© 2008 The Author Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Sociology Compass 2/6 (2008): 1920–1933, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00145.x Social Movements and New Media Brian D. Loader* University of York, UK Abstract This article explores the contention that social movements are a significant social force transforming societies through their engagement with new media, such as the Internet, Web 2.0, and digital communications, which are seen as capable of facilitating new power structures. Utilizing della Porta and Diani’s framework, it considers how new media technologies may be shaping the structure, identity, opportunity, and protest dimensions of social movements. It concludes by sug- gesting that new media does offer important opportunities for cost-effective networking, interpretive framing, mobilization, and repertoires of protest action. However, their adoption does not represent the creation of entirely new virtual social movements but rather a new means of providing existing social movement organisations, local activist networks, and street-level protest with a trans-national capacity to collaborate, share information, and communicate with a wider audience. Such new media-enabled social action is both more congruent with a politics of identity but may also increasingly be competing within a media environment saturated by user-generated content. Introduction Social movements (SMs) have been a prominent, if fluctuating, feature of democratic societies and have consequently attracted a great deal of con- sideration, especially since the 1960s, from sociologists particularly in America and Europe. In more recent years, the advent of the Internet and digital interactive new media has focused attention upon an elective affinity between the transforming capacities of these information and commun- ications technologies (ICTs) and emerging global SMs and protests directed at social change. Yet, the relationship between new media tech- nologies and SMs is not unproblematic. Perhaps most obviously, the Internet offers the prospect of cheaper, faster, and international political commun- ication and mobilization. However, these potential opportunities must be weighed against the possible challenges arising from diminishing face-to-face contact between activists and its replacement by the perceived weaker commitments of computer-mediated communication (CMC). Moreover, whilst new media may facilitate alternative interactive communication channels to those dominated by mainstream commercial and political mass