TY - JOUR
T1 - Organization in the crowd
T2 - Peer production in large-scale networked protests
AU - Bennett, W. Lance
AU - Segerberg, Alexandra
AU - Walker, Shawn
N1 - Funding Information:
Bennett and Segerberg gratefully acknowledge the support of Swedish Research Council grant [No. 421-2010-2303]. This project has also been supported by the US National Science Foundation INSPIRE grant [No. 1243170]: ‘Tools, Models and Innovation Platforms for Research on Social Media’.
PY - 2014/2
Y1 - 2014/2
N2 - How is crowd organization produced? How are crowd-enabled networks activated, structured, and maintained in the absence of recognized leaders, common goals, or conventional organization, issue framing, and action coordination? We develop an analytical framework for examining the organizational processes of crowd-enabled connective action such as was found in the Arab Spring, the 15-M in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street. The analysis points to three elemental modes of peer production that operate together to create organization in crowds: the production, curation, and dynamic integration of various types of information content and other resources that become distributed and utilized across the crowd. Whereas other peer-production communities such as open-source software developers or Wikipedia typically evolve more highly structured participation environments, crowds create organization through packaging these elemental peer-production mechanisms to achieve various kinds of work. The workings of these 'production packages' are illustrated with a theory-driven analysis of Twitter data from the 2011-2012 US Occupy movement, using an archive of some 60 million tweets. This analysis shows how the Occupy crowd produced various organizational routines, and how the different production mechanisms were nested in each other to create relatively complex organizational results.
AB - How is crowd organization produced? How are crowd-enabled networks activated, structured, and maintained in the absence of recognized leaders, common goals, or conventional organization, issue framing, and action coordination? We develop an analytical framework for examining the organizational processes of crowd-enabled connective action such as was found in the Arab Spring, the 15-M in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street. The analysis points to three elemental modes of peer production that operate together to create organization in crowds: the production, curation, and dynamic integration of various types of information content and other resources that become distributed and utilized across the crowd. Whereas other peer-production communities such as open-source software developers or Wikipedia typically evolve more highly structured participation environments, crowds create organization through packaging these elemental peer-production mechanisms to achieve various kinds of work. The workings of these 'production packages' are illustrated with a theory-driven analysis of Twitter data from the 2011-2012 US Occupy movement, using an archive of some 60 million tweets. This analysis shows how the Occupy crowd produced various organizational routines, and how the different production mechanisms were nested in each other to create relatively complex organizational results.
KW - Occupy
KW - communication as organization
KW - connective action
KW - crowd organization
KW - peer production
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84893395064&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1080/1369118X.2013.870379
DO - 10.1080/1369118X.2013.870379
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84893395064
SN - 1369-118X
VL - 17
SP - 232
EP - 260
JO - Information Communication and Society
JF - Information Communication and Society
IS - 2
ER -