Making a deal with the devil? Portuguese and Finnish activists’ everyday negotiations on the value of social media

ABSTRACT

This article explores how young activists in Portugal and Finland negotiate the value of social media in their practices. Considering the near ubiquitous intertwinement of online-offline environments, and its contradictory promises for social movements, we look at these negotiations through the moral principles drawn upon to critique and justify social media practices. Based on ethnographic data from Portuguese climate activists and Finnish mental health activists, we build on pragmatist sociology as an analytical frame to investigate value and meaning-making within these social movements. Results show how activists predominantly criticize social media for its fame-valued logic, which they consider leading to the individualization and depoliticization of communication and the ‘marketization’ of messages and practices. These challenges are managed with reference to the groups’ civic values through two sets of practices: 1) grounding the online and 2) repurposing individualism. Yet these practices reveal different compromise strategies in each country to accommodate social media demands and core group values, highlighting different interpretations of civic values that materialize in competing stances in relation to ‘political’ content and ‘individual’ action. We argue that an analytical framework focusing on values as they unfold in everyday practices is particularly apt to understanding meaning construction in social movements, whose very essence is the evaluation and critique of existing justifications within certain socio-political arrangements.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• social media
• valuation
• critique
• resistance
• youth

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude to their colleagues at the Imagi(ni)ng Democracy project and the Seminar of the Center for Sociology of Democracy (CSD – University of Helsinki) for their thoughtful inputs and contributions in an earlier version of this article. The authors would also like to acknowledge the valuable insights and recommendations from the two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In order to preserve participants’ anonymity, all names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 804024).

Notes on contributors

Carla Malafaia

Carla Malafaia is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Project ‘Imagi(ni)ng Democracy: European youth becoming citizens by visual participation (ImagiDem)’. She works at the Centre for Research and Intervention in Education (CIIE) at the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences (University of Porto), and is an affiliate member of the Center for Sociology of Democracy (CSD) at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include youth political participation, social and educational inequalities and democracy. ORCiD ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5490-1187/@CarlaMalafaia

Taina Meriluoto is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Project ‘Imagi(ni)ng Democracy: European youth becoming citizens by visual participation (ImagiDem)’, and in the Center for Sociology of Democracy (CSD), Faculty of Social Sciences (University of Helsinki). She specializes in experience-based political action, is intrigued by selfies as tools of politicization and fascinated with empirical applications of agonistic and radical democratic theories. ORCiD ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1793-1031/@MeriTaina