It is a Thursday afternoon in September. The following day, we will be traveling from Florence to Milan to interview a young project manager of a movement organization that fights against corruption in Italy. We have already booked our train tickets, but we suddenly need to change our plans. Daniela, the activist we want to interview, has sent us an email to tell us that she is no longer available; she has just received an invitation from a morning television show on RAI1.1 She apologizes, adding that when activists receive an invitation like this, they cannot say no, especially when the interview is aired on the television programme with the highest peak viewership in the morning. At the end of the email, she proposes to meet in Rome a couple of hours after her television interview. We change our plans accordingly and join Daniela in Rome the next day. As soon as we meet with her, she again apologizes. She says she has never postponed an interview, nor has she ever changed the interview location with only a few hours of notice. We tell Daniela there is nothing to be sorry about, and we start our interview.

Unsurprisingly, the first topic we cover is the relationship that her movement organization has with Italy’s main television programmes. The organization usually has no access to them and this is a problem, according to Daniela, because these programmes can easily attract a large part of the Italian television audience. In so doing, they contribute to building the political agenda of the whole country and heavily influence how people speak about a variety of public issues. Thus, if you are a member of a movement organization with limited access to television, it makes perfect sense to suddenly postpone an interview that you have been asked to give if it is only for an academic research project.

As the interview unfolds, it becomes apparent that most of the daily choices of Daniela’s movement organization converge toward one main aim: spreading its message on corruption fast and in a way that it reaches as many people as possible. Television, newspapers, weeklies, radio programmes, news websites, social media platforms, text messages, and instant messaging apps are part of her organization’s strategy to make different audiences aware of its values, activities, and achievements. In other words, Daniela and her movement organization put complete visibility at the centre of their strategy, exploiting all available communication channels. No option is left aside because her movement organization’s aim is “becoming a point of reference for whoever would like to engage in the struggle against corruption: for this reason, we must answer to whatever input we receive”, Daniela explains. Hence, she could easily agree to be interviewed for media outlets that are neither tied to her anti-corruption struggles nor entrusted with the mission of giving information on politics. However, among all the available media, television has allowed Daniela’s movement organization to achieve a goal that would have been difficult to accomplish through a post on a social media platform, regardless of their popularity. It is television – especially that specific television programme aired at 8 am on an ordinary workday – that allows Daniela to speak to millions of viewers at the same time, informing them of her organization’s anti-corruption stance thanks to a brief interview. Daniela explains that the same results could not have been achieved if she had been interviewed for the print press or in a radio show, let alone for an article published on her movement organization’s website or in its newsletter; even the events that her movement organization arranges across Italy as part of its anti-corruption campaigns would not have sufficed.

Like many other activists we interviewed, Daniela has a cross-media and cross-platform understanding of the whole media environment in which she operates. She indeed acknowledges the current role of television in attracting millions of viewers thanks to a brief interview, but she also knows that television alone is not enough to gain visibility. Therefore, even when Daniela succeeds in the difficult task of obtaining television coverage, this specific media exposure does not fulfil her quest for visibility. In times of latency, she needs to devote particular attention to other forms of visibility, digital media being constantly on her mind. According to Daniela, the large number of people that her organization is able to reach through digital platforms allows her and her fellow activists to gain the attention of more powerful political actors in a relatively short amount of time. This is not a secondary aspect for her, because the time of institutional politics rarely matches that of grassroots politics – and timing, as activists know very well, is all but a secondary and irrelevant factor in politics.

The interview we conducted with Daniela and the insights that she shared with us highlight important aspects of the practice of gaining visibility, also in terms of how activists exercise their agency over the data stream in order to be noticed among a variety of other political actors during latency stages, that is, when they are not in the streets. On the one hand, through their interactions with legacy media and the professionals that work in them, activists engage with the data stream in an attempt to become trusted producers of information and, accordingly, of the data that sustain the production of news and other content types in television programmes, radio broadcasts, and newspapers articles. On the other hand, activists engage in the autonomous production of data about themselves and their activities, often ‘cooking’ – so to say – those data in ways that render them appealing to journalists and other audiences. They do so through social media platforms, hence entering into contact with another data sequence in the data stream, but in some cases also through the creation of their own media. The teleoaffective structure that guides the practice of gaining visibility seems to revolve around the willingness to become a data source from which various types of media professionals and audiences can then deduct what the activists’ movement organizations are, what they are doing at the political level, and why they deserve their attention. As we will see, knowing how to do this, in terms of both a practical and general understanding of the practice of gaining visibility, differs from country to country, especially when it comes to the activists’ interactions with legacy media. What the activists in Italy, Greece, and Spain have in common, though, are the challenges that they must face when attempting to become data sources and – in this way – address the data stream from a proactive position.

This chapter discusses these challenges and reflects on how activists and their movement organizations can exercise a certain degree of agency when they interact with both legacy media and social media in an attempt to become visible beyond the smaller activists’ circles that already know them. We will first reflect on the important role that legacy media still play today for the activists in the three countries under investigation. Although the possibility for an activist’s disintermediation from journalists through digital media is rather large in the present day, movement organizations continue to consider television, radio, and newspapers as particularly important to reach the broad public in times of latency. Next, we will discuss the trade-offs that activists need to deal with to become valuable data sources for legacy media journalists: adaptation to the logic of legacy media is not without costs and activists face many dilemmas. For this reason, some activists decide not to adapt, resorting to other ways of making themselves visible to their audiences. On the one hand, they use social media platforms. Although these are important in all three countries that we considered, in this chapter we will show how activists do not use them in the same way. On the other hand, we will see that activists – despite heavily relying on social media platforms – have not completely abandoned alternative media that they can manage independently and in their own time, away from both a legacy and social media logic. In general, the chapter reveals that activists curate their visibility to various types of audiences by strategically navigating the data stream and exercising their agency towards it, for instance taking advantage of its heterogenous nature. Before addressing these points, in the following section we will offer a definition of the practice of gaining visibility that today seems to play an important role for activists even when they are not involved in street protests.

