The #OCCUPY network on Twitter and the challenges to social movements theory and research

Int. J. Electronic Governance, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2013 319

Copyright © 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

The #OCCUPY network on Twitter and the challenges to social movements theory and research

Davide Beraldo* Graduate School in Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan, via Pace 10, Milano 20122, Italy E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding author

Juan Galan-Paez Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Seville, Av. Reina Mercedes s/n, Sevilla, Sevilla 41012, Spain E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: This work sketches out an exploration on some challenges that digital environments pose to social movements studies. While transformations in the technology available for communication among movement networks quite obviously reconfigure their organisational patterns, the current use of the notion of collective identity, less obviously, is also called into question. Drawing on a dataset of tweets collected during the early stage of the worldwide Occupy protest wave, the outcomes of different possibilities of analysis are presented. The discussion of the results challenges various aspects of recent trends in Social Movements Theory, including the persistent distinction between organisational and identitary elements. A socio-semiotic observation is then acknowledged: to a certain extent, in contemporary protests, signifiers have acquired distinctive importance with respect to signified, in mediating the assemblage of contentious networks. The notion of ‘social movement brand’ is consequently suggested as fitting these phenomenon’s better than the classical one of collective identity.

Keywords: occupy; networks; Twitter; social movements; digital media; collective identity; floating signifiers; brands; digital methods; digital sociology; actor–network theory; socio-semiotic; spatial networks; semantic networks.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Beraldo, D. and Galan-Paez, J. (2013) ‘The #OCCUPY network on Twitter and the challenges to social movements theory and research’, Int. J. Electronic Governance,Vol. 6, No. 4, pp.319–341.

Biographical notes: Davide Beraldo is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan, he also collaborates with the research group Centro Studi Etnografia Digitale. With a background in Computer Science, he owns a Bachelor degree in Political Sciences and a Master degree in Social Sciences. His main research interests are digital methods, online networks, social movements and social theory.

320 D. Beraldo and J. Galan-Paez

Juan Galan-Paez is a Computer Engineer by the University of Seville and has a Master degree in Logic, Computation and Artificial Intelligence. Currently, he is working as Research Assistant for the ‘eComplexcity’ project and completing his PhD in the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Seville. His research interests are complex systems modelling and simulation, data and big data science.

This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled ‘The #OCCUPY network on Twitter and the challenges to social movements theory and research’ presented at Online Political Participation and Its Critics,DEL Network, Paris, 19–20 June, 2013.

1 Introduction

1.1 A divide and a short circuit

Starting from the crucial role played by the internet among the anti-globalisation movement of the last decade (e.g., Castells, 2009; Della Porta, 2007; Kavada, 2003; Rucht, 2007; Van Aelst and Walgrave, 2002), the coupling between contentious networks and digital environments bursts with the diffusion of social media and their exploitation by protest movements for various purposes (e.g., Bajpai and Jaiswal, 2010; Costanza-Chock, 2012; Ems, 2009; Gaffney, 2010; Lotan et al., 2011). While some contributions dispute the role new media actually play in fostering collective mobilisation (Gladwell, 2010; Morozov, 2011), the purpose here is not to address their impact on social change, rather to derive their implications for social movement’s studies. Social Movements Theory is, in fact, stuck around a well-known divide: the organisational/strategic vs. cultural/identitary one (Della Porta and Diani, 1997). The diffusion of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) into the practices of activists has nonetheless encouraged interesting tendencies.

The ‘dynamic of contention’ programme (McAdam et al., 2001) focuses on the processuality involved in social movements spread. The ‘scale-shift’ that occurs within movements – evolving from the local, to the national and sometimes to the transnational level – is conceptualised through three mechanisms of diffusion (Tarrow and McAdam, 2003): non-relational – when occurring through media; relational – when occurring through pre-existent ties; brokerage – when occurring through newly established relations.

An intersecting shift is the so-called ‘relational persuasion’ (Diani and McAdam, 2003); this perspective does not only result in the wide exploitation of Social Network Analysis for studying social movements, but moreover conceives networks as epistemological tools that better fit the inherent porosity of social movements’ boundaries (Diani, 2003). The fairly distinct notion of informational network has been explicitly applied to new social movements (Castells, 1997, 2009), so as to account for the distinctive morphology of digitally empowered networks of contention.

Furthermore, the classical dilemma of collective action1 (Olson, 1965) is undergoing a radical redefinition, as new media tend to blur the distinction between private and public domains (Bimber et al., 2005, 2013). The affordances related to these new digital repertories, when effectively leveraged, can indeed lead up to radical changes in models

The #OCCUPY network on Twitter and the challenges 321

of mobilisations (Earl and Kimport, 2011). The rise of brand new organisational logic is caught up by the notion of connective action (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012, 2013): where traditional collective action requires organisations to provide members with incentives for participation, directives for coordination and frames for identification, digitally enabled connective action emerges from self-organising networks of individuals.

Despite the primacy to the organisational dimension implicitly accorded by the above-mentioned approaches, the theory of informational movements explicitly states the crucial role and the power associated with collective identities within the network society (Castells, 1997). More in general, the concept of collective identity is considered a fundamental feature of social movements among radically different theoretical perspectives (Polletta and Jasper, 2001). While, in some approaches, it is basically conceived as a matter of free-riding prevention (Pizzorno, 1986; Chong, 1991), in the constructivist school it is even part of the definition of what a social movement is (Melucci, 1996): the construction of a collective identity is the process to account for when studying social movements, being it related to the production of new meanings and the challenge to dominant codes.

