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AbstractThe Canadian Refugees Welcome Movement (2015–2016) was one of the most sizeable, visible, and effective instances of collective action in recent Canadian history. It had a nationwide scope and grassroots initiation. It comprised a wide variety of participants and actively employed social media in its constitution. This article reports the results of a multimethod case study that seeks to explain how collective action frames emerged in the context of the Canadian Refugees Welcome Movement; which actors were involved in their articulation; and how they generated a following, collective action and humanitarian and political effect. The focus is on the discursive processes of construction of solidarity across difference as they unfolded in the social media environment. The Facebook event pages calling for rallies in support of Syrian refugees, it argues, served as a discursive space that helped transform the moral shock experienced by members of distinct moral communities into a process of concerting of voices and construction of solidarity and collective action frames across differences.

This article presents a case study based in a medium-size Bulgarian city, Stara Zagora, where three different electronic platforms intended to support the interaction between citizens and institutions were introduced and tested between 2010 and 2018. These platforms had different driving actors, somewhat different profiles, and markedly distinct effects. The construction of the first platform was pursued through an e-government project led by a municipal official and financed with funds from the European Union. The second platform was My e-Municipality, an initiative undertaken by a small group of active citizens in collaboration with the city administration. The third platform was a set of interconnected Facebook groups through which citizens protested the destruction of a local park. The article defines and assesses the three distinct models of participation exemplified by the three platforms and discusses the challenges of achieving authentic engagement and response on the part of political and administrative institutions.

AbstractThis article employs the concept of McDonaldization introduced by George Ritzer (1993) in his Weberian analysis of the processes of formal rationalization characteristic of late modern consumer society to reflect on the social and cultural implications of the most recent wave of communication technologies – social media. It argues that social media smuggle formal rationality into the elementary forms of social interaction, most clearly illustrated through the way they redefine the notion of friendship. In an attempt to lay the ground for a "multiperspectivist approach" (Kellner, 1999) to this phenomenon, the article enters the Weberian argument into a conversation with other styles of theorizing social media such as Marxism, Critical Theory and sociological phenomenology.

The summer of 2007 marked the growing visibility of blogs and bloggers in the Bulgarian public sphere. A case in point was a spontaneous civic protest spurred by a decision of the Supreme Administrative Court to strip a territory in the south-east of Bulgaria (Strandja Mountain) of its status as a protected natural reserve. Young people and environmentalist groups went out in the streets to challenge the decision, their actions being organized and reported by blogs, websites and text messages. These brief but centrally placed and well-attended civic actions compelled not only the mass media, but also parliamentarians to put the issue on their agendas. This article analyzes the relationship between media messages and street action as well as the dynamics of inter-media exchanges and the profiles of the actors behind them.

This article examines recent changes in the media situation in Bulgaria, particularly in the field of television supply and consumption. It focuses on the problem of how changed social conditions have influenced the adoption of home satellite TV reception equipment. The growing pluralization of Bulgarian society and the increasing differentiation of personal information and entertainment needs are indicated as major prerequisites for the diffusion of the new communication medium. The results of an in-depth study of the motivation of early adopters are reported. An attempt at a typology of satellite television use patterns is made.

This article explores the symbolic construction of civic engagement mediated by social media in Canadian newspapers. The integration of social media in politics has created a discursive opening for reimagining engagement, partly as a result of enthusiastic accounts of the impact of digital technologies upon democracy. By means of a qualitative content analysis of Canadian newspaper articles between 2005 and 2014, we identify several discursive articulations of engagement: First, the articles offer the picture of a wide range of objects of engagement, suggesting a civic body actively involved in governance processes. Second, engagement appears to take place only reactively, after decisions are made. Finally, social media become the new social glue, bringing isolated individuals together and thus enabling them to pressure decision-making institutions. We argue that, collectively, these stories construct engagement as a deeply personal gesture that is nevertheless turned into a communal experience by the affordances of technology. The conclusion unpacks what we deem as the ambiguity at the heart of this discourse, considering its implications for democratic politics and suggesting avenues for the further monitoring of the technologically enabled personalization of engagement.

This article explores the symbolic construction of civic engagement mediated by social media in Canadian newspapers. The integration of social media in politics has created a discursive opening for reimagining engagement, partly as a result of enthusiastic accounts of the impact of digital technologies upon democracy. By means of a qualitative content analysis of Canadian newspaper articles between 2005 and 2014, we identify several discursive articulations of engagement: First, the articles offer the picture of a wide range of objects of engagement, suggesting a civic body actively involved in governance processes. Second, engagement appears to take place only reactively, after decisions are made. Finally, social media become the new social glue, bringing isolated individuals together and thus enabling them to pressure decision-making institutions. We argue that, collectively, these stories construct engagement as a deeply personal gesture that is nevertheless turned into a communal experience by the affordances of technology. The conclusion unpacks what we deem as the ambiguity at the heart of this discourse, considering its implications for democratic politics and suggesting avenues for the further monitoring of the technologically enabled personalization of engagement.