Editor's Introduction for Special Issue on the Role of Computer-Mediated Communication in Promoting Activism and Revolutionary Work Around the World

Technology has drastically changed the way people communicate. Gone are the days of waiting for a response via email or sitting at a desk to use a desktop computer. Portable technology such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones afford users the ability to be connected to their social media communities 24 hours a day. Apps give people the power to manage practically every aspect of their life, and social media applications such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat give people the power to create community and share their lives via pictures, posts, and videos. Social media has rewritten the definition of community building and changed the way people organize and protest. As hashtag activism continues to grow (#metoo, #62milliongirls, #timesup, #Oscarssowhite, #lovewins), the need to understand how and why people use Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) is key—considering the polarizing political climate around the world. As Freelon, Mcilwain, and Clark (2016) suggest, it is important to “understand both the strategy and potential success” (p.15) that social movements have when using social media and the web as part of their organizing strategies.This special edition focuses on the uses of CMC for community organizing in countries where revolutionary action and social and political activism remain hidden or confined in limited digital or real spaces. Emphasis is given to how social transformation happens in social spaces, and the collection further examines whether in rare “revolutionary times” substantial opportunities for shifts in power relations emerge that enable the subversion of cultural and social norms (Cocks 1988). The collection’s interest in exploring social transformation and social change arises from the need to understand the processes by which social change can be materialized within the spatiality of social life, and to study how spaces of imagining and theorizing can/do shape or displace the future(s) of power relations. According to Butler (1990), the possibilities for social transformation are produced by instabilities within the present social order and by the possibility “of failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction” (p.141). It is in these processes of uneven development and the production of settled and fluid social spaces that opportunities for social and possibly political change arise in the shifting of social spaces—from the present to the future spaces of transformation of which we dream (Robinson, 2000).https://connexionsjournal.org/portfolio-3/vol-6-•-2018/