Social Media Activism at the Margins: Managing Visibility, Voice and Vitality Affects

This article is concerned with social media activism at the margins and deals with the problem of managing visibility and voice and the role of affect in the emergence of contested publics over time. While we hear a lot about social media mobilization and exchange during critical and large-scale protest events, less is understood about the capacities for building and maintaining more peripheral dissident publics over longer timeframes. And while platforms such as YouTube have been celebrated (and censored) for their ability to make protest visible through dispersed affective networks, the increasingly commercialized channel structure raises questions about the sustainability of ordinary acts of protest in the long term. This article examines a case study of peripheral anarchist political activism that moves through and beyond critical events. The study applies methods of video content analysis, qualitative analysis of comments and interactions, and visual analysis of selected videos to examine emergent “affective publics,” drawing on Daniel Stern’s notion of vitality affects.