How Social Media Shape Political Organization: Mediated Participation, Leadership and Collaboration at the Youth Food Movement and Young Democrats

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How Social Media Shape Political Organization

Mediated Participation, Leadership and Collaboration at the Youth Food Movement and Young Democrats

University of Amsterdam

Media Studies, research MA

Thesis

Name: Ingrid van Rijt

Student number: 5734460

Date: 16 August 2015

Supervisor: Thomas Poell

Second readers: Stefania Milan & Bernhard Rieder

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ABSTRACT – The rise of social media has started to transform the manner in which public

protest is organized in ways that challenge traditional notions of political organization. Main claims in the debate assert that social media have enabled a new mode of political organization that is leaderless and based on open, horizontal networking by facilitating personalized political communication on a massive scale. However, current scholarship lacks insight into the workings of internal organizational social media communication and how this shapes contemporary movements from the inside out. In addition, conventional political organizations, which have adopted social media in their daily operations as well, are largely left out of scope. In light of the supposition that social media enable a new mode of political organization, it becomes important to critically explore the relation between the two from these additional perspectives. To this aim, this research examines and compares how social media involvement affects both contemporary action networks and conventional political organizations from a socio-technical perspective. It analyzes the ongoing processes of organizing in their everyday contexts, in which core individuals interact and engage through social media spaces within a dynamic ecology of data streams. Based on four weeks of ethnographical study of the Youth Food Movement and Jonge Democraten (Young Democrats), I claim that working through social media introduces various social and technical challenges to participation, leadership and collaboration. In turn, these give rise to new leadership strategies and organizational relations, rather than replace them. Yet, the shaping influence of social media embedded in organizational practice is critically coupled to organizational negotiations with the technologies and is not singularly connected to one organizational form.

KEY WORDS

social media – political organization – collective action – networks – interaction – engagement – participation – leadership – collaboration – ethnography – social media logic – socio-technical analysis

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Acknowledgements

This thesis would not have been possible without the support of a number of people. I would like to thank my supervisor, Thomas Poell, for his guidance, patience and indispensable feedback through e-mails and meetings both in Amsterdam and on Skype from California. I would like to thank the second readers, Stefania Milan and Bernhard Rieder, for taking the time out of their summer to evaluate my work. The student advisors from the department of Mediastudies at the UvA, in particular Marianne Harbers, I would like to thank for helping me sort out my study program the last few years. Moreover, I am thankful to the coordinators and all the academic staff of the research master. They composed a program that I used as a kaleidoscope from which to learn and draw inspiration. Doing so helped me to develop a critical perspective on the media in our culture. I would also like to thank my fellow students for having shared with me their ideas and research interests, for our intellectual conversations and shared excitement, confusion, laughter, and above all else for their motivational company during long days, coffee breaks and lunches in the university library.

In addition, my special thanks go out to all the people from the Youth Food Movement and the Jonge Democraten who donated their time to this research. I have enjoyed learning from you, talking with you and am grateful for the experiences and opinions you entrusted me. Furthermore, I would especially like to thank Joszi Smeets and Dirkjan Tijs, whose efforts helped me to unlock valuable sources of information in these respective organizations.

Lastly, I would like to thank my family and friends for their unconditional love, comfort and support. Those who kept believing in me and those who reminded me that after all the hard work I would make it were invaluable in helping me bring this thesis to a successful conclusion, I am forever grateful.

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1. Introduction

The rise of social media has started to transform the manner in which public protest is organized in ways that challenge traditional notions of political organization. The technological infrastructures and features of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, allow political messages to be individually constructed, adapted to personal ideas, shared and reach large-scale audiences in a manner that mostly bypass formal organizations and mass media. Because of this, these platforms are supposed to have enabled an entirely new mode of political organization, in which the technological infrastructure of social media is considered a constitutive element that enables personalized, leaderless, and horizontally networked political action (e.g. Bennett and Segerberg, 2013; Castells 2012).

Surely, social media have dramatically altered the ways in which communication can be made public and become widespread. Yet, in the light of the perceived organizational changes, it is important to note that social media provide many private communicative features as well, such as Twitter Direct Messages, closed and secret Facebook Groups, and Facebook Messenger. Moreover, in tandem with the advent of smartphones, the social media ecosystem has become intermixed with services like Slack and WhatsApp. Indeed, the importance of texting has been noted in a couple of studies on the recent protest waves (Eltantaway and Wiest 2011; Tufekci and Wilson 2012; Castells 2012). Even though these ‘private’ communication technologies are central to a lot of contemporary activism, their organizational implications have not received much scholarly attention.

The Youth Food Movement (YFM), which was established in 2009, heavily relies on social media for its organizational and communicational purposes. YFM started out as a group of young activists in Amsterdam that made strategic use of Facebook and Twitter to generate awareness for the issues they wanted to advocate. Within five years, according to their own year plan, the movement counted almost four hundred official members and almost 7000 ‘likes’ of their Facebook Page1. The movement has maintained an open and inclusive public profile. YFM promotes ‘good, clean, and fair food’ and strives for sustainable changes in the food system. There is no clearly defined political agenda. Instead, YFM strives to inspire and connect people and organizations in different areas of the food system, as well as raise awareness among the general public to help create a positive change.

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In the last few years YFM has also been developing its internal structure, by setting up regional committees and a physical office with a director and a small number of employees. Social media have been essential to this development. Employees at the office started working together through a Facebook Group and WhatsApp and have recently switched to Slack2 and a Trello3. At the same time, regional committees could by created with the help of Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts, set up by the office’s communication manager. Their internal communication is organized through closed Facebook Groups and chat programs such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. These practices played an important role in how the movement has taken shape. Yet, while the public communication and mobilization activities of new social movement have been extensively studied, much less research has been devoted to how such private communication shapes organizational dynamics from the inside out. Of course this has several obvious reasons, of which the most imperative is that internal organizational communication is very difficult to obtain for researchers.