The practice of gaining visibility

Visibility has always been a precious resource for activist organizations, especially in times of protest. Indeed, early studies on social movements’ outcomes links the success of movement organizations to their ability to be recognized as legitimate political actors by their protest target and, more in general, policy makers (Gamson, 1975). To be recognized as a legitimate actor means, first, to be noticed and, even more so, to be noticed as the activists want to be. Along this line, the ability of activists to correctly frame what they want to achieve and the actions that lead to such achievements are both extremely relevant to determine the capacity of movement organizations to bring about change (Cress and Snow, 2000). In short, activists organize and come together to say something to someone else; to reach this goal, they need to be heard and seen. Since this accomplishment is central for social movement actors, they continuously engage in a wide array of activities to make themselves visible. The most straightforward of such activities is the act of going out in the streets to protest. In so doing, activists make themselves visible as claiming subjects and, through the performance of protest, they also link themselves to the object of their claims (Tilly, 2006: 35). Such performances can take many shapes: from signing an online petition to organizing a wild strike in factories. Activists plan them in a way that enables them to gain the attention not just of those audiences who physically attend the performance, sharing the protesters’ same time and space, but also of those who are not there at the exact moment in which the protests unfold. In other words, throughout the history of social movements, activists have always constructed such performances in order to gain the mainstream media’s attention and, in so doing, become visible beyond the limited physical boundaries of the performance setting (Gitlin, 1980; Ryan, 1991). From this viewpoint, organizing a protest is one of the many activities that activists and their movement organizations engage in to obtain visibility.

Nevertheless, it is not the only one. Speaking with a journalist during a demonstration or organizing a press conference before the start of a campaign are two further examples of the many relevant activities that activists perform to increase the visibility for themselves and their protests in mainstream media (Sobieraj, 2011; Mattoni, 2012). Additionally, activists have always employed other media to speak about their protest in a more direct way. For instance, they have created and managed alternative, radical, and autonomous media (Downing, 2001; Atton, 2002; Lievrouw, 2011), ranging from free radios to street televisions, from posters and flyers to alternative informational websites.

In short, activists and their movement organizations continuously engage in a wide array of activities that revolve around their need to become visible and make their presence a stable one for the various audiences they need to interact with to reach their objectives. We consider these actions part of the broader practice of gaining visibility, which we define as all those activities that activists engage in when trying to be recognized as valuable political actors by different types of audiences, including their political opponents, political targets, dispersed bystanders and potential supporters who do not belong to the activists’ social movement milieu. In the next section, we start unpacking the practice of gaining visibility by focusing on activists’ interactions with legacy media.

Legacy media as challenging spaces for visibility

While websites, social media platforms, instant messaging apps, and other types of digital media have acquired a growing significance for the visibility of movement organizations in the past two decades, legacy media like newspapers and weeklies, radio, and television still play an important role for activists. This happens both during protests, as some studies on the subject matter also indicate (Sobieraj, 2011; Lee and Chan, 2018), and in the quiet times of politics, as we argue in this chapter. Interestingly, not just television counts for activists, but also radio and newspapers. As we will show in this section, activists highly value the ability of these legacy media to give their movement organizations visibility, also in times of latency. In some cases, they consider them even more useful than digital media, as becomes evident from the talk we had with Abril:

‘We did not realize, a few years ago, that having your own website and your own social network is all very well, but if you do not appear on television, in the newspaper, … on the radio, in the end nobody knows you, [so] you are very isolated. We are looking for notoriety and maximum impact.’

While Abril mentions using various types of legacy media, activists do not assign the same role to all of them. Rather, they see different affordances in them, also with regard to the kind of audiences that they could reach through them.

Television, for instance, seems to be valued most for its ability to reach large numbers of people. If Petro, a Greek activist, could make one of his wishes come true, he would certainly ask for his own TV station, because television remains the most important medium as far as addressing the general public goes. If you want to address the widest public possible, television is still the medium to use. If you ask any member of a union in Greece, they would say the same. We need to be heard by as many people as possible.

Television coverage is central for Petro, even if his movement organization communicates its members’ claims and activities through a website, a Facebook page, a web forum, or in public events and meetings focusing on their issues of interest. The reason that such relevance is given to television is its ability – according to Petro – to reach broad audiences. Many of our interviewees touched upon this aspect, including Daniela at the opening of this chapter: activists in the three countries seem to attribute to television (especially generalist television) the ability to communicate its content with immediacy to a wide audience. In this sense, activists evoke the logic of numbers to which they often refer during mobilization phases (della Porta and Diani, 2020). During protests, movement organizations seek to engage a large amount of protest participants in order to become visible in the eyes of the (often few) institutional political actors to whom they direct their questions. During stages of latency, instead, the same movement organizations try to exploit appearances on television to reach a large number of viewers; this is certainly an undifferentiated group of people but nevertheless a useful one precisely because of its vastness.

Other than television, radio programmes and newscasts also emerged as particularly important. There are specific moments in which grassroots actors even prefer radio to television coverage, and this is also linked to the affordances of radio, a medium that traditionally revolves around the voice. According to Simona, this in turn leads “radio journalists [to] care more about contents. They have a higher level of professionalization. They care less about your appearance and more about your ability as a communicator”. Radio offers activists another advantage: it is much more accessible, as we will also see later in this chapter. Although activists spend part of their time trying to get radio coverage and also enjoy participating in radio shows, they are conscious of the limits of this medium. Thus, the number of people they communicate with during a radio interview cannot be compared to that reached through television.2 Also, according to activists, visibility obtained through radio programmes rarely triggers offline participation in terms of new activists joining the forces of a movement organization. Abril confirms this when she compares her appearances on television, the radio, and the print press in Spain.

