“A Performative Identity Perspective of Cyberactivism: The Case of My Stealthy Freedom”
The use of social media in social movements is generating questions about technology’s role in social change. Challenging the resource-based view of extant research that casts social media as a tool, in this paper we accord the technology a more agential role by applying a sociomaterial and affective lens. We view social media as a space where ordinary individuals perform courageous and emotional acts of protest by enacting sociomaterial practices such as generating and posting content. Through these actions, they perform activism and become activists. This new identity not only carries over into their ‘real’ lives, but also (re)creates the social movement’s collective identity through affective attunement—i.e. people connected together through emotions (Papacharissi, 2015). Drawing on a qualitative case study of a Facebook page where Iranian women protest the compulsory hijab by publishing their hijabless photos, we investigate how social media produce E-movements. Our findings indicate that the specific configuration of cyberactivism’s affective sociomaterial practices produce feelings of bravery that perform an individual’s activist identity, as well as the movement’s collective identity.
Bio: Mahya Ostovar is an assistant professor in management-information systems at Paris School of Business. She received her PhD in business administration from ESSEC Business School in 2018. Her research focuses on the intersection of organization theory and information systems, specifically different human-technology relationships and their implications for alternative forms of organizing. In her dissertation research, she has studied the role of social media in social movements organizing. Her research has been presented in conferences such as EGOS and ICIS. The first paper of her dissertation is currently under final round of revision, while another two papers are being prepared for submission to top-tier journals.