In addition, it should be observed that Web-based advocacy movements such as YFM represent only a part of all modes of political organizations. The most common are still conventional political organizations that were founded before the advent of social media and which chiefly operate offline. These organizations also use social media in their daily communication, especially when younger generations are involved. The Jonge Democraten (Young Democrats; JD) can be considered as a prime example of such an organization. The political youth organization was established in 1984 and has over five thousand members. While the JD has organizational ties with one of the national political parties, Democrats 66 (D66), it has its own political program and organizes member activities throughout the year. The JD has one national and several regional Twitter accounts and Facebook Pages for official public social media communication, moderated by members of the corresponding boards. In addition, the national Facebook Group is active daily has over two thousand Facebook members, which are mostly official members as well 4 . Moreover, both organizational and social interactions have partly moved to Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp Group Chats. Taken together, these activities have become integrated in and

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Slack is a “messaging app for teams”. Slack. 13 August 2015. <http://www.slack.com>.

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Trello is a board or “list of lists filled with cars, used with a team or by yourself”. Trello. 13 August 2015. <http://www.trello.com>.

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Jonge Democraten. “Public Group.” Facebook. 13 August 2015. <https://www.facebook.com/groups/jongedemocraten/?fref=ts>.

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started to affect the internal organizational workings of the JD. Yet, not much is known about how social media usage shapes these older forms of political organization. Seeing as such developments have been most extensively studied in explicit relation to contemporary movements, it becomes especially interesting to examine the implications of their social media use and compare them to those in conventional organizations. Moreover, regarding the claim that organizing through social media replaces the need for formal organization and leadership, a comparison concerning these particular issues is relevant.

Therefore, this thesis will examine and compare how social media, including private forms of communication, are involved in the organizational practices of Web-based and conventional political organizations. The main question guiding the analysis will be how social media are intertwined with and shape the organizational dynamics of both. In Chapter 2, I will start by discussing relevant literature with regard to the connection between social media and observed transformations in political organizations and develop an analytical perspective suited to this research. Chapter 3 contains an outline of the methodological approach. In Chapter 4, I will give detailed descriptions of the operations of the two case studies, the Youth Food Movement and the Jonge Democraten, and discuss the significance of social media practices in their respective organizational contexts. Chapter 5 entails a discussion of social media principles and features that relate to and affect internal organizational participation. In Chapter 6, I will discuss how operating through social media can steer organizational processes. In Chapter 7, I will reflect on the manner in which social media blend with collaborative practices. Chapter 8 will contain a conclusion on my findings.

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2. Shaping political organizations

This section discusses the key arguments and insights that have been developed in current research on social media and the two modes of political organization. While acknowledging the importance of the work done so far, I will provide a critical evaluation of the scope and subsequent claims of these studies. Moreover, I will develop a theoretical approach suited to studying how social media are involved in organizational dynamics of both Web-based and conventional political organizations, with specific attention for the role played by ‘private’ social media communication.

2.1 Contemporary movements

The field of social movement research has focused most on changes in political organizations that relate to the utilization of social media technologies, in particular with regard to the mass communication of self-published content on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in public mobilizations. This heightened scholarly attention is partly due to the recent global wave of protest in which social media were organizationally involved, starting with the Arab Spring protests in Tunisia and Egypt and including the Occupy Movement (see e.g. Castells 2012; Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Eltantaway and Wiest 2011; Lim 2012; Juris 2012; Howard and Hussain 2013). Some of the key claims in the debate have been made by scholars Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg in The Logic of Connective Action (2013) and Manuel Castells’ Networks of Outrage and Hope (2012). Both studies argue that contemporary communication networks have made a new mode of organizing possible that is based on personalized, large-scale horizontal networking, thereby replacing the need for formal organization and leadership.

Bennett and Segerberg (2013) argue that social media have enabled a new logic of political organizing, which they call connective action. They contrast this logic with the more familiar logic of collective action, as formulated by Mancur Olson (1965), which focuses on “the organizational dilemma of getting individuals to join in actions” to attain a certain public good (Bennett and Segerberg 2013, 27). Olson’s formulation of the organizational problem is based on the premise that individuals act out of self-interest and have a tendency to free-ride on the efforts of other people in large groups. Therefore, following the traditional logic, it was necessary to cultivate collective action frames – these were generally based on group identities or ideologies – that would bind individuals to a common cause with the help of

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strong leadership and organizations with professional staff and resources (McAdam, McCarthy and Zald 1996; Snow and Benford 1988; Benford and Snow 2000). By contrast, Bennett and Segerberg propose that the ability to share personalized political content through social media has changed the organizing process to such an extent, that it has replaced the need for such organizational control. Connective action networks are supposed to rely on the

symbolic inclusiveness and technological openness of these new media instead, denoting that

“political content in the form of easily personalized ideas” can be shared “among friends, among trusted others, and beyond” through “texts, tweets, social network sharing, or posting YouTube mashups via phone, computer or some other personal device” (37). They argue that the technological affordances tie in well with this day and age of “personalized politics” that “has to do with citizens seeking more flexible association with causes, ideas, and political organization” (5). Allowing individuals to join in actions according to their personal motivations in this manner, social media are supposed to bypass the need for organizations to foster a collective identity. Thusly, according to Bennett and Segerberg, Olson’s traditional organizational dilemma is overcome by the coordinative mechanisms of social media.

The work of Manuel Castells (2012) shows significant parallels to that of Bennett and Segerberg. According to Castells, political organization originates in the power of symbolic construction, which depends on processes such as the framing and spread of messages 5 (6). These have significantly transformed in recent years. He claims that new technologies particularly enable “mass-self communication” (see also: Castells 2009), which is communication “from many to many, with the potential of reaching a multiplicity of receivers and of connecting to endless networks”, while the “production of the message is autonomously decided by the sender, the designation of the receiver is self-directed and the retrieval of messages from the networks of communication is self-selected” (6-7). Ultimately, Castells argues that recent movements “do not need a formal leadership, command or control center, or a vertical organization to distribute information or instructions”, because symbolic construction is already processed by these interactive, horizontal networks (221). Moreover, he infers that these changes optimize individuals’ abilities to participate, reasoning that “these are open-ended networks without defined boundaries” (221-222).

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The power in symbolic construction to which Castells refers, strongly resembles the understanding of action frames and symbolic inclusiveness in the work of Bennett and Segerberg (2013). It indicates the mobilizing potential of shared meanings or, a sense of togetherness (Castells 2012, 225).

