Civil resistance 2.0: How online resistance serves a tool to express societal dissatisfactions

Abstract

This thesis researches the notion of online civil resistance, a particular form of mediated activism. Unlike e-democracy initiatives which collaborate with governmental power, and applications of social media which facilitate offline gatherings of protesters, citizens can also use the Internet itself as a place to protest. This is achieved through various forms of mediated activism, such as hacking. It is argued that the Internet enables citizens to express societal dissatisfactions in ways in which regular initiatives of e-democracy and e-participation fall short. This study embeds the characteristics of regular civil resistance in an online setting. First, a theoretical framework will be provided to explain how in today' s networked world citizens have new options to influence others through media manipulation. Then in order to analyze how these new possibilities make way for specific new social practices, critical discourse analysis will be applied to understand how the Internet enables groups of citizens to express dissatisfaction as they oppose certain political conduct based on their current cultural values and beliefs. Frame analysis supplements this by highlighting how media manipulation works in the discursive events researched. By using these methods, three cases are analyzed which act as discursive events of struggle for power. The first case revolves around the dissatisfaction concerning poor use of the Dutch language and ' being Dutch' surrounding the ' Koningslied' prior to King Willem-Alexander' s inauguration in the Netherlands in April 2013. The second case features online discontent in the form of hacking performed by Anonymous and aimed against the impediment of Internet liberties which were threatened by the ACTA treaty. The last case features the use of citizen journalism (a concept based upon newsgathering by public citizens) used by Turkish protesters and aimed against governmental encroachment on secularism. This allows for a fresh and contemporary outlook on digitally networked-based resistance, explaining if we can truly speak of online civil resistance as an additional way of citizen engagement within the (global) networked public sphere, able to express societal dissatisfactions and perhaps change political conduct in order to better reflect values and ideas existent in civil society.