Social Media and Revolutions: Imagined Communities and Social Justice Movements

Abstract

This talk focuses on the concept of political communities created by social media tools and platforms. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, it argues that social media and the networked public sphere have created new discourses for imagining community. These new imagined communities are radically different from their print predecessors as they focus on participants being active producers rather than passive recipients, and cut across boundaries of space and time. They have great political potential but also have their limitations. I ultimately argues that the networked public sphere is one which politicized scholarship needs to turn its attention towards.