Abstract

This article presents a new approach to the study of public contestation through social media. Developing this approach, we make three conceptual moves. First, to capture the dynamic character of contemporary contestation, we shift attention from publics to publicness as an interactive process. Second, we turn the focus from the “counter,” as a public or space distinct from the dominant sphere, towards distributed forms of contention. Finally, instead of considering media as arenas of claims, we investigate how media are constitutive of contentious publicness, which can be studied along its material, spatial, and temporal dimensions. These moves lead to an analytical framework through which trajectories of contentious publicness can be systematically traced and evaluated. Through case studies on the 2011 Egyptian uprising and the Occupy protests, we demonstrate how this framework can be employed to examine the construction of new contentious actors and evaluate their democratic legitimacy as claim-makers.

中文翻译：

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从反公众到有争议的公众：通过社交媒体追踪民众抗议的时间，空间和物质表达

摘要

本文提出了一种通过社交媒体研究公共竞争的新方法。开发这种方法，我们进行了三个概念上的动作。首先，为了捕捉当代竞赛的动态特征，我们将注意力从公众转移到公众作为一个互动过程。其次，我们将焦点从“柜台”（即与主导领域不同的公共场所或空间）转向分布式形式的竞争。最后，我们没有将媒体视为主张的舞台，而是研究了媒体如何构成有争议的公共性，可以沿着其物质，空间和时间维度对其进行研究。这些举措形成了一个分析框架，通过该框架可以系统地追踪和评估有争议的公开轨迹。通过对2011年埃及起义和占领抗议的案例研究，