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The works of Castells (2012), Bennett and Segerberg (2013) provide several of the most influential claims on how the rise of social media affects contemporary protest networks. They show that the ability of individuals to disseminate personalized political messages to potentially massive audiences has become a significant element in the dynamics of mobilization through action frames. However, Castells, Bennett and Segerberg understand social media primarily as platforms that facilitate the personal sharing of content. This problematizes their extensive claims that social media make formal organization and leadership altogether unnecessary. That is to say, they adopt a limited perspective on the relationship between social media and contemporary political organization.

To start with, the studies do not take into account the internal dimension of organizational processes: the mediated practices of individuals through which contemporary movements are shaped from the inside out. Several ethnographical studies have indicated that (groups of) core organizers played a crucial role during the Arab Spring and in the Occupy Movement, by steering and coordinating mobilizing efforts (e.g. Gerbaudo 2012; Lim 2012; Terranova and Donovan 2013). The fact that core organizers were active in these prototypical contemporary protest networks contradicts – by definition – the idea that they function mainly by means of massive many-to-many communication. Indeed, in Tweets and the

Streets (2012), Paolo Gerbaudo even asserts that “for all its participatory ideals, the process of mobilization always involves inequalities and asymmetries in which there are people who mobilize and people who are mobilized, people who lead and people who follow, and the two categories only ever partly overlap” (165). Thus, research on social media in political

organization should remain open to differences in the levels of participation as well as instances of leadership.

Even more, activist tweeps and Facebook admins have been pointed out as the leaders of new forms of protest communication (Gerbaudo 2012; Poell et al. forthcoming). Gerbaudo claims that the “liquid and informal character of contemporary movements” relates to “new forms of ‘choreographic’ leadership” that have emerged together with the personal nature as well as the interactive elements of communication through social media (2012, 17). Poell et al., more specifically, have paid attention “the evolving relationship between administrators and users” through the “most engaged with messages” on a Facebook Page on the basis of likes, comments and posts (forthcoming, 6). Doing so, they expand on the argument of Della Ratta and Valeriani that the function of these new kinds of leaders continues to be “to connect

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people and information, framing the latter in ways that might generate support for the movement itself” with an exploration of concrete leadership strategies in protest communication on social media (Poell et al, forthcoming; Della Ratta and Valeriani 2012; see also: McAdam, McCarty and Zald 1996; Melucci 1996; Della Porta and Diani 1999; Snow, Soule and Kriesi 2004). Referring to the central positions of these admins, these studies also prompt questions regarding the way inequalities in participation reflect in the mediated engagements of individual users. It would be useful to reexamine to what extent contemporary movements can be understood as open-ended networks in the ecosystem of social media, and how to position the participation of key figures in their online operations.

In addition, the internal, private uses of social media and organizational relations therein should be studied. Many activists make a distinction between external and internal communicative practices (Askanius and Gustafsson 2010; Treré 2012; Barassi and Treré 2012; Terranova and Donovan 2013; Agarwal et al. 2014). Whereas an external medium is a window through which the “outside world” can get an idea of what the movement was up to” an internal medium is “a practical tool used by the activists themselves” (Askanius and Gustafsson 2010, 28). Furthermore, Gerbaudo interestingly claims, building on the work of Jo Freeman about ‘new social movements’ from the 1960s onwards (1972), that contemporary action networks still tend to develop informal hierarchies (2012, 24). In this light, it is important to study how social media might (re)shape internal communication between core organizers and how they affect cooperation and hierarchical relations.

Important, in this respect, are several studies on processes of mobilization in more formal types of organization, such as electoral campaigns. Fisher (2012) and Bimber (2014) show that the involvement of social media does not exclude the possibility for social-movement like mobilizations to be backed by highly structured organizations – with layers of strategists, consultants, staffers and volunteers – which develop innovative technological strategies for mobilization and are resource-rich. In a striking example of social media enabling organizers to engage in top-down communication, Bimber argues that, in the Obama Campaign of 2012, personalized political communication had gone beyond stimulating the “personalized entrepreneurialism” of supporting volunteers. In addition, it entailed the exploiting of “data analytics to engage in an unprecedented level of personalized message-targeting” (2014, 131). What these studies point out is that social media technologies not only facilitate organizational communication that is horizontal and many-to-many but that they also enable top-down and controlled communicative mechanisms.

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Nielsen (2009), in turn, concentrates the lowered costs and ease of communication via new ICTs rather than on the possibility to join in action with personalized ideas. In particular, he argues that the influx of communicative possibilities creates novel and interrelated challenges for collaborative efforts within mobilizing teams, imploring activists to develop strategies to deal with overcommunication, miscommunication and communicative overload (277). With that, he counters “the myth of frictionless collaboration” and argues that new technologies “do not make traditional organizing challenges go away, even if their adoption does change the form they take” (278). Taken together, these studies show that it is important to examine how collaboration and offline hierarchical relations are enacted through social media and correlate to new organizational challenges and strategies.

A second problematic factor in current scholarship is that scholars like Castells (2012), Bennett and Segerberg (2013) focus on the agency that social media lend to users. Similar to the work of Internet enthusiasts like Clay Shirky, the technologies are understood as tools that enhance group formation and collaboration (2008; 2010). This perspective assumes that organizing through social media gives rise to autonomous organizational configurations. However, other scholars have emphasized the fact that social media actually steer activists’ – and other users’ – interactions and lead to socio-technical struggles (Langlois et al. 2009; Milan 2013; Poell and Van Dijck 2015). This might be explained with notions drawn from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the work of Bruno Latour specifically. According to Latour (2005), technology should be considered as an actor in social processes for the simple reason that it is an object that “might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid” any action of a user (72). Social media in particular are a very dynamic type of object, in constant development and controlled by corporations.

With that, it becomes clear that techno-commercial strategies partly design organizing activities through social media. On the one hand, these strategies concern questions of who controls the platforms you are using and what their policies and business models are (e.g. Youmans and York 2012; Poell and Van Dijck 2015). On the other hand, they can be located in the principles and features that are built into the technological architecture of social media and enable specific kinds of user actions, such as ‘sharing’, ‘liking’, ‘retweeting’ and more. Together, they have a significant impact on organizational processes, seeing as the types of interactions that social media can push particular communicative patterns (Poell and Van Dijck 2015).