‘The radio does call us more but we have little availability to do interviews because they take away our operating time, and because we have noticed that they do not translate into an increase of members, of prominence. Both the press and television do: every time we go to a talk show we gain two or three new members.’

So far, we have reflected on the role of radio and television, but in this last excerpt Abril also gives value to another legacy media: print press. In fact, activists believe that printed newspapers or weeklies are still able to affect both media and political agendas. The reason for this is to be found not so much in the number of readers they can reach through the press. Rather, activists in the three countries greatly appreciate newspapers because of their legacy and the long history that characterizes many of them. For activists, then, receiving media coverage from a national newspaper is an important sign of recognition. No matter how many readers eventually get to know you through a newspaper article, having a story about your movement organization published in the print press is already an achievement in itself. Additionally, activists also acknowledge the variety of newspapers and value the local dimension of many of these. At the more pragmatic level, activists indeed know – because they have experienced this many times firsthand – that local newspapers are much more willing and able to publish media content that activists provide, such as press releases, but also detailed reports on specific topics or social media updates.

If activists do not value television, radio, and newspapers in an equal way, their understanding of legacy media in the three countries also varies. More precisely, if we consider the role of print press from a comparative perspective, Greek activists attribute a more prominent function to this mass medium in the process of acquiring visibility as opposed to their Italian and Spanish counterparts. It is mainly in Greece that most activists still see newspapers as the media able to affect a national media and political agenda. Thus, they believe that an interview in the main national Greek newspaper can give their communicative effort the best possible outcome. One of the Greek activists we interviewed, Eustratios, even said the following:

‘I want my movement organization to have its own, proper newspaper. We cannot do that since it is a matter of money; this will cost a lot of money … Having a newspaper is important. If you go in a hotel where the people are having their siesta, [or] they are eating, [then] it is important if you can give them your newspaper.’

In short, living amid digitalization and datafication, activists in Italy, Greece, and Spain – while being surrounded by digital media of all kinds – do not forget legacy media, which they include in their repertoire of communication. Television, radio, and newspapers are not media of the past: they are firmly rooted in the practice of gaining visibility that activists perform even in times of latency. At the same time, activists acknowledge the fact that legacy media bring along significant challenges, mostly related to the close connection between institutional political actors and legacy media in Italy, Greece, and Spain. The attempt to obtain this kind of visibility through legacy media in times of latency may be even harder when activists and their movement organizations do not engage in any kind of mobilization. Without the disruptive power of protest actions, newspapers, radios, and television programmes prefer to engage less with movement organizations and more with institutional political actors, which represent more stable news sources. Unless activists set up a highly newsworthy series of events, legacy media tend to turn their gaze elsewhere. This is also a result of the strong ties between legacy media and political parties – or other types of political, institutional actors – that traditionally characterize Southern European countries: the latter influence the former according to a process of political parallelism (Hallin and Mancini, 2004). Activists in the three countries under examination consider legacy media to be strongly influenced by various types of political and financial actors; in the interviews, they provided concrete examples of this phenomenon, also related to their own experiences as activists trying to draw the attention of mainstream media. Hence, they consider news media organizations not so much a neutral space, but proper political actors whose legitimation through media coverage becomes even more relevant for activists. This is why activists in Greece, Italy, and Spain greatly value mainstream media and, despite the low probability that they effectively obtain media coverage, display a variety of activities to reach these media in an attempt to be heard and seen by the broad audiences that such media are able to reach. This is important also beyond the organization of protests, when the activists’ daily political work unfolds as usual.

In sum, while activists attribute an important role to legacy media when performing the practice of gaining visibility, they also acknowledge that they need to face and overcome certain constraints. To do so, they seek to change their movement organizations from simple news sources to valuable data sources for legacy media. As we will explain in the following section, though, becoming a data source brings along many dilemmas for activists.

The dilemma of becoming a data source for legacy media

While activists usually organize protests that resonate with the news-making value of the print press or television broadcasting during mobilizations, they need to do something different when they are not protesting in the street. They still employ the strategy of adaptation to mainstream media (Rucht, 2004) in moments of latency, but their activities are tailored to the features that characterize legacy media, rather than to the qualities of the collective actions they organize. Activists exercise their agency over legacy media by producing knowledge of how they function. Indeed, all our interviewees know how legacy media work in their respective countries and are conscious of some of the difficulties that they need to face when seeking to obtain coverage during stages of latency. In the case of the Southern European movement organizations that we investigated, activists engage in a twofold strategic adaptation.

On the one hand, adaptation is linked to the exogenous features of legacy media and their connections with other institutional political actors. Activists adapt to legacy media considering them political actors, rather than as a neutral space of discussion. This means that when activists establish strong and long-lasting connections with journalists, the chances of becoming relevant data sources increase; as a consequence, it is easier for activists’ movement organizations to become visible also when they are not in their mobilization stage. In other words, activists try to exploit the political parallelism and turn it to their benefit, seeking the right contacts with journalists who work in those legacy media that may be ideologically nearer to their positions, but also simply nurturing connections with individual journalists who work as freelancers and might cover their movement organization activities also in times of latency. This process becomes easier when activists already have ties with the world of journalism. As we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 6, when activists have a privileged relationship with journalists, gaining visibility requires less demanding efforts.

On the other hand, adaptation is linked to an endogenous characteristic of legacy media, namely the growing and widespread precariousness of information professionals – including journalists – who are employed in them (Deuze, 2007). In this regard, activists know that time is a precious resource in newsrooms, especially for precarious journalists, who are increasing in legacy media of all kinds. Given also her past as a journalist, Emilia, for instance, knows that providing the right type of data, packaged in a format that resonates with journalistic needs, can greatly increase her movement organization’s ability to get media coverage, especially during stages of latency when activists do not make the news by filling the streets with hundreds of thousands of protesters. According to Emilia, precarious journalists suffer from a lack of resources that renders them more inclined than full-time, permanent journalists to favour “news items that are already cooked”. This is why she and her movement organization ‘cook’ the data they have in order to make them appealing to journalists and, more importantly, ready to be used, as Emilia explains:

‘[K]nowing the journalists, who need to have everything ready, for the press, I prepare a report, for example, which is 150 pages long. I prepare a five-page synopsis so that it reaches the journalists, and in those five pages they have everything they needs, and if they want to go deeper they do. … So you build it up a little bit. In fact, we are working more and more on that because, unfortunately, most of them do a copy-and-paste [of what we supply to them].’

