by Anna Priante
Social movement organizations widely use social media to organize collective action for social change, such as cancer awareness campaigns. However, little is known about how effective online social movement campaigns are at generating social change by translating online action into meaningful (offline) action. This dissertation examines the micro-mobilization dynamics at play that can explain the effectiveness of online social social movement campaigns. This book comprises seven chapters presenting research based on a multidisciplinary, mixed-method approach, combining theories and methods from sociology, social psychology, communication science, and computational social science. The findings show that, with mobilization dynamics of collective action, we can gain an important understanding of the mechanisms at work during online social movement campaigns and of the effectiveness of such campaigns in fostering communication processes related to the cause, obtaining important resources for the cause, developing a collective identity, and raising awareness.
Anna’s defense was the 5000th PhD defense at the UT!