Social activism on social networks sites

Abstract

From the very beginning the internet has been often perceived as a miraculous cure for accumulated social problems of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century and, in the same time and perhaps more often, has been denied any activistic potential. The aim of this paper was to explore and identify the real potential of the internet as a mean of civic activism. At the theoretical level, the internet is defined as a technology that can be used to support but also to undermine the social hierarchy, as such representing Feenberg's (2002) two fundamental principles of each technology functioning. In this regard, starting from Castells (Kastels 2014) idea that citizens via the internet may undermine one of the two fundamental sources of power-the power of communication. At the analytic level activist role of the internet is broken down into informational, organizational and public in order to empirically investigate the potential of the grassroots social movements that operates on social networking sites in Serbia.

Keywords

• online activism
• grassroots movements
• Facebook
• public sphere