In some cases, activists exploit certain affordances of digital media to make the journalists’ work even easier, such as instant messaging platforms to create direct contact with journalists to whom activists send various types of data, sometimes aggregated in the form of information that can easily be included in the journalistic accounts. An emblematic example is Miranda’s use of instant messaging apps, like WhatsApp, to produce a continuous sequence of data about her movement organization’s activities that she then sends to her journalist contacts without waiting for a request to be interviewed for a radio programme or the print press. She proactively releases data about what her movement organization is doing, how, and why, putting them together into consistent stories that already resemble pieces of radio news, as she describes in detail in this interview excerpt:

‘Another thing I do with WhatsApp [is that] I have this … there are two kinds: I have the press and I have the radio. In the press, I give news. But on radios I give audios … Something happens and I say “hi, this is me, today, and I will talk about this”, and I make my statement. They like it very much and then I say “I will send an audio with my statements on these points: this, this, and that”. They see the text and if they find it interesting they listen to it and they take the part of the audio that is relevant to them and put it in the news. So the people who work on the radio, they told me “really, this is great, because then I don’t have to call you, I don’t have to ask you anything, you already give it to me and when I am preparing the news, I take the cut and I put it”. They say that this WhatsApp audio is even better than if I talk on the smartphone, because … this is not a mobile system: these are data. They download it, they take the cut they need, it and they use it.’

According to Miranda, WhatsApp audios can render the journalist’s job easier and, in turn, increase the chance of obtaining visibility in their news programmes. Instant messaging apps, then, become central digital devices in the practice of gaining visibility as they allow activists to interact with journalists directly, sending them already cooked data in a format that is appealing to journalists who work with an unstable schedule, frequently across more than one newsroom, to make a living despite their precarious working conditions.

Becoming a data source also comes with trade-offs for activists. In some cases, journalists working for news media organizations make clear requests to activists, offering visibility in exchange for stereotyped characters to be used in television programmes, as Simona explains:

‘It works like this: TV journalists call us saying: “hello, we have our show tomorrow. We need a temporary employee, possibly a young new mum, because we have to talk about precarity and fake VAT workers”. I used to joke about making a lot of money if we set up an agency offering uncool characters for television. That is what they want from us.’

Simona jokes about these types of requests that render her movement organization a supplier of stereotypical workers who can speak about precarity. However, through her joke, she points out a relevant aspect of the relationship between movement organizations and legacy media. When the former manage to become trusted data sources thanks to their adaptation strategies, the latter interact with them from a different viewpoint, considering them less as political actors and more as on-demand content providers. This is a risk that activists run when adapting to legacy media: their political role is to some extent put in the background as the front stage is meant for individuals who somehow stand for the vulnerable groups that activists support. Gaining visibility of such vulnerable groups through the intervention of emblematic characters (for example the precarious working mother, the victim of corruption crimes) may of course be a positive aspect also for the movement organization that supplies them to legacy media. However, the risk is that movement organizations, their messages, and political activities at the collective level remain unseen and that the audiences of legacy media consequently fail to recognize them.

Although legacy media adaptation strategies are quite widespread in all the countries that we considered, it must be pointed out that Greek activists are less inclined to use them than others. Almost all of the Greek activists we interviewed reject the logic behind a media system in which journalists and their news outlets have close ties to institutional political actors. Such a rejection implies – among other things – that they refuse to cultivate contacts with journalists and, more generally, do not strategically adapt to what legacy media want them to be in order to better represent them on television, radio, and in newspapers. At the same time, this means that Greek activists may in some cases decide to conquer their own media spaces through direct action in the editorial offices of newspapers, as Kosta told us:

‘When we do … big events, like the strike that we had last week, we go and do like a small protest squat at radio stations, where we say our word directly. Last time we had prepared our statement in [the form of an] audio and we went to one radio station where we could do it and put it on the programme. Something like: “we are going to hear some people from the union”. We went there with our recording and we said “it’s like this, something between a protest and a squat, a small invasion”. And in a second radio station, there was a big conflict, they didn’t want to do it, so they said “we are going to call the police”, or something like that. And our assembly had chosen that we won’t go very far with the violence, so we didn’t do it finally.’

Gaining visibility through direct action, as described by Kosta, is not a common activity among the Greek activists we interviewed. However, it represents an interesting exception that underscores what other studies on the topic already pointed out: while adaptation to the media logic is certainly common among activists, this is not the only strategy that they imagine and practice. Even in times when legacy media played an even more central role in covering political events and public protests than they do today, activists could choose to reject their logic of newsworthiness, obtaining media coverage according to their rules and not those of the journalists, or even creating their own communication channels (Rucht, 2004; Mattoni, 2012). This last option remains particularly central to the practice of gaining visibility even today, although nowadays the choice lies not so much in building alternative media through which to spread one’s ideas, but in trying to exploit the possibility of disintermediation offered by social media platforms, as we will explain in the next section.

I do social media ergo sum

When seeking visibility, activists and their movement organizations try to become relevant data sources. However, they may also attempt to obtain recognition in other ways, mostly through digital media producing data for and disseminating them through social media platforms, mostly Facebook and Twitter.

