The Fourth Phase (2010–2014): Digital Activism Invades Mainstream Politics

Abstract

The WikiLeaks revelations in my view became the symbol of the mainstreaming and popularization of digital activism in the public sphere, and this is why I view this as the start of a fourth phase in digital activism. WikiLeaks was in a sense a continuity for online collaborative communities, such as the FLOSS movement, as was explained in the first chapter. I started thinking about how affect theory could contribute to the study of the first reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations when I was preparing a chapter for the edited volume we published with Adi Kunstman in 2012. I am reusing material from that chapter here (Karatzogianni, 2012). By using affect theory, which I explain in depth in Section 4.4, I sought to enrich cyberconflict theory beyond the identity, media representations, discourse, conflict analysis, and resource mobilization elements I utilized in previous studies.