The flow of this brief and selective review purposefully ranges from the organisational to the identitary dimension, despite overlaps have already been highlighted: identities are not alien to instrumentality (Polletta and Jasper, 2001) and neither rationality is immune to expressivity (Della Porta and Diani, 1997). Moreover, recent movements tend to embed organisational metaphors within their rhetorics and ideologies (Bennett, 2005; Juris, 2005). This contributes to generate a short circuit between categories still markedly distinguished theoretically, but more and more overlapping empirically.

1.2 The complexity of new movements

Where it is evident that new communication technologies exhibit a deep impact on social movements’ organisational patterns, analogous transformations affecting identification processes are less acknowledged.

Following the anti-neoliberal globalisation movement, the idea of an unproblematic correspondence between a social movement and its collective identity has been empirically challenged. Inter-organisational contacts, multiple belongings (Rucht, 2007), a loose master frame and a set of broker issues (Della Porta, 2007): these elements are in this case responsible for the networking between basically autonomous identities (Castells, 1997). Furthermore, the fractal geometry of the underlying network/s, and the enactment of reflexive framing, introduce distinctive elements of complexity in patterns and representations of this phenomenon (Chester and Welsh, 2005, 2006).

Something even more challenging for the notion of collective identity derives from other recent cases: the availability of social media allows disperse and anonymous networks to instantaneously converge around identifiable labels. This logic of aggregation represents a fairly different process from the networking logic enabled by older internet-based tools (Juris, 2012).

A paradigmatic example of this evolution is represented by the Occupy network, which has fostered both online and offline activism in the USA and other countries. This case suggests how digital entities can contribute to quickly spread social movement waves among people and organisations worldwide (Lotan, 2011). Consequently, whether Occupy should be conceived as a social movement or a collection of different movements


is not banal. Furthermore, being it mainly a crowd-enabled form of mobilisation (Bennett and Segerberg, 2013), it results from the interaction between a small group of core activists and a wider public of supporters (Gitlin, 2013), articulated around fairly different claims (Calhoun, 2013).

The overall importance that digital platforms play in this and analogous cases is self-evident, and research on the relation between social media and recent protest movements covers a range of perspectives. As already mentioned, the broad logic conveyed by newer tools of communication is found particularly challenging (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012; Juris, 2012). The myth of new movements as collectives of tech-savvies, by the way, does not reflect their actual media culture: the simple activity of sharing content across social media platforms represents the most recurrent media practice within Occupy (Costanza-Chock, 2012). The self-narration of movements through the circulation of media content has an important effect in identity building processes, and various kind of videos appears among the most recurrent type in this case (Thorson et al., 2013). Twitter, the famous micro-blogging platform, plays a crucial role in this content sharing ecology and as a tool for movements’ publication, thus has been widely analysed with regard to various aspects, such as recruitment dynamics (Gonzales-Bailòn, 2011), factors influencing engagement (Chen and Pirolli, 2012) or the geographical structure of the resulting network (Conover et al., 2013).

The purpose of this work is neither to investigate how a specific medium has been used by activists, nor to analyse Twitter data as such; rather, the aim is to exploit Twitter as a methodological tool for assessing broader implications, related to social movements studies. The focus is not on the mainly American Occupy movement itself, rather on the global adoption of the logo for branding a disparate range of protest events.

Premising that this study is more concerned with hypothesis building than hypothesis testing, the research questions that lead the analysis are developed at various levels. From an empirical point of view, the aim is to evaluate the articulation between the signifier ‘Occupy’ and both geographic and semantic dimensions of the movement. From a theoretical standpoint, some challenges to current Social Movements Theory, stimulated by the results, are assessed. From a methodological perspective, some possibilities of digital analysis are explored.

2 Methods

2.1 Data collection and structure

The strategy undertaken here is to exploit the availability of material traces of the social on the internet (Latour, 2011; Latour et al., 2012), following the growing digital methods approach (Rogers, 2009, 2012). The main data corpus is composed of a set of 879,994 tweets, containing at least one hashtag in the ‘#occupy-’ form,2 collected between 7 and 20 October, 2011 via the publicly available Twitter’s Streaming API. The choice to work with the popular micro-blogging platform has a number of reasons: first, it is extensively adopted in contemporary protests; secondly, the study of Twitter networks has consistently spread to many research fields (e.g., Borge-Holthoefer et al., 2011; Conover et al., 2011; Takheteyev et al., 2011; Yang and Counts, 2010; Yardi and Boyd, 2010; Van Meeteren et al., 2010); thirdly, the more specific choice to exploit Twitter data for studying contemporary contentious politics follows a growing pattern of research


(e.g., Bajpai and Jaiswal, 2010; Chen and Pirolli, 2012; Conover et al., 2013; Gaffney, 2010; Gonzàles-Bailòn et al., 2011; Lotan et al., 2011); lastly, but not least, the public nature of communication flowing within the platform renders it easy, and legal, to be scraped.