When they include social media platforms in the practice of gaining visibility, activists do this from the perspective of the general understanding that one social media platform is more efficient in reaching the general public than another. Such understanding does not necessarily reflect the actual relevance of social media platforms in terms of their ability to reach broad audiences. The activists we interviewed do not seem to care about the actual use of Facebook or Twitter among the general population of their respective countries. However, as we have mentioned earlier, they develop a general understanding that seems to be driven more by intuition and based on their personal experiences of the social media platforms they interact with. Interestingly, these general understandings are not the same in Italy, Greece, and Spain.

Unsurprisingly, almost all activists in the three countries assign a relevant role to social media platforms in the process of becoming visible. When we interviewed Delphina, a labor unionist based in Greece, she paraphrased the famous Cartesian motto cogito ergo sum to summarize the importance of social media for her movement organization: “[W]e have reached a point now where the cogito ergo sum has turned into Facebook ergo sum.” Far from being an isolated position, Delphina’s general understanding of social media is shared by most of the activists we interviewed in Greece, Italy and Spain. Despite some exceptions, social media platforms appear to be essential in the practice of gaining visibility for Southern European activists. However, even if activists tend to combine different social media platforms, we noticed that activists in all three countries develop a distinct general understanding of which social media platforms are more valuable for them and a practical understanding of how to use them. This awareness is subsequently reflected in the actions that they undertake to manage their social media profiles and pages.

In Italy and Greece, activists consider Facebook the most efficient social media platform to gain visibility beyond the smaller circles of their supporters. It is not surprising that activists in both countries affirm that they produce data mostly to be published on this social media platform, as the following Italian activist noticed when reflecting on the types of communication that she engaged with for her movement organization: “[C]onsidering all kinds of communication together, not just video communication, the main one is Facebook” (Davide). This general understanding is so relevant that some activists even go a step further: they equate efficient communication with Facebook communication, as this member of an anti-corruption movement organization suggests when he says that “[c]ommunication means that I publish a post on Facebook. In my experience, there is nothing more effective”. It is also for this reason that activists employ Facebook for their grassroots political engagement even when they use their own private profiles. As a consequence, the activity of posting on Facebook is not a private matter but a political one. As Riccardo, an activist who works in a prominent civil society organization fighting against corruption in Italy, explains, “for me, Facebook is work. For me, Facebook is important for the positioning of the association also through social media”.

Facebook, in short, is relevant for the positioning of activists’ movement organizations in the broader social movement milieu, building bridges with social movement actors. However, this positioning does not happen through the engagement in public debates within the social media platform, or, at least, it is not the primary function that the activists we interviewed attribute to Facebook. In fact, they consider this social media platform not more than a window through which to show who they are and what they do. The data that they produce through Facebook are meant to convey a stance about the movement organization itself and its daily political work. Activists tend not to take advantage of the social media platform as an online space to develop a debate between the activist organization and its diverse audiences. They ignore the interactive affordances that Facebook offers and mostly employ their accounts – especially the pages of their movement organizations – as channels in which to broadcast messages following a one-to-many pattern of communication that they manage in a top-down fashion. Although Facebook may be, at least in principle, a social media platform that also supports interactions with their audiences, activists do not value this possibility. This is what Simona and Kosmas explained to us in this regard:

‘In my view, our Facebook page is not a place for debating. This happens only sporadically and about little things. A real debate occurs on a wide level and on Facebook more in general, but not on our Facebook page.’

‘On Facebook sometimes we have enough shares of a post, and that’s engagement, but we don’t have too many comments. They absorb the information but usually they don’t interact. This is not bad because we don’t want to debate, we want to inform and if someone wants some clarifications we answer him or her, but I don’t want to debate, I don’t like this.’

In short, the general understanding of Facebook among activists in Italy and Greece is that of a social media platform where they can be seen. The practical understanding of the kind of actions that activists should undertake is consistent with this interpretation: affordances that would trigger and nurture a debate about the movement organizations, their choices, and their strategies are not interesting for activists. They do not use them, and this is a deliberate choice that is not linked to any lack of digital skills.

Conversely, in Spain, we encountered a different type of general understanding, according to which Twitter is the most important social media platform that activists have to reach people. Indeed, as Ruben points out, activists see Twitter as: “A more serious social media platform where issues are not as cruel and trivial as the famous cat videos on Facebook. Twitter audiences care about other kinds of issues. That’s why we communicate much more on Twitter.”

This quote is emblematic of a distinction that almost all activists we interviewed in Spain made between Facebook, considered a place that is not for politics in the first place, and Twitter, where audiences are more open to receiving political messages about certain contentious issues, as the following extract from Ruben underlines:

‘Political conversations on Facebook are horrible because noise, noise, noise, noise enters and you cannot get to any point of substance. Facebook cannot change electoral behaviour. It cannot change people’s opinions. Everything is totally false and nothing more than publicity for Facebook. Facebook is a dead social media in which people do not interact; you barely have any interactions. There is a severe crisis of interaction going on. However, interactions still occur on Twitter.’

Interestingly, in the case of Spanish activists, the interactive potential of social media platforms is still at the centre of their general understanding, although they interpret this potential in a different way than their Greek and Italian counterparts: while the latter use Facebook seeking to avoid interactions, the former use Twitter because it allows them to interact with their audiences to a greater extent than Facebook, where debates are considered noisy and rude. Consistently, Spanish activists view Facebook as a social media platform that is no longer central for general conversations and more politically inclined debates. Twitter, on the contrary, is the place where people talk about politics; this feature, in turn, renders it the social media platform where activists want to become more visible. That said, it is also worth noting that some of the Spanish activists we interviewed know the primary limits of Twitter, their preferred social media platform, up to the point that some of them have even decided to stop tweeting, as Abril told us:

‘We’ve stopped using Twitter, because we’ve seen that this choice has no repercussions, that nothing happens, that Twitter is of little importance because its target audience is not ours. Twitter’s target audience is under 25 years old, without any degree or working in politics and media, but [it is] not the general public. So we obviously already reach politicians through other channels and, at the same time, we do not reach the general audience through Twitter.’

