Departmental Papers (ASC)
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
2016
Publication Source
Information, Communication & Society
Volume
19
Issue
3
Start Page
397
Last Page
418
DOI
10.1080/1369118X.2015.1106571
Abstract
On the afternoon of 9 August 2014, 18-year-old Michael ‘Mike’ Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri. Brown’s body lay in the street for four and a half hours, and during that time, his neighbors and friends took to social media to express fear, confusion, and outrage. We locate early tweets about Ferguson and the use of the hashtag #Ferguson at the center of a counterpublic network that provoked and shaped public debates about race, policing, governance, and justice. Extending theory on networked publics, we examine how everyday citizens, followed by activists and journalists, influenced the #Ferguson Twitter network with a focus on emergent counterpublic structure and discursive strategy. We stress the importance of combining quantitative and qualitative methods to identify early initiators of online dissent and story framing. We argue that initiators and their discursive contributions are often missed by methods that collapse longitudinal network data into a single snapshot rather than investigating the dynamic emergence of crowdsourced elites over time.
Copyright/Permission Statement
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Information, Communication & Society on 2016, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1106571
Keywords
social media activism, networked counterpublics, network analysis, discourse analysis, policing, ferguson
Recommended Citation
Jackson, S., & Welles, B. F. (2016). #Ferguson Is Everywhere: Initiators In Emerging Counterpublic Networks. Information, Communication & Society, 19 (3), 397-418. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1106571
Date Posted:06 May 2020