Thesis
Virtual hostilities: an examination of negative discourse among social movements on the Internet
Washington State University
Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
2011
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/102732
Abstract
This paper examines negative discourse that occurs on the Internet and is targeted at social movements. All analyses were run using a dataset consisting of over 2,000 websites sampled and content coded over a four year period. Contention among social movements has typically been studied using the movement/countermovement framework, which focuses on movement pairs consisting of two social movements that are in direct opposition to one another. To date, there has been little, if any, work done examining this framework‟s applicability to social movement activity on the Internet. But recent work done on social movement activity on the Internet more generally, has shown that use of the technology has allowed for fundamental changes in key determinants of behavior of social movement organizations and affiliated individuals. This paper‟s results show that the movement/countermovement framework may not be applicable in an online context, as most of the hostilities found did not occur in movement/countermovement dyads. Further findings demonstrate that on the Internet, both website format and conservative affiliation of websites both play a large role in determining whether sites will target social movement organizations in a negative manner. These findings are significant because they demonstrate that scholars need to exercise caution in extending social movement theory from offline to online settings, and that new factors, specific to the Internet, need to be accounted for.
Metrics
Details
- Title
- Virtual hostilities
- Creators
- Jayson Hunt
- Contributors
- Erik W. Johnson (Degree Supervisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Sociology, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University; Pullman, Wash. :
- Identifiers
- 99900524806401842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis