Barash R.E., Antonovskiy A.Yu. New Social Movements and their Evolution in the Network Age. Voprosy filosofii, 2019, Issue 7, pp. 99-110.

Abstract

The evolutionary transformation of activism and protest communication, apparently related to the explosive development of Internet networks, significantly undermined the significant theoretical achievements of the social sciences in interpreting these new forms of communication. This evolution closed some internal mechanisms from the eyes of the observers and made the non-network manifestations of social networking activities unpredictable.A completely new theoretical problem arose: does protest activism in its social-network manifestation retain the invariant features of protest as a separate communicative system that emerged as early as the 1960s? Or does a fundamentally new form of communication arise, essentially different, both from traditional macrosystems (politics, economy, science), and from classical protest and activism? This article, on the one hand, puts this problem of observant inaccessibility of communications of new social movements in their network form, and on the other hand, tries to solve this problem, highlighting at least some of the program mechanisms of network activity, offering an answer to the question of what are these network neoplasms from the point of view of the modern system-communicative theory, what are their functions and dysfunctions for society as a whole, what are their perspectives, reflexive, reactive and proactive properties and functions?