Physics

Sociology

Summit

Salient

Action (physics)

Gatekeeping

Biology

Politics

New media

Physical geography

Social movement

Political science

Geography

Media ecology

Contentious politics

Collective action

Public relations

Social media

Quantum mechanics

Argument (complex analysis)

Media studies

Biochemistry

The Communication Review

The Twitter Revolutions of 2009 reinvigorated the question of whether new social media have any real effect on contentious politics. In this article, the authors argue that evaluating the relation between transforming communication technologies and collective action demands recognizing how such technologies infuse specific protest ecologies. This includes looking beyond informational functions to the role of social media as organizing mechanisms and recognizing that traces of these media may reflect larger organizational schemes. Three points become salient in the case of Twitter against this background: (a) Twitter streams represent crosscutting networking mechanisms in a protest ecology, (b) they embed and are embedded in various kinds of gatekeeping processes, and (c) they reflect changing dynamics in the ecology over time. The authors illustrate their argument with reference to two hashtags used in the protests around the 2009 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen.

Social Media and the Organization of Collective Action: Using Twitter to Explore the Ecologies of Two Climate Change Protests