A Study of Digital Activism in a Leaderless Era
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Fridays For Future: a study of digital activism in a leaderless era Sophie Christine Wandzilak 12277118 MA Media Studies: New Media and Digital Culture June 23rd, 2020 Supervisor: Dr. M.P. Stevenson Abstract This thesis explores the departure from centralised leadership as observed by the online behaviours and practices of the digital climate activist group Fridays For Future. The chosen movement is unique as its collective efforts and apparent leaderlessness are positioned around Greta Thunberg as a figurehead rather than the leader of the movement. To understand decentralised and centralised forms of leadership, a qualitative content analysis was conducted on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Each platform was analysed according to a coding agenda consisting of categories reflecting the overall aim of the movement, decentralised leadership (based on the ideology of horizontalism and the soft leadership form) and centralised, hierarchical leadership. Results of the qualitative content analysis indicate that the category reflecting the overall aim of the movement consists of approximately 40% more codes than leadership forms, supporting that Fridays For Future is operating within a new hybrid form of leadership. Moreover, although codes reflecting centralised leadership were detected, the analysis suggests that some of the online practices identified during the research support the distribution of the soft leadership form. Fridays For Future remains a successful digital activist group. The movement is inclusive rather than exclusive and, despite being founded at the end of 2018, has proven to overcome geographic barriers through online connectivity facilitated by social media platforms. Keywords: Fridays For Future, digital activism, leadership, (cyber)populism, participatory culture and social media platforms. 2 Acknowledgments First and most importantly, I want to thank my supervisor Michael Stevenson, who guided me in the most constructive way throughout this writing process. His advice and input helped in ensuring I remained on the right tracks, pushed me to develop my thinking-and- research skills and made the thesis writing enjoyable. Thank you, Michael! I would also like to thank my mother. She helped me in remaining motivated to persevere during challenging times. Further, my boss Marlie who has supported both my academic and professional career over the course of these past months. Finally, I am thankful for Stephanie allowing me to call her spontaneously to discuss my ideas and encouraging me when I doubted myself. 3 Table of Contents Chapter 1 | Introduction 6 1.1 Activism in a digital world …………………………………………………… 6 1.2 Fridays For Future, digital activism and leadership ………………………….. 7 1.3 Research questions and hypotheses …………………………………………... 9 1.4 Structure of this thesis ………………………………………………………… 9 Chapter 2 | Practices of contemporary digital activism 10 2.1 The digitisation of activism: social media, affordances and #MeToo ……….. 10 2.2 What affordances enable in the context of digital activism ………………….. 14 2.3 Summary and next steps ……………………………………………………… 17 Chapter 3 | Networked and leaderless organisation of digital activists 17 3.1 The umbrella of digital activism: cyberpopulism …………………………….. 17 3.1.1 Shared leadership: horizontalism …………………………………… 19 3.2 The aesthetics of collective and connective action …………………………... 20 3.3 Participatory culture and the spreading of user-generated content …………... 21 3.3.1 Practices of participatory culture: memes ………….......................... 23 3.3.2 Limiting leadership to a ‘soft’ form …………................................... 25 3.4 Genres of digital activism for research purposes ………….............................. 26 Chapter 4 | Methodology 28 4.1 Research questions and research design ……………………………………… 28 4.1.1 Deductive category application …………………………………….. 29 4.1.2 Inductive category development …………………………………… 30 4.2 Data collection ……………………………………………………………….. 31 4.3 Data analysis …………………………………………………………………. 33 4.4 Ethical considerations and limitations of the approach ……..……………….. 34 4 Chapter 5 | Results 35 5.1 Results from deductive category application on each platform …………........ 35 5.2 Results from inductive coding of each platform …………............................... 36 5.2.1 Facebook …………………………………………………………… 37 5.2.2 Instagram …………………………………………………………… 39 5.2.3 Twitter ……………………………………………………………… 42 5.3 Results after combining each dataset ………………………………………… 45 Chapter 6 | Analysis of results and a discussion of their significance 46 6.1 Genres of digital activism on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter …………….. 47 6.2 Coding to understand leadership, the overall aim of the network and the significance of a participatory culture ………………………………… 51 Chapter 7 | Conclusion 54 Chapter 8 | Bibliography 57 5 Chapter 1 | Introduction During a recent conversation with former NASA astronaut Rusty Schweickart, he told me about his experience in testing the life support system of spacesuits. As part of the Apollo programme, he ensured that Neil Armstrong was able to safely walk on the moon’s surface. Rusty emphasised the Earth’s fragility with its thin, blue ozone layer and the importance of protecting it. To achieve this, Rusty wants to raise awareness about preserving our planet for future generations. This conversation inspired me to choose Fridays For Future and climate activism as research topics for this thesis. 1.1 Activism in a digital world With social media practices having such an influential role in the digitisation of cultural and social practices, the concept of leadership is also changing. As social media plays a vital role in everyday tasks, the importance of platforms grows, forms of leadership therefore adapt and nowadays become more inclusive. Fridays For Future departs from the lineage of traditional leadership and instead created a new hybrid form of networked organisation with the Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg as figurehead of this movement. By using Thunberg’s name and transforming it into a symbol to represent 21st century climate activism, the movement Fridays For Future can leverage her popularity to increase the spread of messages and gain global media attention whilst operating as a leaderless movement. To frame this research objective, this thesis will study digital activism of Fridays For Future in a leaderless era. With new waves of activism currently unfolding in the world – the most recent one triggered by George Floyd’s death on 25 May 2020 – leaderless forms of activism are growing, proving to be very successful and a worthy topic for research (“George Floyd is remembered around the world,” 2020). When the unarmed Afro-American Floyd died because a Caucasian police officer knelt on his neck, the video footage taken by onlookers rapidly circulated the Internet. The event quickly made global headlines and reignited the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then, with Floyd as figurehead, protests erupted across the world to address racism and police violence, whilst demanding justice for Floyd and others who had the same or a similar fate. People utilise social media and follow the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement; millions of tweets and Instagram posts have been published to express outrage. On Instagram, the hashtag #georgefloyd was used 2.3 million times in the first two weeks after his death, “already nearly as often as #metoo (2.5m times since October 2017)” showing how 6 rapidly the group and its impact are growing (“George Floyd is remembered around the world,” 2020). It is hard to detect who is leading this wave of the Black Lives Matter movement and not yet clear what it will achieve, but the immediacy and reach of online technology makes socio-political activism very powerful. Centralised versus decentralised forms of leadership have been the objects of research in the past. As will become clear in this thesis, there are various ideologies and practices that describe different waves of contemporary activism that are identifiable in both offline and online settings. However, there is a lack of research on how internationally dispersed activist groups can feed into a larger cause, when strategically positioning an individual as a figurehead of the movement. Therefore, this thesis will investigate (cyber)populist leadership forms by focusing on the online behaviours and practices of Fridays For Future through conducting a qualitative content analysis on the movement’s Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages. 1.2 Fridays For Future, digital activism and leadership When Thunberg started a school strike on Fridays to raise awareness about climate change, she may not have foreseen that she launched a global socio-political movement which changed the perception of climate activism. Thunberg rose to fame as a climate activist over the course of the last two years and, during this short period, she was invited to speak at the United Nations General Assembly, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and has continued to receive attention and support from people around the world (Beeler, 2019). Her impact has grown from that of a young local, Swedish activist to an international climate activist of world renown. The movement founded by Thunberg is now called Fridays For Future and involves over 13,000,000 people globally across 7,500 cities dispersed on all continents (“Fridays For Future,” n.d.). Fridays For Future has developed into a global activist movement where followers can register their countries within the network and form local, country-specific