Focus On The Tech

Abstract

Internet centrism, the notion that online tools play substantial roles in social and political processes, is frequently invoked by journalists, pundits, and academics. Existing research has explored this idea directly in the case of protest, attempting to discern the actual magnitude of the internet’s role in protest organization and mobilization. Taking a different approach, we conduct a content analysis to examine the extent to which internet centrism is discussed in articles about the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring in mainstream US newspapers and technology blogs. Our main findings are that the role of publication type in predicting internet centrism depends upon which protest is being discussed, and the role of protest type depends upon publication type. This study lends a theoretical perspective to an under-studied journalistic phenomenon with the potential to influence how audiences think about the causes and consequences of protests.

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