The geographical provenience of users was collected relying on the self-reported location field in users’ profiles; raw data were manually checked, translated to a standard format and subsequently parsed using Yahoo’s Place Finder API. Despite this cannot be considered a 100% reliable procedure, it follows an established research practice (e.g., Borge-Holthoefer et al., 2011; Chen and Pirolli, 2012; Conover et al., 2013; Takheteyev et al., 2011) and resulted in a 70.66% coverage at the nation level (23,369 users) and a 53.55% coverage at the city level (17,711 users).3

The semantic entities classified were retrieved owing to the Natural Language Processing tool Open Calais’ API; through this library it was possible to recognise, within the text of the tweet: persons, organisations, companies, media, locations, facilities, positions and products. The data obtained were consequently checked, filtered and merged with a semi-automated technique, so as to limit incorrect entries. The implementation of deeper semantic analysis has been postponed to further elaborations, being NLP techniques on Twitter data a cutting-edge topic in the field.

In order both to reduce computational demands and to improve the validity of the operationalisation, the users considered were restricted to those who emitted four or more tweets, and to those who were involved in at least one retweet interactions. In this same data corpus, in fact, the threshold of four tweets results related to a much greater level of endorsement towards the movement (Beraldo, 2012). Within political issues, furthermore, retweets have been shown to mainly tie like-minded users (Conover et al., 2011); moreover, where follower–followee relations are much more demanding to crawl, retweets provide direct information on the structure of attention, thus representing “the network that matters” (Huberman et al., 2009).

A weighted retweet network was consequently built, considering each user as a node and linking two users whenever a retweet occurred between them. This resulted in 33,070 nodes connected by 229,609 weighted edges. An analogous operation was performed aggregating users tweeting from the same city, thus deriving a geospatial network accounting for the flows of information among various geographical areas. Cities were then further slightly aggregated, cutting off all the decimals after the first, so as to merge minor locations. This provided a network of 2544 geographical areas, related through 20,659 weighted links. The software for network analysis and visualisation Gephi was used to process and display the networks.

Besides this computational strategy, a representative sample of 3000 tweets was selected, explored and classified to get deeper qualitative insights on the phenomenon.4

Moreover, during the following months, the evolution of the movement has been, even if less systematically, monitored. Planning further investigations and comparisons, an additional dataset, related to the persistent activity of the movement on Twitter registered between February and March 2013, was collected and preliminary inspected. Some observations below must then be intended as accounting for a broader time span then the one represented by the main dataset.

A final methodological remark is though necessary. To be sure, Twitter data, and digital traces in general, allow only for a partial overview of a certain phenomenon; but this point of view provides possibilities of analysis that are crucial to grasp many contemporary research objects. In particular, the opportunity to take into consideration


both structural and cultural issues at time, and the possibility to indefinitely zoom in and out between the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’ levels, provide incomparable capabilities of inquiry towards complex and multi-scale scale phenomena.

3 Results

3.1 Arab spring, European summer, American fall

On 13 July 2011, a blog post from the Canadian anti-consumerism magazine Adbusters proposes to peacefully gather in front of the New York Stock Exchange and occupy the area, to protest against the interference of financial and economic powers on politics. “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?” is the significant question introducing the article; the opening banner displays the allusive logo ‘#OCCUPYWALLSTREET’. These elements already suggest interesting inferences: the introduction establishes a direct link between the planned protest and the Arab Spring movements; the hash mark preceding the logo explicitly states social media to be the elective field where the mobilisation should spread.

The meet up date, 17 September, starts circulating on social networking platforms, without reaching surprising rates of diffusion. On the day planned, ~1000 protesters gather in Wall Street area, a part of which decide to camp overnight in the publicly accessible, but privately owned, Zuccotti Park. It is worth to note that the participation to the flash mob is widely below the 20,000 people proclaimed target; and that the event, despite some minor emulations, does not gain great resonance on mainstream media. But it evidently does on social media, as a storm of related messages floods Twitter in the subsequent hours.

In the following days participation consistently grows, while digital and physical spin-offs pop-up in many other cities of the USA and of other countries, accurately emulating the repertoires of the original protest and labelling themselves as local instances of the Occupy movement. The occupations are organised in a community-like style, often provided, other than tents, with facilities of all sorts – kitchens, libraries, media centres, etc. – regularly planning activities – marches, workshops, concerts, etc. – and generally organising protests, projects and daily life through working groups and an open General Assembly.

As occupiers regularly undertake marches and prove to conceive encampments as durable settings, confrontation with police becomes unavoidable. Most notoriously, on 1 October some 700 people get arrested while crossing the Brooklyn’s bridge. On 11 October Occupy Boston faces the first big raid by police and gets partially evicted. One of the climax of the mobilisation is reached on 15 October, when the ‘global revolution day’ – originally launched by the antecedent Spanish 15M, or ‘Indignados’, movement – is widely branded under the banner of Occupy. In this occasion, people from some 900 cities in 80 different countries – both western and non western – simultaneously take the streets to share their anger against the global economic and political systems; in many cases, the marches end up with the settlement of new encampments.