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Therefore, more knowledge on how organizers adapt to these technological forces is needed. The ethnographical studies of Tiziana Terranova and Joan Donovan (2013) and Stefania Milan (2013) further demonstrate this want. Donovan, who was a member of the media committee at Occupy Los Angeles, describes how the Twitter hashtag ‘#OccupyWallstreet’ was initially used to communicate among invested activists. However, “the search term quickly became impossible to follow” due to massive growth and an online platform called ‘InterOccupy.net’ was developed (Terranova and Donovan 2013, 298). Further, Milan maintains that radical techies collaborate in an informal non-hierarchical manner where one “I” encounters other “I”s (2013, 87). The organizational work form is linked to the technology that they operate through and develop themselves. Together, these studies imply that particular attention for activists’ negotiations with social media technology is valuable to analyze the manner in which they become part a constitutive part of dynamics.

In sum, I have argued that the seminal work of Castells (2012), Bennett and Segerberg (2013) is based on a limited perspective of the relations between social media and political organization. In particular, I highlighted the importance of the internal communication among invested activists and their negotiations with techno-commercial strategies in the shaping of an organizational configuration. Studies that address these additional dimensions, suggest that organizational challenges relating participation, leadership and collaboration have transformed together with social media involvement rather than having been overcome. In order to develop a better understanding of how organizing through social media shapes political organizations in these respects, a further exploration is needed of the internal communication and cooperation practices among (groups of) core activists that is sensitive to the interrelatedness of social and technological processes.

2.2

Membership organizations

The work of Bruce Bimber, Andrew Flanagin and Cynthia Stohl (2012) provides valuable ideas on how social media shape a more conventional type of political organization. In

Collective Action in Organizations, they examine how new technologies have affected

membership organizations. The scholars adopt an understanding of technology which is similar to that of Castells (2012), Bennett and Segerberg (2013). They emphasize that “the digital-media environment facilitates transactions at the level of individuals” and argue that

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therefore they “place power and agency” in the hands of members “rather than […] central locations like the leaders of formal organizations” (18). Nevertheless, their conclusions about the transformations in membership organizations are rather contrary to the ones made in reference to contemporary movements. Most notably, because they insist from the start that “organization and hierarchy are hardly dead” despite the use of these new technologies (17).

Their main claim is based on the premise that digital technologies have changed the conditions that determine how “membership and opportunity” are enacted – benefiting the position of the individual member in relation to the organization (18). With regard to the question of how digital technologies affect the problem of collective action, they argue that that the principle of individual agency does not promote more or less participation in organizations but rather facilitates personal variations in membership style6. The crucial difference in the work of these scholars relative to theories of contemporary action networks is that they do not address the construction and spread of political content. They concentrate on new possibilities for ‘interaction’ and ‘engagement’ instead. More specifically, they argue that digital technologies enhance individual members’ “capacity to interact personally with others in organizations” and “engage with the organization”, which comprises “the ways that people are able to learn about the organization, its goals, and its successes or failures, and the opportunities for people to play a role in shaping what the organization does” (19).

Thus, Bimber, Flanagin and Stohl provide a useful perspective to examine how social media become intertwined with internal communication and cooperation, namely along the axes of individual ‘interaction’ and ‘engagement’ practices. In turn, highlighting these practices can be a starting point to explore negotiations between users and technological forces. However, in light of previous arguments, the fact that the scholars approach the role of technology primarily as context makes it difficult to discern the influence of specifically social media architectures in organizational interactions. What should be examined in more detail is how platforms and applications enable or limit ways of interacting and engaging, and what organizational patterns result from these technologically shaped activities.

In addition, their analysis spurs critical questions regarding the existence and form of organization and hierarchical relations in this new communication environment. Choosing individual member experience as the object of study, Bimber, Flanagin and Stohl for the main

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Four participatory styles are distinguished: ‘enthusiasts’, ‘individualists’, ‘traditionalists’ and ‘minimalists’ (Bimber, Flanagin and Stohl 2012, 170-171).

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part “looked outward from each organization” and largely passed by on examining how mediated interaction and engagement among core individuals structures internal organizational patterns (2012, 187). Moreover, they seem to consider the ‘organization’ and its ‘members’ as separate entities. Meanwhile, I would argue that the prevalent view that digital technologies particularly enable various interactions at the individual level should be applied to conventional organizations as well. Here, I mean we should bear in mind that a conventional organization comprises of a multiplicity of individual organizers that have adopted social media use in their organizational practices aside their non-organizing members. In this light, it becomes interesting to examine how these organizers’ practices through social media (re)shape the organizational form and hierarchies in which they operate.

2.3 Socio-technical analysis

Based on the existing literature, I observed a knowledge gap on the relationship between social media and transformations in political organization with regard to internal mediated participation and leadership, both in Web-based advocacy movements and conventional political organizations. In order to understand the influence of new conditions of interaction and engagement on political organizing more fully, I will adopt a socio-technical perspective throughout the rest of this research. Doing so I will draw on insights from ethnographic research and the conceptual framework of social media logic (Van Dijck and Poell 2013).

In her ethnographical study of an ‘old’ social movement, Veronica Barassi discusses network analysis in social movement research and its growing importance in mapping “the social structure of movements” while explaining the relationship between changes in organization form and the use of internet technologies (2013, 48). In particular, she critiques the prominence of quantitative approaches and emphasis on structures of communication and advocates, like others have done in part, the importance of complementary qualitative network analysis (Mische 2008; Juris 2008; Saunders 2007). Agreeing with Barassi, I will argue that understanding (contemporary) social movements, as well as conventional organizations, as “complex processes of negotiation and interaction rather than structures […] is of central importance” (50). Most importantly, because studying organizations within the context of their mundane activities helps “to gain an in-depth knowledge of the internal, political beliefs and practices that define the everyday construction of collective action” and to explore how they “negotiate with and adapt to the techno-historical transformations of our

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times” (Barassi 2013, 60). Internal mediated practices of interaction and engagement and their significance become visible by acknowledging and analyzing the everyday processes.