It is, then, crucial not to overestimate the role of Twitter even in Spain. If compared with activists in Italy and Greece, there is no doubt that Spanish activists strongly rely on this digital platform as well, although they do so according to a much more professional approach to digital media, very often coupled with a parallel awareness of the strength and power of algorithms.

The differences between the general understanding of Facebook and Twitter in the three countries are profound. Despite some exceptions, for Spanish activists, Twitter is the social media platform that attracts the right type of audience and allows for a particular communication style, which values civil interactions that focus on political issues. Vice versa, Italian and Greek activists consider Facebook a trendy digital environment where the majority of people hang out: one in which you want to be to produce and disseminate your data. Such a general understanding does not match the actual diffusion of the two platforms in the three countries, where no significant differences arise: around 70 per cent of Greek, Italian, and Spanish citizens who are online use Facebook, while this percentage stops at 20 per cent in the case of Twitter (Newman et al, 2019). However, the difference between activists’ general understanding of social media in the framework of gaining visibility and the actual diffusion of Facebook and Twitter in the three countries is not relevant. What counts is that when activists consider one social media platform relevant to become visible this has consequences for how they ingrain it in their actions, as we have discussed earlier. There are, however, other ways through which activists seek to become visible, beyond social media platforms: as we will see in the next section, they engage in the creation of alternative media.

Gaining visibility through alternative media

As we have already stated in the introduction, activists and the movement organizations they belong to often link their visibility to media other than legacy media. Indeed, in the previous section, we have shed light on how activists engage with social media platforms that have been developed by commercial companies. These platforms cannot be considered alternative digital media in the strict sense (Treré, 2018), although the kind of content that activists share on platforms like Facebook or Twitter may of course present alternative political viewpoints. However, activists do not control them and the logic of visibility that they promote, which is mostly tied to commercial aims (Poell and Van Dijck, 2015; Hutchinson, 2021). Other than using these social media platforms, activists in Greece, Italy, and Spain also rely on alternative, radical, and autonomous media (Downing, 2001; Atton, 2002) to gain visibility. Those that emerged as particularly relevant in our analysis include independent websites; banners, posters, flyers, and leaflets; and communications via fax. While the latter cannot be conceived as alternative media in the full sense of the word, we consider these forms of communicative interactions a valuable way for activists to produce data sequences that escape the social media logic.

Alternative, radical, and autonomous media have often played an important role in the practice of gaining visibility. Without going back in time too much, we could mention the case of the independent informational website Indymedia, which was particularly relevant in sustaining and accounting for the protests of the global justice movement that developed in the late 1990s in Seattle, to then quickly spread across the world (Kidd, 2003; Juris, 2005). Additionally, our investigation revealed that this type of media is important to sustain activists’ organizations during moments of latency, when people are not in the streets and activists are not planning protests. While being of a different kind, alternative, radical, and autonomous media become the window through which activist organizations can let their voice be heard even in these quiet moments, sharing their worldview beyond the narrow circle of their members to involve other audiences that are not necessarily connected to the core organizers of the protests.

In fact, the activists we interviewed also spoke at length about the media – and the related technologies – that they control in an autonomous manner. Independent websites, for instance, are often used in the practice of gaining visibility; activists perform several activities aimed at the creation of their independent websites also when they do not mobilize in the streets. More specifically, there is a general understanding of independent websites as a static digital space, where static does not necessarily have a negative connotation: in a world of quick information diffusion, where the data stream might have a very fast pace, having a space where data can flow at a controlled pace may become a relevant feature – perhaps even a luxury. Furthermore, independent websites also offer a digital space in which activists can proclaim who they are and what they do without having to tackle the temporal limitations of social media platforms. For instance, when activists manage their own independent websites and the content they publish on them, the visibility that they develop stretches well beyond the fast pace of Twitter feeds, WhatsApp chats, and other digital media platforms that work in an accelerated way. Furthermore, they can ensure visibility that lasts longer and gives a temporal depth to their organization’s identity, so that it does not remain trapped in an eternal present made up of continuous statements that change hour by hour, when not faster. The Greek activist Delphina aptly summarizes the clash between social media platforms and the affordances of independent websites when it comes to visibility:

‘[In social media platforms] you cannot upload a text that no one reads. It does not make any sense. You can do this on your website, because if someone wants to have information on your organization, they visit your website, and you can find everything there. You have to be shorter and more attractive on Facebook.’

The data stream that surrounds grassroots politics and the related daily practices that activists perform once again reveals its heterogeneity: the slow and somehow self-reflective digital space that independent websites represent for activists seems to clash with the overall accelerated production of data in which the same activists participate when they produce content for the social media platforms that they also employ every day. The abundance that characterizes the data flows in an age that is at the crossroad between digitalization and datafication inevitably generates these differences at the level of the practice of gaining visibility. While the teleoaffective structure remains similar, the activities performed to sustain the visibility of movement organizations may greatly vary. In this regard, it is interesting to note the renewed role of alternative media. If in the late 1990s Indymedia was the main digital place for activists to quickly disseminate information related to their protest activities, today movement organizations promote their visibility in a more fragmented way, each on their website. The independent websites of movement organizations are, indeed, digital spaces where activists can better represent their daily efforts in an attempt to acquire more visibility for their demands without reducing the substance of their claims. For instance, Fabio told us: “The website is a fundamental component, because the website raises the level of the public debate that you try to affect. It does so by producing updates, information, news, and content. It would be a real problem if it were not there.” The Spanish activist Abril, instead, observed that “the website we have serves the purpose of showing that we exist”. According to Abril, the website has an important function for her movement organization because it gives it a sort of quality certificate. It not only shows that her movement organization exists; it also provides a kind of authority, professionalism, and reliability that other digital media platforms, like Facebook, are not always able to deliver on their own.

