific technology? To answer the question, this study advances a relational approach that dissects the relevant, yet rarely addressed, link between Gibsonian affordance, understood as action possibilities, of technology, which underpins its subsequent (non)use as a ‘repertoire of contention,’ namely the practice and performance of political activism. Along with the relational approach, this study presents an empirical and comparative perspective to examine how and why Hongkongers selected, coordinated, or discarded various ICTs for activism in the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement. The findings reveal that activists hold diverse understandings and interpretations of technology and thereby strategically or tactically turn some technologies or functions of a certain technology into their contentious usage on the basis of affordances. The relational framework helps disclose specific dynamics of affordances behind repertoire selection and constraint.

KW - Activism

KW - Affordance

KW - Comparative study

KW - Information and communication technology (ICT)

KW - Repertoire of contention

KW - The Anti-extradition Law Amendment Bill (anti-ELAB) movement

KW - Umbrella revolution

U2 - 10.1007/s10606-021-09400-9

DO - 10.1007/s10606-021-09400-9

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85104652309

VL - 30

SP - 627

EP - 650

JO - Computer Supported Cooperative Work

JF - Computer Supported Cooperative Work

SN - 0925-9724

ER -