In the following months, due to police evictions and due to the challenges placed by the forthcoming winter, most of the occupiers gradually retreat from the camps – Zuccotti Park is raided on 15 November. In spite of this, spot occupations keep on addressing various targets and embracing disparate initiatives such as the May 2011 Occupy Chicago


protest against a NATO meeting, or the Occupy Sandy effort to give a contribution in post-hurricane reconstruction. Even in completely unrelated geographical contexts, such as Nigeria or Uganda, local movements protesting, respectively, against fuel price and dictatorship, assume the Occupy logo and ask for solidarity from other occupiers. With a variable degree of intersection with the original event, projects and groups labelled accordingly continue to show up worldwide up to now, providing emulative, sympathetic, instrumental or merely metaphorical references to the initial protest.5

The master frame around which participants in various occupations convene is expressed by the most recurrent slogan in vogue: “we are the 99%”. This expression refers to the idea that, in last decades, a tiny minority of super-rich has benefited from an unfair economic system and the complicity of political power; consequently, the remaining vast majority has to make its voice heard. The slogan explicitly conveys an identity proposal, setting the boundaries of an in-group/out-group cleavage. This project of identity presents interesting ‘in-or-out’ but still ‘minimal’ features: a criterion of identification is explicitly settled, but left opened to an almost unspecified ‘catch-all’ dimension.

The absence of a clear and articulated set of claims represents one of the most recurrent criticisms, widely addressed by the detractors. Various attempts to converge on a list of demands are independently sought by some local assemblies. By the way, activists often reply to criticism explicitly claiming that it is not in the nature of the movement to address definite requests to the political system: the goal of Occupy should be sought in the occupations themselves. Furthermore, despite a common orientation towards the critique of financial system, it is possible to register an evolution towards a commitment with an heterogeneous array of issues, ranging from working condition, housing rights, environmentalism, pacifism, anti-homophobia, internet freedom, etc.

3.2 #OccupyTwitter

The exact amount of significant occupations springing up around the world in this period is not straightforward to be estimated. According to a wiki-format page,6 among the 746 episodes listed, 558 refers to events lasting more than one day. In Table 1, these more or less stable encampments are classified by country.

Table 1 Stable occupations by country, self-reported (elab. Rogers, 2011)

USA 367 Ireland 5 Serbia 2 Pakistan 1 Canada 55 Sweden 5 Bangladesh 1 Poland 1 UK 24 Brazil 4 Belgium 1 Portugal 1 Netherlands 11 Israel 3 Brasil 1 Slovakia 1 New Zealand 10 Mexico 3 Colombia 1 Taiwan 1 Australia 8 Puerto Rico 3 Cyprus 1 Tunisia 1 Germany 8 Slovenia 3 Iran 1 Turkey 1 Spain 8 Switzerland 3 Italy 1 Uruguay 1 France 6 Denmark 2 Japan 1 Total 558

South Africa 6 Finland 2 Norway 1


From the distribution above, it is possible to observe that, despite the great majority of occupations occur inside the USA borders, about one over three of the total do not. Without neglecting the fact that the USA are by far the most interested nation, it would consequently be reductive to conceive the phenomenon as solely national. The mere fact that some hundreds different local contexts are involved – ranging from metropolitan to middle size cities – is what really matters for the present argumentation.

The conditions of possibilities thanks to which the Occupy brand spreads among heterogeneous local networks are surely related to the virality embedded in social media ecology. But this contagion appears not to be solely confined to this ‘ethereal’ domain: the diffusion of the ‘virus’ across many ‘virtual’ squares serves instead as a channel through which a wide on-the-ground infection arises. The impetuous communication flows on Twitter serve here as a privileged point of view from which to account for this epidemic. Between 7 and 20 October, 8356 unique hashtags in the form ‘#occupy-’ are counted in the dataset; out of this huge mass, 122 reach a substantial survival rate – more than 500 occurrences. At the beginning, the most typical pattern of mutation that the meta-hashtag undergoes consists in the substitution of the original ‘Wall Street’ suffix with the name of a specific city, signalling the existence of a parallel offline project to set up an occupation (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Most recurrent hashtag mutations; 7–20 October (see online version for colours)

The memetic reproduction of the hashtag does not only involve a process of relocalisation,7 as many descendents express a broader and more abstract process of resemantisation. Indeed, the #OCCUPY prefix starts merging with a disparate range of heterogeneous entities.

Also considering the further replications occurred in the following months, it is possible to classify the various dimensions in these categories:

• global: denotes the intent to extend the logic of occupations spatially, socially and semantically.

(e.g., #occupyeverywhere, #occupyallstreets, #occupytogether, #occupyeverything.)

• target: directly draws from the original form in expressing specific economic or political institutions as the target of the occupation, and often related to a particular local instance or event

(e.g., #occupycongress, #occupybankofamerica, #occupythefed.)


• issues: expresses campaigns related to narrower area of concern, ranging from student debts, low wages, genetically modified food, construction of pipelines, militarism, natural disaster reconstruction.

(e.g., #occupystudentdebts, #occupywalmart, #occupymonsanto, #occupypipelines, #occupydronewarfare, #occupysandy.)

• task: used to accomplish concrete tactical and organisational purposes, such as reporting inter-occupation news, providing evidences on the reasons of the protest, denouncing repression or giving tips of various kind.

(e.g., #occupymedia, #occupyfacts, #occupyarrests, #occupyadvice.)

• event: to focus the action on specific occasions.

(e.g., #occupythesuperbowl, #occupymayday, #occupychicago.)

