A Networked Social Movement: A Study of How a Massive Mobilization Formed in Mainland China

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-319-1_24How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Networked social movement; leaderlessness; crisis communication; Chinese social media platform

Abstract

Networked social movements are established on pre-existing social and organizational linkages facilitated by networked media technology. Instances of such movements encompass those that transpired in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, the United States, and numerous other nations as a reaction to the 2008 financial crisis. Despite the significant differences in regional issues and political contexts, the primary participants were interconnected with one other, as well as with peripheral participants and observers, via digital media. The primary distinction between traditional social movements and networked social movements lies in the transition from ‘collective action’ to ‘connective action’. The latter pertains to individuals addressing issues largely on an individual level, recognizing common concerns within easily personalized frameworks of action that facilitate the widespread sharing of varied interpretations of shared problems via digital media networks. The author aims to investigate the development and evolution of opinion leadership on Weibo and Douyin by analyzing the distribution of social influence across these platforms and assessing the stability of inequality in social influence. Specifically, concentrate on the current social event “Sanzhi Yang,” which pertains to an e-commerce company's crisis communication. The author replicates the research design of Liang and Lee (2023), who utilized two statistical approaches to assess the stability of opinion leadership: Gini coefficients and coefficient of variation. The subsequent sections will commence with literature evaluations on networked social movements and the concept of leaderlessness.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xianlin Yuan
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/12/14
TI  - A Networked Social Movement: A Study of How a Massive Mobilization Formed in Mainland China
BT  - Proceedings of the 2024 6th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 223
EP  - 229
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-319-1_24
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-319-1_24
ID  - Yuan2024
ER  -