Riots and Twitter: connective politics, social media and framing discourses in the digital public sphere

Abstract

Social media technologies like Twitter are credited with enabling a new form of connective action, in which political movements coalesce and mobilise around hashtags, memes and personalised action frames. After the UK riots in 2011, citizen ‘broom armies’ took to the streets to clear up and repair damage. Different hashtags, including #RiotCleanUp and #OperationCupOfTea, were implicated in these movements. This paper questions connective action theory in this context. It seeks to respond to two criticisms of the connective approach, namely that connective action underplays differences between technologies and does not account sufficiently for cultural and ideological drivers of action. The p..