• identity: to encourage or vindicate the participation of certain categories such as women, Afro-American, Jews, militaries, under-recognised at the beginning of the protest.

(e.g., #occupywomen, #occupythehood, #occupyjudaism, #occupyveterans.)

• reflexive: referring to projects of self-narration and inquiry into the movement.

(e.g., #occupyyourminds, #occupyresearch, #occupyknowledge.)

• parodistic: both supporting and opposing the movement.

(e.g., #occupysesamestreet; #occupyajob.)

The most straightforward possibility of analysis with Twitter data related to events consists in taking a look into the dynamic of activity rates, to identify crucial episodes.

Two peaks are evident in Figure 2: one on 11 October, referring to the police raid against the Boston camp, that results in its partial eviction; another one on 15 October, related to the worldwide call for action, when simultaneous marches are performed in hundreds cities all over the world. It is then possible to zoom into these specific episodes, to look for typical rhetorics associated with them.

With respect to the first event, the idea that “the whole world is watching” a specific local episode is very frequent, as results from the following selected tweets:

#occupyboston the whole world IS watching: http://t.co/hBfILf2D #ows Solidarity! Keep the peace! Stay strong. You are loved!

Situation at #OccupyBoston getting tense. Riot cops gearing up. Live feed: http://t.co/joZw0y5R Stay peaceful, the world is watching! #OWS

#OWS Note @Boston_Police remember the world is watching #OccupyBoston on live stream, Do you want to increase support? http://t.co/PzBcM2o6

Over 3500 watching #occupyboston livestream. BPD, the world is watching. Don’t be on the wrong side of history. #OWS

@boston_police #ows #occupy_boston The whole world is watching and listening to your actions tonight, Live. Please stand with the 99%


Figure 2 Tweet volume and cumulated tweet volume by day; 7–20 October (see online version for colours)

The denounce of localised repressive episodes and the expression of solidarity towards occupations facing evictions are extensively recurrent practices, conveyed by social media informational flows. The idea that a worldwide public is monitoring and judging police behaviour is widely mobilised by participants and supporters of the movement. This fact is explicitly related to an empowerment effect of new media, as live streams of occupations are highly advertised with this purpose, and as those reporting police brutality represent the most viral You Tube videos.

The second episode, often framed as the beginning of a ‘global revolution’, highlights the perception of a proper global scale, which characterises the movement in the eye of those involved, as the following tweets clearly show:

This is why I know humanity is going to make it! #ows #occupywallstreet #occupychi #occupyboston #globalrevolution

Has something like this ever happened before? A world wide mass protest for a common cause or are we writing history? #ows

Protests in over 600 cities in 80+ countries today. #Oct15 #GlobalChange #OWS #OccupyTogether #Occupy

Today is #Oct15 the day we #OccupyTheWorld. Get out and occupy your town.. If one hasn’t started … grab some friends …

Shhhh … hear that? That’s the sound of the People waking up all over the world. Join us. #OccupyTogether #OccupyWorld #Occupy

Especially, as the day of the synchronised global action takes place, the idea that a truly global movement is rising from the networking of local initiatives becomes evident in the discourse of supporters. This empirical fact is something that cannot be ignored when


evaluating the proper analytical scale of the movement. In the overall set, references to a worldwide reach of the protest occur 72,128 times.8

Owing to the network visualisations (Figures 3 and 4), it is possible to have an immediate outlook over the trans-local reach that characterises information flows, during the local and the multi-local episodes.

Figure 3 Geospatial retweet network; keyword ‘#OCCUPYBOSTON’, 11 October (see online version for colours)

Figure 4 Geospatial retweet network; keyword ‘#OCCUPY’, 15 October (see online version for colours)


Over the total of the retweet links analysed, the 83.85% result to tie users from different locations, while the 23.37% consist in trans-national interactions.9

Interestingly, the episodes mentioned affect the interactional patterns in the geospatial network (Figure 5).

Figure 5 Percentage of trans-local and trans-national retweets per day; 7–20 October (see online version for colours)

It is possible to observe a peak in the rate of interactions occurring across cities on 11 October, when the expression of trans-local solidarity converges on Boston camp facing the police raid. Correspondingly, on the day of the global protest, an augmented rate of trans-national flows signals a coupling between the focus over global unity and interactional patterns of communication.

Provided the patterns of trans-local communication observed, it comes quite natural to ask: is it legitimate to consider a given local hashtag as a proxy to intercept the communication flow of the corresponding local network? The elaboration of the data on the top hashtags, referring to a certain locality, suggests that for each local hashtag, on average, over than a half (53.3%) of the users that adopt it do not belong to the city reported (Table 2).10

This pattern of ‘despatialisaton’ – or, better: respatialisation – might undertake diverging interpretations. One may tend to think that this simply proves that no pertinent inferences on a social movement can be derived from studying its Twitter publics. An alternative reading could instead argue that the various local instances are involved in a high level of communicative overlap. Support for this hypothesis is shown in Figure 6.

This network is built drawing a connection between two local hashtags whenever they co-occur in the same tweet.11 As it appears immediately evident by the density of the graph (0.495), the practice of multi-local framing is widely recurrent. This may be interpreted as an indicator of a consistent narrative interaction – or even integration –between the local instances of an overall global network.

