social media – To Archeio

The Digital Golden Dawn: Emergence of a Nationalist-Racist Digital Mainstream

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:44 +0000

Eugenia Siapera and Mariangela Veikou examine the rising fascist and racist political online networks in Greece. They demonstrate that the kind of online presence that the Golden Dawn and its affiliates have acquired is the result of a mutual accommodation and adjustment amongst the Golden Dawn, digital corporations, the Greek state and civil society. Far from having been excluded or marginalised, Golden Dawn rhetorics, practices and discourses have adjusted to and infiltrated the digital mainstream.

Using Twitter to mobilize protest action: online mobilization patterns and action repertoires in the Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, and Aganaktismenoi movements,

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:37 +0000

The extensive use of social media for protest purposes was a distinctive feature of the recent protest events in Spain, Greece, and the United States. Like the Occupy Wall Street protesters in the United States, the indignant activists of Spain and Greece protested against unjust, unequal, and corrupt political and economic institutions marked by the arrogance of those in power. Social media can potentially change or contribute to the political communication, mobilization, and organization of social movements. To what extent did these three movements use social media in such ways? To answer this question a comparative content analysis of tweets sent during the heydays of each of the campaigns is conducted. The results indicate that, although Twitter was used significantly for political discussion and to communicate protest information, calls for participation were not predominant. Only a very small minority of tweets referred to protest organization and coordination issues. Furthermore, comparing the actual content of the Twitter information exchanges reveals similarities as well as differences among the three movements, which can be explained by the different national contexts.

YouTube, young people, and the socioeconomic crises in Greece

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:37 +0000

The overriding aim of this paper is to analyse Greek adolescents’ digital video making and sharing, the voices they represent in their videos, the dialogical interactions they evoke, and how this activity relates to their everyday lives as they traverse the crises that have taken hold in their country. A focused search of YouTube content was conducted which yielded five videos for analysis. These texts were ‘re-read’ using multimodal analysis and the resulting ‘texts-on-texts’ were analysed using thematic analysis. Via the creation of YouTube videos young people visually convey and communicate their representations of the crises and provide a rich analysis of how the following themes define their lived-experiences: (a) ‘unoccupied youth and occupied dreams yield a sacrificed generation’; (2) ‘blanket condemnation of powerbrokers, their messengers, and mesmerizing mediums’; and, (3) ‘hypnagogia and the insidious enslavement of the psyche’.

Small stories trans position and social media: A micro-perspective on the ‘Greek crisis’

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:25 +0000

In this article, I employ small stories research as a micro-perspective for the scrutiny of any crisis-related positionings of ‘Greece’ and ‘the Greeks’ that accompany the circulation of news stories from Greece in social media. My claim is that such positionings cannot be fully understood without reference to what stories get circulated, where, by whom, for/with whom and how. To substantiate this, I draw on a particular incident involving the assault of two female MPs by a male MP on a Greek TV breakfast show (June 2012). My analysis will show that the ways in which the Greek crisis is invoked or disregarded and erased in the social media transpositions of the incident are intimately linked with two key-narrative processes, which I call narrative stancetaking and resemiotizations (i.e. video-based or text-based) that involve a rescripting of the initial incident. In both cases, I will show how processes of story making are important for what is signalled as relevant and for how the context of the Greek crisis is made sense of, critiqued and ultimately backgrounded or erased in favour of more personalized and localized interpretations, grounded in the original and the transposed tales and tellings.