ABSTRACT
Social media emerged with a broad understanding that egalitarian practices would become the standard approach to publishing and distributing content. In recent times we have seen this flat hierarchical approach fade as commercial stakeholders, platform providers and content publishers continue to design and practice exclusionary processes to ensure their work is visible. This current practice limits the capacity for all voices to be heard, prompting the question how can digital activism remain visible in a media-saturated social media environment? This paper draws on a content analysis of the most popular YouTube users in Australia to illustrate the absence of digital activism within its visual culture. It maps the process of fragmented platformization, called here micro-platformization, to highlight the content production and publishing strategies digital activists should adopt. While successful commercial YouTube practitioners adhere closely to the principles of social media logics (Van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2014). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2–14), this paper argues that stakeholders engaging in the practice of digital activism need to adopt similar strategies to their commercial counterparts. By including strategies that reflect the successful practices of social media logics, digital activism can not only become visible across social media spaces, but also engage public discourse on civic matters and public affairs.
Acknowledgements
I would also like to thank Brittany Ferdinands who conducted the unwieldy data collection of a number of Australian YouTube channels.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Dr Jonathon Hutchinson (PhD 2013, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, QUT) is a lecturer in Online Communication and Media at the University of Sydney. His research explores Public Service Media, cultural intermediation, everyday social media use, the role of social media influencers within co-creative environments, and social media within cyber-security. He is the NSW Representative on the Executive Committee for the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA). Hutchinson is an award-winning author and his latest book is Cultural Intermediaries: Audience Participation and Media Organisations (2017) published through Palgrave Macmillan [email: jonathon.hutchinson@sydney.edu.au].