However, not all activists appreciate the slow pace of independent websites. According to some, alternative media are no longer useful exactly because they are not consistent with the acceleration and ubiquity that characterize the current diffusion of information. For this reason, a more stable digital space risks becoming so static in the delivery of its content that it somehow clashes with a form of visibility based on a constantly changing flow of information. Adrian has very straightforward ideas on this point: “[W]e have a website, which is static. There is a blog on the website, but we don’t really write anything there. A long time ago, we reached the conclusion that it’s not … it doesn’t work.” In short, some movement organizations decide not to engage in the practice of gaining visibility through activities that include the creation of independent websites: they no longer see the advantage of developing this type of alternative media because they consider it to be out of tune with the overall rhythm that characterizes the present-day flow of information.

While in some cases the practice of gaining visibility rests on a broad combination of activities that keep together older and newer media technologies, in other cases this combination seeks to escape the heterogeneity of the data stream, simplifying its features and somehow reducing it to a more homogeneous way of understanding the spaces and times that characterize it. Once again, the type of media technology that activists decide to engage in is deeply tied to a general understanding of what visibility must be given to grassroots activism in the present. The differences related to what visibility means and how activists should achieve it are also striking when it comes to Greece. The Greek activists we interviewed indicated other types of media technologies as being relevant in the practice of gaining visibility. Most of these are situated outside the spectrum of digital media: older media technologies, like paper or cloth, still play an important role when it comes to seeking visibility for Greek movement organizations; flyers, leaflets, and posters are also very common in Greece. Conversely, these traditional devices no longer seem to exist in Italy, at least within the movement organizations that we investigated. As suggested by an Italian activist, Simona: “[W]e no longer use paper-based forms of communication: leaflets, posters, business cards printed for years and now stored somewhere, unused. No one reads them anymore.” Spain situates itself in the middle. Flyers, leaflets, and posters are not used as regularly as they are in Greece, but they nevertheless remain part of the practice of gaining visibility, as the following example from Julia demonstrates: “We have a very cool pamphlet: it is like a caricature. We sneak into hotels as if we were customers, and we put our pamphlet in bathrooms as well as strategic places to make them visible for security cameras, so that workers join us in our assemblies.”

What distinguishes the Greek case in this more frequent and massive use of flyers, leaflets, and posters is a geopolitical and demographic factor: half of the Greek population lives in Athens. Almost all political and economic centres are in Athens. Although the Italian and Spanish capitals attract a significant amount of political power, it happens less than in Greece. This unique trait of the three Mediterranean countries pushes Greek activists to also rely on low-tech media in their practice of gaining visibility. Since movement organizations have to haunt a limited territory, it makes more sense to spend their money and time on putting up posters in public spaces or crowding the capital’s main streets with their own leaflets and flyers. Political power is far more dispersed in Italy and Spain, where the population is also more spread out across several medium-sized cities, which discourages Italian and Spanish activists from using those visibility strategies employed by their Greek counterparts.

In the case of the Italian activists, another interesting yet marginal media technology turned out to play a more central role in past waves of protest: the fax. In this case, too, we are not speaking about a common activity in the framework of the practice of gaining visibility. However, the use of the fax is indicative of the activists’ ability to go beyond the usual activities, introduce changes into their everyday political work, and be creative when seeking visibility and, accordingly, the recognition of other political actors. Indeed, practices may be frequent and consistent over time, but they are not fixed: they could change through the incremental transformation of certain activities or more abruptly and depending on the circumstances in which activists find themselves. While a certain practical and general understanding remains stable, the need to face otherwise unsurmountable obstacles can lead to unexpected activities, or even to activities that were at the centre of the practice of gaining visibility in the past, like the use of the fax. This is the case of an Italian movement organization that sought to become visible to policy makers, as Simona explains:

‘We discovered that if you send emails to the various addresses of the Senate and the House, which end up in the spam folder, then it all gets clogged up and you end up there. But if you send a fax, whoever is on the other end is institutionally required to protocol it because it is an official communication in some way. So we bought one of those services that let you fax online, we spent 50 euros as an association and we invited everyone to log on and send a fax. People would actually just log on to our site, click, fill in their name, and sign up. We clogged them up with faxes. Within 2 hours, we sent them 50 euros worth of faxes, while the committee was in a meeting, until they picked up the phone, called us, and asked us to stop. They told us they understood and called us back.’

Activists strategically used an older technology (fax) to make their claims visible to the institutional actors they wanted to relate with, then employed newer media-related services such as their website, newsletters, and social media accounts to involve their networks in this fax bombing strategy, all the while taking the street with a few dozen of their members to obtain a face-to-face meeting with legislative actors. This case of Italian freelancers casts light on the combination of different media technologies, and their related affordances, that are embedded in the practice of gaining visibility. It may require activists to merge different data flows, such as face-to-face and digital interactions, also including media technologies – like the fax – that no longer exist for most activists even if they are still normatively anchored within the organizational and bureaucratic practices of public institutions. The activists’ practical understanding of how the fax works in such a specific context, in which they wanted to gain visibility, was indeed key to reaching their objective.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have discussed the practice of gaining visibility. We have explained what it means, for activists, to engage in the data stream to become noticed and recognized when no protests are going on and the public’s attention is caught by other issues. Social movement studies usually consider visibility a precious resource when there is a mobilization happening and people are protesting. When activists succeed in either bringing people to the streets or involving them in online actions to claim their demands, they also want such protests to be seen and heard. For this reason, organizing a protest and then trying to have that protest covered by the mainstream press as well as in social media platforms is an important part of the practice of gaining visibility. However, as emerged from the interviews that we conducted with activists in Greece, Italy, and Spain, activists and their movement organizations have continuous attention to the visibility of their movement organizations beyond moments of protest. Indeed, our research proves that the practice of gaining visibility is crucial for activists also when it does not entail making claims in the context of a specific mobilization. Activists do not wait for the next protest to acquire visibility; they want various types of audiences to watch, recognize, and legitimate them also when they are not mobilizing, hence allowing them to enter a state of permanent visibility. This attitude is consistent with what happens in the realm of institutional politics, where political leaders and their parties are constantly engaged in electoral campaigns even when these are not happening (Joathan and Lilleker, 2020), also as a result of the use of social media platforms (Elmer et al, 2014). Similarly, it recalls the overall practice of presencing – that is, of sustaining a public presence – that Nick Couldry (2012) more generally associates with what people do in social media platforms, as we have mentioned earlier in this chapter. However, elsewhere in this chapter, we have seen that activists do much more than establish a public presence on Facebook or Twitter: they sustain their visibility in times of latency across a whole range of media, including mainstream and alternative media. From this viewpoint, we could say that the logic of presencing that is strictly linked to social media platforms nowadays goes beyond these digital media services to permeate the whole practice of gaining visibility.

