Dissent and Social Media: The Role of Social Media in Facilitating Cultural Change

The book considers the role social media platforms play in facilitating dissent as a function of cultural, and associated hegemonic, transformation.In this context, social media is one of the locations of dissenting practices used to interrogate and potentially change the dominant cultural discourse, and, therefore, our experience of everyday life.Dominant cultural discourse is both created and maintained in established social institutions such as the linguistic, educational, legal, political, economic and religious institutions.The function of dissenting practices in this cultural structure is suggested in Raymond Williams’s model of culture that illuminates the dynamics of cultural formation.In his essay “The Analysis of Culture,” Williams examines the common thinking about culture, noting that we often use any of three categories when analyzing culture: the “ideal,” in “which culture is a state or process of human perfection in terms of certain actions or absolute values, ” the “doc