Further, Milan and Hintz (2010) have pointed out that scholars “usually focus on actors that are easily identifiable, structured according to known models, and acting according to known repertoires of action” (838). In trying to grasp the changes brought about by the use of social media in political organizations, many researchers have approached the ‘new’ departing from what is known about the ‘old’, building on and contrasting ideas against existing models. Yet, this is not an exhaustive approach to analyzing organizational patterns that “fall out of the known frameworks” (ibid.), especially considering the view that the ecosystem of social media processes organizational activities according to its own logic (Van Dijck and Poell 2013). In order to understand new dynamics, it is useful to study them in their own right.

The work of Barassi provides an additional analytical perspective for this task, by arguing that in political organization “networking practices create multiple and overlapping

spaces of action and meaning” in which the organizing process unfolds (49). Taking into

account this spatial dimension, social media can be considered as distinct socio-technical

spaces, meaning the communicative spaces that are constituted by media networks7 (57). Social media fundamentally differ from other kinds of socio-technical spaces such as post, fax, telephone calls and websites. In and through social media, people live in “ecology of data

streams” that is underpinned by “the use of technical devices that allow users to manage and

rely on” real-time feeds while they become sources of data themselves as well (Berry 2011, 143). Moreover, social media services are commercial constructs “vulnerable to shifting and ever-changing social and cultural habits” of users, the potential influence of a social medium is therefore “largely influenced by its adoption” throughout society (Hermida 2010, 303-304). In other words, social media are specific kinds of spaces which, in a context of organizational action and meaning, overlap and stand next to e.g. “mundane internet tools” and meeting rooms (Nielsen 2011, 760). They introduce patterns that cannot provide definitive conclusions on the nature of contemporary organizational configurations. Nevertheless, their pervasiveness and ever growing influence on daily life make it important to study specifically what organizational practices take form when they are used.

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Barassi also identifies “concrete spaces of political action” such as an office, “the imagined spaces of political identification” and “the economic ones” (2013, 59).

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As an additional step in the research of social media as socio-technical spaces, I will derive insights from the analytical prism of social media logic, developed by José van Dijck and Thomas Poell (2013). They establish that social media impose their logic on all kinds of social processes: “the processes, principles, and practices through which these platforms process information, news, and communication, and more generally, how they channel social traffic” (5). They identify four elements as inherent to this logic, namely “programmability”, “popularity”, “connectivity” and “datafication” (11). The perspective is especially useful for tracing how social media affect social processes in political organizations, helping to “systematically analyze social media mechanisms as sources of transformation” in their daily contexts (11). It is important to identify what features of social media spaces give form to the organizational activities that are carried out through them. Doing so can shed light on how working through social media shapes internal organizational processes.

In what follows, I will address the outstanding issues that were identified in this part. I have observed that a more complete understanding of how social media shape political organization can be developed by paying attention to be the internal dimension of social media use by the individuals who are invested in contemporary movements in comparison to those within conventional organizations. From the available literature I inferred, moreover, that social media affect the dilemmas at the base of participation, leadership and collaborative processes in ways that run parallel to the techno-commercial evolution of social media, rather than having been solved by them. They can be located in the everyday individual interaction and engagement practices that take place in negotiation with the social media ecosystem.

I will approach these issues by asking the following questions: What features of social media spaces are pivotal in mediating the internal participation of core organizers? How do interactions and engagement practices through social media steer organizational processes from the inside out? How does the use of social media affect collaborative practices among a multiplicity of individual organizers? How do these processes relate to questions of formal structure, leadership and hierarchical relations? And how does this work in Web-based and conventional political organizations?

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3. An ethnographical study through social media spaces

To gain insight in the internal social media communication of the two selected political organizations, the Youth Food Movement and the Jonge Democraten, an exploratory, pragmatic ethnographical approach is adopted. Inspiration for this approach is taken, on the one hand, from Barassi’s perspective on organizations as processes of negotiation and interaction involving multiple and overlapping spaces. On the other hand, the work of Christine Hine on ethnography that moves into the digital landscape was instructive for making the analytical perspective on social media as socio-technical spaces operational. In

Virtual Ethnography (2000), Hine argues that “[w]e can usefully think of the ethnography of

mediated interaction as mobile rather than multi-sited. […] As a consequence, the concept of the field site is brought into question” (Hine 2000: 64). In this research, the ecosystem of social media through which core organizers interact and engage, is considered to establish a range of socio-technical spaces that thus make up the mobile field sites of this research. That is to say, the interactions and engagements that take place specifically in and through (private) social media environments like Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp will be studied, whether they are accessed through computers or smartphone technologies. Doing so, enables to trace and analyze the way social and technical elements interrelate: the (spatial) features that are built into technological architectures, the users that operate through them, and the organizational contexts in which they do so.

Further, this ethnographical approach was conducted using a triangulation of research methods, including participant observation, interviews and content analysis of any documents pertaining to the involvement of social media at YFM and the JD. Participant observation involved participating in the organizations for a period of four consecutive weeks in order to observe the internal mediated organizational activities for a period long enough to capture any arising patterns. I gained access to the Slack and Trello groups of the office at YFM NL (also shared with the board) and worked at the office on Mondays. In addition, I participated in a regional team, joined their internal Facebook Group and was admin of their Facebook Page. At the JD, I participated in one of the political working groups and the team of trainers, which included joining their Facebook Groups and WhatsApp Group Chats. During this period, I also took into account the incidental interactions and engagements that took place, for example privately mediated one to one conversations. Moreover, I made myself known as a researcher wherever possible. The participant observations helped to gain comprehensive

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knowledge of the organizer’s mediated activities and detecting patterns therein. However, these could not explain, of course, how to interpret their significance in their respective organizational contexts. To this end, I asked a wide array of organizers in my surroundings informal questions throughout the period of the research to elucidate certain salient matters.

In addition, one hour long interviews were held with a small dozen individuals in the active core of each organization as well as with a couple of the core teams of organizers. At YFM, I interviewed all seven office employees – three of which had also been involved in different regional teams – including the director, and a board member of YFM NL. I conducted an additional group interview with the office and one with four (non-office) members of a regional team. From the ‘cadre’ of the JD, I interviewed two national board members, two political portfolio holders, one member of the ICT-team, one trainer, and six members of four regional boards. Some of these members had had a longer running career in the organization. I conducted a separate interview with five (out of nine) members of the national board. In total, interviewees at YFM comprised of a moderate majority of females and were on average aged in their mid to late twenties. At JD, the interviewees knew a large majority of males; they were averagely aged in their early to mid twenties.