Provided that geospatial patterns are only one among the dimensions that can be considered, to account for the unity or multiplicity of a phenomenon, a semantic element is added in the word-clouds below. This visualisations represent just the first step of a further systematic geo-semantic analysis. The most recurrent entities recognised within tweets emitted from New York, Los Angles, Vancouver and London are separately visualised (Figure 7).


Table 2 Top local hashtags and percentage of users tweeting from a different city, ranked by hashtag occurrence

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET 77.7 #OCCUPYBOSTON 79.4 #OCCUPYLSX 65.2 #OCCUPYSF 56.3 #OCCUPYLA 54.3 #OCCUPYSEATTLE 59.5 #OCCUPYDC 74.2 #OCCUPYDENVER 69.5 #OCCUPYCHICAGO 53.7 #OCCUPYPORTLAND 38.8 #OCCUPYTORONTO 38.6 #OCCUPYDALLAS 68.4 #OCCUPYATLANTA 60.0 #OCCUPYVANCOUVER 39.1 #OCCUPYSD 50.3 #OCCUPYLASVEGAS 36.3 #OCCUPYTOKYO 46.5 #OCCUPYDENHAAG 73.0 #OCCUPYFRANKFURT 80.5 #OCCUPYSACRAMENTO 72.9 #OCCUPYOTTAWA 43.3 #OCCUPYMONTREAL 33.2 #OCCUPYCLEVELAND 69.3 #OCCUPYTAMPA 72.5 #OCCUPYCLT 27.6 #OCCUPYTUCSON 47.1 #OCCUPYSTL 54.2 #OCCUPYRALEIGH 57.3 #OCCUPYBUFFALO 65.0 #OCCUPYMIAMI 59.3 #OCCUPYPHILLY 50.2 #OCCUPYPHOENIX 53.3 #OCCUPYBERLIN 59.0 #OCCUPYMN 60.2 #OCCUPYDAMESTREET 49.0 #OCCUPYAMSTERDAM 69.1 #OCCUPYOAKLAND 79.1 #OCCUPYSYDNEY 46.1 #OCCUPYAUSTIN 53.5


Table 2 Top local hashtags and percentage of users tweeting from a different city, ranked by hashtag occurrence (continued)

#OCCUPYMELBOURNE 60.6 #OCCUPYHOUSTON 47.5 #OCCUPYMADISON 59.0 #OCCUPYORLANDO 40.6 #OCCUPYDETROIT 51.1 #OCCUPYCINCY 50.7 #OCCUPYNOLA 42.0 #OCCUPYPITTSBURGH 52.2 #OCCUPYINDY 47.3 #OCCUPYBALTIMORE 55.0 #OCCUPYYEG 21.4 #OCCUPYDSM 64.9 #OCCUPYKC 43.9 #OCCUPYNS 27.2 #OCCUPYMILWAUKEE 66.9 #OCCUPYBURQUE 46.5 #OCCUPYSLC 32.7 #OCCUPYCALGARY 37.9 #OCCUPYVICTORIA 32.3 #OCCUPYLOUISVILLE 21.6 AVERAGE 53.3

Figure 6 Co-occurrence network of top local hashtags; 7–15October (see online version for colours)


Figure 7 New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver and London most occurring semantic entities (see online version for colours)


From the geo-semantic clouds above, no clear patterns of divergence or uniformity are observable: where some entities widely recur among different cities, and even different nations, many are also the specificities of each area; where explicitly local entities are highly present; references to other locations are likewise not an exception.

Starting from the preliminary results presented, some useful directions that further analysis on the data should undertake are: an evaluation of similarities and differences between different operationlisations of the geographical variable – users provenience, local hashtags and locations mentioned – the assessment of statistical/network analysis techniques to test defined hypothesis on geo-semantic clustering – e.g., comparison between the city and the nation level – a deeper qualitative inspection of some geographical branches of the movement for triangulating the results. Despite these useful possibilities of extension, the very challenging nature of the phenomenon – not only the early stage of the methodology applied – may be responsible for the ambiguity registered. In the discussion below, different possibilities of interpretation are conversely discussed.

4 Discussion

4.1 #Occupy social movements theory

In this section, a critical account of the challenges that the empirical case inquired suggests is sketched. Various working hypothesis, to possibly deal with these challenges, are subsequently suggested.

The dynamics allowed by new media environments for social movements to reach weakens the analytical difference between scale-shift model’s mechanisms. The distinction between mediated, relational and brokered patterns of diffusion largely collapses: social media networks, in fact, redefine the distinction between both ‘mediated’ vs. ‘social’ networks and ‘pre-existent’ vs. ‘newly established’ patterns of interaction. Concrete and chronological paths of diffusion do not of course vanish; but given the new possibilities of brokerage present within digital environments, the more empirically observable, the less theoretically interesting they become. A sort of ‘scale-free’ model12 – more than a scale-shift one – is in fact what could describe the geographical patterns of the movement: an iteration – more than a diffusion – that gives rise to a fractal articulation of the network and a reflexive synthesis between the local and the global levels. These aspects are suggested by the speed at which Occupy spreads among hundreds of cities, the importance associated with both the local – the physical square – and the global – the digital square, and the various elements of ‘despatialisation’ registered. The observation that the geospatial structure of the communicative network is sensible to specific events might indicate that the network – or better: its structure of attention, lacks of a fixed scale and rearranges itself converging on specific episodes.

