"Meet Them Where They Are": Social Movement Communication in a Culture of Personal Politics
Date
2017
Authors
Johnson, JL
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Abstract
This dissertation asks, how do social movement communicators attempt to strike up a societal conversation in a culture of personal politics? A conversation with society is essentially social, yet the current media landscape increasingly demands a personalized style of communication. Drawing from three sources of evidence—a year of fieldwork in a social movement organization, interviews with 15 communication directors for advocacy organizations, and a discourse analysis of New York Times articles on personalization—this dissertation furthers sociology in two specific ways. First, the evidence supports a separation of traditional media advocacy, which has been defined as social movement attempts for journalistic attention, from a movement’s communicative work of strategizing for and drawing from sources of attention across a stretched, distracted, and noisy media terrain. Second, this dissertation demonstrates that the media ecosystem is not only a forum for public discussion but a social structure of public dialogue, producing a schema with which movement communicators form their attempts at reaching a potential audience. This dissertation concludes that the communicative schema of the early 21st century encourages a radically-practical deference to emotion, narrative, identity, and personal biography. This “communicative personalism” promotes cultural conditions that are both enabling and limiting; it opens up a wide range of deep, personal involvements in silos of the civil sphere while closing down other possibilities of translation and dialogue across political enclaves.
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Keywords
Sociology, Attention, Culture, Media, Personalization, Public sphere, Social movements