The interviews were semi-structured and combined elements of an expert and an ethnographical interview – all names were made anonymous upon documentation for ethical considerations with regard to the latter (Flick 2014: 202). The interviews helped to tap into the interpretive and experiential process knowledge of the interviewees: descriptions of what they say they do and what it means according to them. Doing so helped develop understandings related to the actions and meanings in and of the field sites. The selection of all interviewees happened on the basis of semi-purposive sampling. It was mostly important to identify teams and individuals in different parts of the organizational core, so as to get the best possible overview of the organizational dynamic throughout the organization.

Lastly, documents were requested first and foremost to compare with the data collected in participant observations and interviews. Doing so mostly helped to develop ideas on the relation between formal procedures and (in)formal practice, and to trace any noteworthy topics and tensions in the observations made. At YFM, I collected and analyzed documents of functional descriptions of office employees and the communication toolkit for regional departments. At JD, I collected the secretary manual that is used by national and regional boards and the proceedings of a congress in which several motions regarding organizational social media use were discussed.

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The data I gathered from my field notes, interview transcriptions and documents, were thematically analyzed (Flick 2014: 421-423). In the initial phases of the research period, certain themes that could be brought in dialogue with the conceptual framework and research questions were identified and thereafter explored in more detail. After the research period, the data was selectively organized in several phases. Here I used recurring and oftentimes unsolicited topical threads from the interviews as main interpretative guidance. I connected this data to my more detailed field notes on the technical aspects of the social media spaces, in order to trace the meaningful patterns in the relation between the social and technical processes. My aim was to try and detect any dynamics that could provide additional knowledge on social media involvement in political organizations by taking on the organizational internal perspective, and compare specific patterns that were either shared or diverged between the organizations. This was also the primary rationale for the way the results were ultimately structured.

The recently created Youth Food Movement (dating back to 2009) and the well-established

Jonge Democraten (dating back to 1984) were ideal cases to develop the analysis. Selection

of these cases was purposive and in part opportunistic, as I have been a(n active) member of both organizations since 2012 and 2010 respectively. Their dissimilar adoption patterns of social media got me intrigued due to previously formed research interests. My familiarity with the actual (unpaid) labor of their activities further helped me to develop the “relationships and an understanding of the research process as a collaboration” with which I could gain access to the sites and respondents (Milan and Hintz 2010, 842). During the research phase, I was aware that I had to remain attentive to the double position I was taking as a member and as a researcher. In addition, I tried my best to not let my private position as a member inhibit or guide me as a researcher. I approached this matter by summarizing or paraphrasing my personal understandings in interviews in order to allow interviewees to adjust or confirm the notions they were trying to explain. Further, I consciously abstained from including any interpretations that had formed before the research into this study, from taking notes to analyzing the data.

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4. Two contemporary political organizations

To understand how social media shape YFM and JD, it is important to first gain insight in the overall operations of these political youth associations. These include multiple levels of activities, from their main goals and projects to the daily (mediated) acts of which the processes of organizing consist such as: ongoing conversations, asking questions and giving answers, coordinating activities, consensus seeking, decision making, making and staying tuned for announcements, inviting people for and promoting events, sharing news, and so forth. In this section I will give descriptions of the (internal) organizational activities of both organizations, how social media are included in these and discuss the organizational implications in their respective contexts.

4.1 Youth Food Movement

YFM started out in 2009 in Amsterdam as part of the international grassroots organization Slow Food and is currently part of an international network8 of students, consumers and professionals in the food industry that apply themselves to making the food system more fair, healthy and sustainable. They particularly seek to get young people thinking about food. At the time of undertaking this research, “no more than forty people”9 were active organizers in the movement. Most of them are “all just friends”10 as well. The formal organization includes a board and an office, consisting of a director and a few employees, referred to here on out as the Youth Food Movement Netherlands (YFM NL). YFM NL has two main annual projects which are executed by the director and office members, namely the Food Film Festival and YFM Academy11. In addition to these annual programs, YFM NL takes on several ad hoc projects each year. With the office taking on the main part of the movement’s activities, YFM NL has also been described as “an activist project bureau”12. The board mainly occupies itself with the relation to mother organization Slow Food and facilitating the emerging of regional committees.

8

The Slow Food Youth Network (SFYN).

9

“niet meer dan een mannetje of veertig” (YFM, Lennard. Personal interview, 23 March 2015).

10

“we zijn ook gewoon allemaal vrienden van elkaar” (YFM, Abi. Personal interview, 2 February 2015).

11

The latter is a half year long educative program for food professionals, policy makers and students, which together make up a growing network of YFM Academics.

12

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At the office, only a few employees occupy themselves with public communication through social media. The head of communication is responsible for managing the official Twitter account, the Facebook Page and a Facebook account. These are primarily used for external communication, promotion of events, communications for job openings and appeal for volunteers to organize events. The director of the office acts as the movement’s spokesperson and uses Twitter extensively for this fact, in part by having assembled a list of the “leaders in the food business” which is a “simple, fast, efficient way to be continuously up to date on the latest discussions about food”13. In addition, as regards people in the movement “a lot less indeed” 14 – their names counted no more than ten – are also active tweeps and the ones that are, are mainly (previous) office and board members. Yet rather than speaking on behalf of the organization, they do so on their “personal account”15.

Together, their efforts have been a leading component of the movement’s success from the beginning. Due to the large-scale reach of campaigns and events through sharing on social media like Facebook and Twitter “YFM got big” and “would not have been where it is today”16 without it. In earlier years, for instance, people within the movement “literally organized a Twitter tsunami” by asking each other to share certain items with the specific “purpose to make something a trending topic and be able to show it to a larger public”17. Doing so allowed the movement to be more visible and develop “not necessarily a broad reach but […] a stable community quickly”18. Yet there have been two notable changes in this respect in recent years. Widespread sharing is done “a little bit less nowadays”, because now there are “people who are already very active on social media” and “have a good reach

13

“Foodkopstukken […] simpele, snelle, efficiënte manier om continu op de hoogte te zijn van de laatste

discussies rondom voedsel” (YFM, Puck. Personal interview, 20 February 2015).

