shadows-streets-book

Forewordxipretend that Twitter, Facebook, or any other technology, for that matter,is the generative force behind the new social movements. (No observer,and certainly no activist, defends this latter position; it is a straw manerected by traditional intellectuals, mainly from the left, as a way to garnersupport for their belief in the role of “ the party ”— any party — in leading“ the masses, ” who are deemed unable to organize themselves.) Moreover,my observations of movements around the world reveal that the new socialmovements are networked in multiple ways, not only online but in theform of urban social networks, interpersonal networks, preexisting socialnetworks, and the networks that form and reform spontaneously in cyberspaceand in physical public space. This networking consists of a processof communication that leads to mobilization and is facilitated by organizationsemerging from the movement, rather than being imported from theestablished political system. However, to make progress in understandingthese movements, we need scholarly research that goes beyond the cloudof ideology and hype to examine with methodological reliability howcommunication works in such movements and to understand with precisionthe interaction between communication and social movements.From this perspective, the book you hold in your hands represents afundamental contribution to a rigorous characterization of the new avenuesof social change in societies around the world. The concept of transmediaorganizing that Sasha Costanza-Chock proposes integrates the variety ofmodes of communication that exist in the real media practices of socialmovements. From the activists ’ point of view, any communication modethat works is adopted, so that the Internet and mobile platforms are usedalongside and in interaction with paper leaflets, interpersonal face-to-facecommunication, bulletins and newspapers, graffiti, pirate radio, street art,public speeches and assemblies in the square. Everything is included inwhat Costanza-Chock calls the media ecology of the movement. This isthe reality of the new movements and the foundation of their communicativeautonomy, on which their very existence depends, particularly whenrepression inevitably falls on them.Costanza-Chock identified this novel interaction between the shiftingmedia ecology and social movements long before the Arab Spring uprisingsor the Occupy movement came to the attention of the mass media.He focused on a most significant social development, the movement forimmigrant rights that exploded across the United States in 2006, with its