When performed in times of latency, this practice does not involve the organization of protests that can attract the attention of legacy media and provide materials for social media content. In this chapter, we have shown that the practice of gaining visibility in times of latency requires activists to make more subtle interventions in the data stream, crediting themselves as legitimate and reliable data sources in the eyes of various audiences – in particular news professionals, like journalists. We have illustrated that there is no such thing as a single type of visibility. On the contrary, activists attempt to gain visibility through various types of digital and non-digital media, hence developing a transmedia visibility strategy that is tailored to societies with a higher quantity of information and more extensive audiences that such information could reach; these audiences are less controllable because political actors cannot foresee what and when they will receive this information, and with what consequences for their visibility (Thompson, 2005). Furthermore, since each media technology shapes visibility in a specific way (Thompson, 2005), in this chapter we have described the different paths that activists follow when engaging in the practice of gaining visibility through the use of both digital and non-digital media.

From this perspective, it is clear that activists are confronted with a heterogeneous data stream even in their daily attempts to gain visibility. We have shown how, in a world where digitization and datafication have partly changed the way activists communicate, legacy media are still very important in Southern Europe. Activists consider it relevant to receive media coverage from television, radio, and print media even when their movement organizations are not engaged in public protests. There are undoubtedly differences between the three main legacy media: television is important because it helps you to reach a wide audience, the radio because it allows you to publish your messages more accurately, and print media because it has political prestige in the eyes of activists. Either way, all three remain a strong point of reference, even if activists often struggle to convey their point of view in this type of media. The reason for this is that – as we have shown – legacy media in Greece, Italy, and Spain are not neutral spaces but resemble more proper political actors. In addition, the journalists who are employed in them are usually precarious and forced to work under conditions that do not benefit the quality of journalistic work. These are two major obstacles that activists have to face when trying to voice their demands within these media types.

To overcome these impediments, Greek, Italian, and Spanish activists seek not so much to make their movement organizations newsworthy in the context of their political work. Rather, they try to become stable and reliable sources for journalists; intervening directly in the data stream by producing data that journalists will be interested in is a way of adapting to legacy media in which journalists are hard-pressed by their precarious working conditions and the newspapers they work for are often closely tied to the political and economic elites of the three countries. It is not an easy job for activists, but in all three countries, they manage to adapt to both legacy media and the data stream as a whole.

In addition to legacy media, social media platforms are also in a prominent position. In this chapter, we have shown that these are now firmly inserted in the communication repertoire of activists, who try to exploit them as much as possible precisely to obtain ordinary visibility based on the regular and constant publication of content, even in phases of latency. Using these platforms to talk about themselves and publish data on the activities of their movement organizations is often seen as a routine activity, not necessarily linked to moments of protest. Through social media platforms, activists are visible all the time, day after day. However, we have demonstrated that the social media platform of preference changes depending on the country one is looking at: activists attribute a precise role to each social media platform they use, associating it with particular categories of users and content. Thus, if Facebook is the reference point for Greek and Italian activists, Twitter has a more prominent role in Spain as far as the practice of gaining visibility is concerned.

Social media platforms are not all activists have at their disposal beyond mainstream media to become visible in times of latency. In this chapter we have shown that they use alternative media also relying on the employment of more low-tech devices, which allow people to produce data about their movement organizations more gradually, even integrating them into physical places beyond the mediation of digital media. In this way, activists can reach people they would not reach through their Facebook profiles, making themselves visible in the streets of their cities or during meetings with politicians. Alternative media space then can be seen as rivulets of the data stream. While they are probably not widespread, they are of crucial importance for activists, as they give them back control of portions of the data stream, thus making them autonomous agents of their own visibility, independent of both the political ties of legacy media and the commercial interests of social media platforms. Again, these are rivulets of data in the context of a broader data stream, in which the search for an activist agency – as we have shown in this chapter – requires a considerable effort.

Overall, it is clear that activists’ agency towards the data stream concerning the practice of gaining visibility relies on their ability to move from one platform to another, from one medium to another, as they seek visibility among different types of audiences. This ability to move along the data stream and interact with different data entry points – each characterized by a different set of services and digital devices – is very important for activists. In this regard, we have demonstrated that activists exercise an agency over the data stream by removing themselves from the production of certain data sequences that nowadays seem more popular than others, like those related to social media platforms. They partially do this by adapting, more generally, to one of the principal aspects of the data stream: its heterogeneity. These activists embrace the fact that they can interact with different sequences of data without excluding one or the other and, indeed, combining them. By contrast, other activists decide to somehow reject this heterogeneity by focusing on data sequences that tend to be more marginal, but which allow activists to regain the slow time of politics even in their visibility practices. Activists do this when they decide to employ alternative media, such as personal websites or digital radios, posters, face-to-face encounters, or apparently archaic media-related activities such as fax bombing.

In the next chapter, we will continue to discuss the practice of gaining visibility and the agency it entails by considering another aspect of the data stream: when activists engage with social media platforms, they have to deal with a highly relevant non-human entity, the algorithm, which further complicates the practice of gaining visibility.