14

“wel veel minder” (YFM, Office. Group interview, 23 February 2015).

15

“op eigen conto” (YFM, Lennard. Personal interview, 23 March 2015).

16

“dat is eigenlijk waardoor YFM groot is geworden, als we dat niet hadden gedaan dan was YFM nu niet

geweest waar die nu staat” (YFM, Abi. Personal interview, 2 February 2015).

17

“letterlijk een Twitter tsunami […] met wel echt het doel om iets een Trending Topic te maken en aan een

groter public zichtbaar te maken” (YFM, Office. Group interview, 23 February 2015).

18

“niet per se breed bereik maar wel gewoon snel een vaste community kregen” (YFM, Abi. Personal interview, 2 February 2015).

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[…] so they share it with each other instead of everyone”19. Second, the organization has stumbled upon the fact that, recently “there is just a pile of shit hanging over Facebook which makes you unable to see, what you want to see or show what you want to show. You have to pay for that and if you have paid for it once, you’ll have to pay for it again the next time otherwise people will not get to see it”20. Supposing that “soon Facebook will not be used like it is now” they will have “to find an alternative” for the purposes they use it for because they “have no money”21 to pay for promotion. This additionally implies that they have to adapt to ways of working that are enforced by the codes and cultural adoptions of social media, for example “on LinkedIn you have to start blogging – but Twitter is the new LinkedIn, etc. – it is a very diffuse time and therefore it is very difficult as an organization to be communicating about what you are doing in one way”22. The public debate that YFM wishes to stimulate, which is now mostly done on Twitter, has been described as something “we do not own by taking it on our platform”23 such as the organization’s own website. The office of YFM NL is aware of the fact that, in the current situation, they are “dependent on all those platforms that succeed each other” – more or less, this forces them to occupy themselves “with the newest things”24 before they are targeted at companies and require payment.

Next to these external communication channels, the office makes use of several internal media for their daily operational engagements. Important, is that the organization was

19

“tegenwoordig ietsje minder […]de mensen die toch al heel erg actief zijn op social media […] Nico heeft

bijvoorbeeld een goed bereik en er zijn wat meer actieve Twitteraars, die delen het dan met elkaar in plaats van iedereen” (YFM, Abi. Personal interview, 2 February 2015).

20

“Nou er hangt gewoon een hoop stront over Facebook waardoor je niet meer kan zien, wat je wilt zien. Of wat

je wilt laten zien. Daar betaal je voor en als er één keer voor betaald hebt, dan moet je er de volgende keer weer voor betalen anders zien mensen het niet” (YFM, Office. Group interview, 23 February 2015).

21

“Ik denk dat Facebook binnenkort gewoon niet meer gebruikt gaat worden zoals we nu doen […] wij hebben

geen geld […] dan ga je een alternatief zoeken” (YFM, Office. Group interview, 23 February 2015).

22

“op LinkedIn moet je wel gaan bloggen – maar Twitter is de nieuwe LinkedIn, bla bla – het is een hele diffuse

tijd en daarom is het als organisatie heel moeilijk om op één manier te communiceren over wat je aan het doen bent” (YFM, Office. Group interview, 23 February 2015).

23

“maar we ownen dat niet door dat op ons platform te trekken” (YFM, Puck. Personal interview, 20 February 2015).

24

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noted to be “in development”25 several times over. As of yet, “there are not a lot of structures” in the office, so for the most part, “all information” lies with and the organization therefore more or less “is dependent on”26 the director. In relation to this, the director recently “decided” and arranged a “mini-training”27 to switch from using WhatsApp and Facebook Groups, to a Slack group (also shared with board members) and Trello board for the office to decentralize communication. This switch in services was emphatically linked to the question “what works, and what does not” and arranged through “a guy who does workshops on internal communication through social media”28. Out of the two, Slack proved most important: an instant messaging service for teams, that features both private messaging as well as topical channels for groups – divided up into the different projects and more – in which notifications only work through ‘@[person]’ or ‘@[channel]’. It also features file sharing, search features and an interface for computers. However, WhatsApp is still being used for social interaction between colleagues. In addition, a couple of Facebook Groups are still moderately active, such as one with “all the people in the office but by now also a lot of people who have been involved in YFM for a very long time”29.

Still, the Youth Food Movement’s operations extend beyond the board and office of YFM NL. On the one hand, there is a network of “all the organizations that know [...] and want to do something with” the movement, on the other there is the community, which comprises of people “who feel to be part of YFM”30. These people are (board) members, the office employees and an undefined group of people who are not official members. Both members and non-members are welcome to attend national and regional YFM events. Further, there are many “spin offs”, companies that originated in the (Academy and)

25

“in ontwikkeling” (YFM, Suzanne. Personal interview, 3 February 2015).

26

“er zijn niet heel veel structuren hier […] alle informatie zit in de directeur […] Ik denk ook niet dat een

organisatie afhankelijk moet zijn van alleen de persoon die het leidt” (YFM, Jan. Personal interview, 16

February 2015).

27

“besloten […] en we kregen natuurlijk gelijk een mini-traininkje” (YFM, Abi. Personal interview, 2 February 2015).

28

“wat werkt wel en wat niet […] op een jongen gekomen die workshops geeft over interne communicatie van

sociale media” (YFM, Puck. Personal interview, 20 February 2015).

29

“alle mensen die op dit kantoor zitten maar inmiddels ook heel veel mensen die al héél lang bij YFM

betrokken zijn” (YFM, Suzanne. Personal interview, 3 February 2015).

30

“alle organisaties die ons kennen en iets met ons willen […] alle mensen die zich YFM’er voelen” (YFM, Puck. Personal interview, 20 February 2015).

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community and are now part of the network, which is something which “YFM has not made perceptible yet but which has a lot of potential”31 for future collaborations. To illustrate that potential, a significant amount of the activities of YFM are constituted through networking practices:

“Getting insight into YFM network, I think every director has mulled over that, because indirectly YFM has quite a lot of influence. Because, for example, through YFM Academy you have everyone in your network indirectly, from the political assistant of the State Secretary up to people who work at Fairfood or somewhere else, or are farmers”32.