The study of social networks is evidently called to follow these networks in their extensive migration into new environments. In the case of Occupy, digital entities act as brokers of the network way more than as specific human beings do: the circulation and resemantisation of a hashtag, through social/media networks, is what mainly accounts for the assemblage of the movement at various scales. Conversely, the notion of informational network is affected by the rise of the web 2.0, as ‘social’ and ‘technical’ dimensions deeply merge; and as a mainly metaphorical concept becomes instead highly empirical. For example, it becomes now possible to more or less accurately map the


geographical reach and the overall structure of otherwise evanescent networks of communication.

The transformations presented do not only affect mobilisations allowing individuals to gather without centralised coordination: they also affect the ‘combinatory logic’ of the process; this works both at the inter-individual and, more clearly here, at the inter-group level. This hypothesis is corroborated by the presence a plurality of issues collected under the same logo. Nonetheless, as the geographical clustering of semantic entities shows both global and local concerns, it is possible to hypothesise the existence of cross-scale and intersecting dimensions of identity. The role played by distinctive practices – such as retweets and hashtags – in mediating the transition between these levels should be further investigated.

The sort of ‘connective identity’, which results from the new logic of association among locales, might be more usefully conceptualised as a brand, a notion that assumes greater and greater importance in contemporary economy and society (Arvidsson, 2005, 2006). This construct can indeed account for the serial instantiation of the movement in various locales, and for the parallel importance put on both the logo as such – occupy- and a loose but yet productive imaginary – surrounding the 99% condition. Moreover, the notion of brand allows one to take into consideration, at the same time, both the organisational and identitary dimensions of a movement, as suggested by both epistemological considerations and empirical transformations. The superposition between these elements is in fact widely present in the Occupy mobilisations: horizontal structures, networking practices, social media communication, consensus decision-making, the occupation itself, etc.; all these features are both, at the same time, aspects of Occupy’s organisation and Occupy’s identity. To do away with this antinomy appears much more challenging for Social Movements Theory than for social movements practice; a direction that can nonetheless be encouraged by the adoption of a symmetrical attitude towards the study of the social (Latour, 2005) and that can rely on the peculiarities of digital techniques.

4.2 Towards a semiotic of contention?

The definition of the boundaries of a movement is, on the one hand, a matter of analytical stance; nonetheless, on the other hand, the act of tracing boundaries is a process performed by the participants themselves. Not to follow them in this enactment is to miss a great opportunity, provided that, within contemporary systems of contention, these boundaries are becoming surely more and more fluid – thus theoretically challenging-, but yet more and more material – thus empirically traceable.

Considering the aspects highlighted in the analysis, how should the Occupy network be analytically conceived is not that straightforward. Is it a coalition of local movements? Is it a global movement? Is it a national movement with minor trans-national spill-overs? The mere fact that a single label is used to brand actions of protest among sparse local networks may not be enough to conceive Occupy as a unified movement; but still is an empirical fact to be registered and consequently interpreted. On the one hand, the patterns of localisation and the number of references to local entities orient the interpretation towards the pole of multiplicity; on the other hand, the high level of trans-local interaction and the overlapping of issues registered among the various geographical branches are evidences accounting for unity. It is consequently suggested that the notion of meta-movement is what better fits the case observed.13


But as a meta-movement, Occupy presents a distinctive feature: its heterogeneous semantic comes along with an highly synchronised syntax. The ‘signified’ of the movement seems somehow to lie in its signifier: ‘Occupy’ evidently works as a floating signifier, which provides organisational and identitary resources for the homogeneous branding of heterogeneous locales. The reproduction of the repertory of enduring occupation of public spaces; the lack of specific and articulated demands; the heterogeneous issue covered; the variety of local contexts connected; the catch-all identity project provided by the “we are the 99%” slogan; the convergence of disparate networks around the label ‘Occupy’14: all these elements indicate the emergence of a sort of ‘syntactical identity’.

Paralleling the substitution between the signifier and the signified that characterises contemporary hyper-reality (Baudrillard, 1981), a pessimistic hypothesis could be that this case represents the rise of ‘simulacra-movements’, deprived of references to the ‘real context’ and transfigured into a ‘virtual hyper-text’ made out of empty signifiers. Alternatively, one may optimistically believe that Occupy reveals how ‘real virtualities’ can help informational movements to overcome the fragmentation of experience, typically conveyed by the logic of domination in the network society (Castells, 1997). More cautiously, this work suggests to start from a simple semiotic observation, without making any speculation with regard to opportunities or threats for social change: a shapeless semantic – the 99% related imaginary, the variety of claims – and a clear-cut syntax – the Occupy logo, the practice of the occupations – are coupling in the assemblage of some recent movement networks. This process represents a synchronisation of social movements’ branding practices, and puts a challenge not only to social movement organisational logic, but also to the role played by collective identities in holding a movement network together.

The function of mediators (Latour, 2005) played by digital entities and environments in this transformation is probably crucial, a statement that deserves further characterisation.

