UC San Diego

This dissertation is an ethnographic account of the information and communication technologies used by networked social movements, particularly Occupy, to communicate and coordinate campaigns and actions. Studying networked social movements is difficult because they diverge from the classic theories of social movement formation due to their lack of leaders, capacity to mobilize large groups quickly, decentralized decision- making, and heavy reliance on networked communication technologies. Networked social movements gain coherence by leveraging the connective capacity of information and communication technologies to forge new social solidarities across space, time, and ideologies. While many studies have investigated the social media presence of networked movements such as Occupy, 15m, and the Arab Spring, few identify the invisible work that goes into managing media for these large-scale uprisings or unearth what kinds of skills, knowledge, and resources are necessary to build and sustain networked movements. My fieldwork attends to these shortfalls, while also contributing a thorough account of the history of the Occupy movement and the political implications for structuring collective action in this way. Since October 2011, I have participated in the construction of a communication platform, called InterOccupy.net, designed to mitigate problems caused by the failure of email and social media to communicate strategic and tactical plans for direct action. By situating my research within the developing infrastructure of InterOccupy, my study documents the Occupy movement's increased organizational capacity and strategic use of resources at the very moment when other scholars were writing Occupy's obituary