Moreover, social media have become an important part of these networking practices by making it possible to recommend, link to and alert people For example, on a platform like Facebook it is easy – when someone sees an interesting post – to use the comment section to “tag each other like: “Hey, is this not something for you?””33.

Finally, in the last few years the movement has also spawned several regional branches, local formations of people who started undertaking similar activities that the original group started with in Amsterdam – ‘eat-ins’, debates, and more – after which YFM redubbed itself Youth Food Movement Nederland (YFM NL). To facilitate the emergence of these regions, YFM NL lent them a “communication toolkit”, including email addresses, regional YFM logos, a Facebook Page, a Twitter account and a ‘tone of voice’ style document. Using these, regional committees were helped in promoting their events because through platforms like Facebook, they could “be linked to YFM Netherlands and use and therefore reach their network, all the followers who are there” and therewith “easily get the

31

“spin offs […] iets wat nog niet inzichtelijk is gemaakt maar waar wel veel potentie in ligt” (YFM, Office. Group interview, 23 February 2015).

32

“Het YFM netwerk inzichtelijk maken, daar heeft elke directeur volgens mij zijn hoofd over gebroken, want de

YFM heeft indirect best wel veel invloed. Omdat je bijvoorbeeld dus via de YFM Academie iedereen indirect in je netwerk hebt zitten van de politieke assistent van de staatssecretaris tot aan mensen die bij Fairfood of ergens anders werken, of boer zijn” (YFM, Abi. Personal interview, 2 February 2015).

33

“je kan elkaar taggen van “Hey, is dit niet iets voor jou?”” (YFM, Florian. Personal interview, 2 March 2015).

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show on the road under that flag”34. It was even said in one of the regions that it “could not have existed without Facebook” or at least “not in the form in which it exists now”35. The office and board of YFM supported further bottom-up developments with a regional tour where people were told that, when they have want to organize something they “can just do that” themselves36.

It should also be noted that the regions “the regional committees are not something together per se”37. There is a Facebook Group YFM Regio’s for practical questions and knowledge exchange among them – “something a region initiated”38. This is now also “the primary means of communication”, there have been “no physical meetings yet” (Amsterdam, YFM). Within the teams themselves, people have started to use diverging social media spaces for their internal communication, from Slack as is done in the office, to Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp Group Chats, or a secret Facebook Group. Yet, it was noted in a region that, despite facilitated organizing through larger Facebook Groups “nobody really feels responsible because it’s really non-committal, such as group, and so you really have to have a smaller group of people, a core team, who wants to go for it”39. Indeed, while the regions (and other projects) might involve more people, the successful ones depend on “kartrekkers”, people who “are motivated, have a lot of energy and social contacts within the organization”40 and are the driving force in getting things done.

34

“om gelinkt te worden aan YFM Nederland en dat netwerk te gebruiken en dus ook dat netwerk te bereiken,

alle aanhangers die daar zitten […] dan kun je heel makkelijk ondernemen onder die vlag” (YFM, Amsterdam.

Group Interview, 2 February 2015).

35

“YFM Amsterdam had niet kunnen bestaan zonder Facebook, misschien wel, maar niet in de vorm waarin het

nu bestaat” (YFM, Amsterdam. Group Interview, 2 February 2015).

36

“Toen hebben we ook gezegd, zijn zij zelf in gaan zien: “Oh, dat kunnen we gewoon zelf doen”” (YFM, Suzanne. Personal interview, 3 February 2015).

37

“de regio’s zijn samen niet per se iets” (YFM, Amsterdam. Group Interview, 2 February 2015).

38

“dat was een initiatief van een regio” (YFM, Suzanne. Personal interview, 3 February 2015).

39

“dat dan uiteindelijk niemand zich echt verantwoordelijk voelt omdat het heel vrijblijvend is, zo’n groep, en je

dus echt gewoon een klein clubje hebben, echt een kernteam, dat ervoor gaat” (YFM, Carla. Personal interview,

16 February 2015).

40

“de regio’s die succesvol zijn hebben gewoon kartrekkers, mensen die gemotiveerd zijn, veel energie hebben

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All in all, strategic social media communication through Twitter and Facebook has been central in attaining organizational visibility and attendance of events at YFM, in ways that constitute the organization beyond the choreographing of protest and generating support for the movement (Gerbaudo 2012; Della Ratta and Valeriani 2012; Poell et al. forthcoming). Yet, their practices seem to have developed parallel to the fact that “as platforms like Facebook and Twitter matured, their techniques for filtering out popular items and influential people became gradually more sophisticated” (Van Dijck and Poell 2013, 6). Moreover, since the movement does not have much financial resources, it is vulnerable to these techno-commercial strategies which include the implementation of features such as promoted Facebook Events (cf. Van Dijck and Poell, 7) – forcing them to renew their strategies.

Moreover, my observations indicate that operating through social media has not overcome the organizational dilemma of free-riders for YFM, nor did it replace leadership and formal organization with a form of open, horizontal networking (Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Castells 2012). Instead, a small formal organizational core at the center of the movement is complemented by complex layers of informal and fluctuating associations that still depend on a small amount of motivated people to get things done – in part through social media. The strategies of cooperation are adapted to the features that social media offer, which importantly include networking practices as well as exclusive group communications.

4.2 Jonge Democraten

The JD was established in the Netherlands in 1984 as a political youth organization tied to national political party Democrats 66. The organizational activities are based on two pillars: political lobbying and the (political) education of JD members. In addition, the aspect of social interaction is very important to the organization seeing as it is “in part a fraternity”41. Organizational activities are based on a formalized democratic system of governance, which is continually developed. The ALV (algemene ledenvergadering, general assembly) – also known as the congress – is held three times a year and is decisive for all formal matters. During the ALV, members of the national board are elected and decisions are made on the content of the political program, organizational motions, the statutes and bylaws. Resolutions, motions, amendments and modifications can be submitted by any member and all decision making is based on a ‘one man, one vote’ principle.

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How Social Media Shape Political Organization: Mediated Participation, Leadership and Collaboration at the Youth Food Movement and Young Democrats