5 Conclusions

5.1 New means, new meanings

The implementation of digital research techniques finds in the field of social movements a suitable topic, being recent contentious networks widely represented within various digital environments. The refinement of a digital methodology is a promising trend in social movements research, well-equipped to deal with the complexity of scales, patterns and implications that contemporary contentious politics exhibits. An exploration of other relevant platforms – both for triangulating results and improving semantic recognition capabilities, as well as deeper exploitation of complex network analysis techniques on various dimension of spatialisation, represent an intended extension of the present work.

The diffusion of digital media is involved in some coupled empirical and methodological transformations. It is urgent to overcome the classical cleavage still present within SMT: the direction social movements themselves have undertaken is widely blurring the distinction between instrumentality and expressivity; moreover, new digital methods allow, to a certain extent, to consider both organisational and identitary aspects of the mobilisation in the same data corpus. The boundaries


of a given movement tend to blur; or better: movement networks become increasingly re-assemblable, along with the global circulation of floating signifiers, inscribed in the digital hyper-text. This very fact challenges the classical notions of social movement network and of collective identity, while makes it cheaper and cheaper the activity to accurately follow and retrace their emergence on complex scales. The new importance of social movement brands and their publics acquires a significant role in mediating the trajectories of social movements; this opens up the question of their theoretical framing, while their materialisation within digital environments allows to study their structure and discourse.

The empirical analysis and theoretical considerations expressed above – still to be further developed – suggest an epistemological shift in the direction of a semiotic attitude to the study of digital media-enabled social movements. In fact, the relation between the denotative/syntactic and the connotative/semantic levels – around which ‘social movement brands’ are articulated – may be complex and non-linear; this can be true for both researchers’ and participants’ points of observation, and thus represents both a methodological and a theoretical challenge.

Wider implications for contemporary socio-semiotic systems may be hypothesised from the generalisation of the process described: the materialisation of systems of signs within the digital environment is evidently responsible for their augmented mobility, fluidity and polysemy. A process that results, as in the case analysed, in a faster synchronisation of movement networks at the syntactical level, with obvious implications for organisational patterns and identity building.

If this aspect contributes in reshaping the relation – or even the boundaries? between form and content in the broader social domain is way too much to be inferred here. Further systematic investigation on how digital environments are affecting processes of signification in socio-semiotic systems, both within and outside the field of social movements, represents an interesting task to be undertaken. It is nonetheless possible to conclude that, when materialised brands – articulated around a shapeless semantic and a clear-cut syntax – consistently mediate the becoming of social movements, the distinction between forms and contents of the protest – its means and its meanings – becomes harder to be traced – both theoretically and empirically – than their convergence.

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Notes 1Crucial to social movements studies even outside pure Rational Choice perspectives (e.g., Klandermans, 1984; Oliver and Marwell, 2001).

2Provided that the original dataset was collected tracking all the tweets containing the word ‘occupy’, the popular ‘#occupywallstreet’ contracted version ‘#ows’ may have been under-represented. By the way, the wide use of multiple hashtags and the focus of this analysis on the geographical variety of the movement legitimise the substantial representativeness of the corpus.

3Sources of unreliability include users reporting fake proveniences, human error occurred while recoding entries and cases in which any sort of localisation was impossible. Conversely, the number of GPS referenced tweets, which information was nonetheless merged in the dataset, resulted to be an extremely small fraction of the total. Moreover, the most important nodes in the network have been manually checked and, in case information in the location field was missing or ambiguous, their position was inferred from an inspection of their tweets feed.

4A random sample was extracted, with time and user’s activity as stratifying variables. 5The mere adoption of the label ‘Occupy’ cannot of course be conceived as a marker of the boundaries of the movement. But in the wide range of phenomena that goes from the original New York protest to an Italian TV program (see http://www.deejay.it/dj/tv/occupydeejay), where to set the borders of the movement is to many extent arbitrary and represents, as claimed in the discussion, the real challenge to confront with.

6Being these data self-reported by anonymous users, they cannot be considered 100% reliable; nonetheless, each entry reported a journalistic source accounting for the corresponding episode.

7Among the many relocalisation, even #OCCUPYANTARCTICA shows up, as photos reporting groups of researchers located in the South Pole, expressing their solidarity toward the movement, widely circulate in the first weeks of the protest.


8The strings searched in the tweets are ‘world’, ‘earth’, ‘planet’, ‘globe’, ‘everywhere’. 9These results are in line with a similar analysis conducted on a wider time span, on United States tweets and comparing flows across US states (Conover et al., 2013).

10This result contrasts in part with the case of the Spanish 15M movement, where interaction on Twitter was found mainly local and only the hub of Madrid was presenting an high degree of trans-locality (Borge-Holthoefer et al., 2011).

11The sample refers to the top 59 hashtags related to a unique city. The dimension of the labels is scaled according to the overall occurrence of each hashtag, while the thickness of edges is related to the weight of the association. Hashtags have been aggregated for location and in some cases renamed to make it evident the city referred (e.g., from #OCCUPYLSX to #OCCUPYLONDON). Owing to its ambiguous valence, both denoting the New York main occupation and the general movement, the hashtag #OCCUPYWALLSTREET has not been translated.

12Paralleling, in a metaphorical sense, the property of many complex networks (Barabasi and Albert, 1999).

13Along with the more demanding notion of brand, which would deserve a proper theoretical characterisation.

14The fact that this signifier denotes nothing more than the occupation itself.

The #OCCUPY network on Twitter and the challenges to social movements theory and research

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