How can you assess the significance of social movements in the digital era? Explain

What changes

Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg distinguished connective action, based on personalised sharing, from older collective action based on dense organisations. Hashtags lower the cost of showing up, at least online. Images travel faster than pamphlets. Diasporas, students and informal workers can coordinate across cities. Zeynep Tufekci has shown how easy mobilisation can outrun the harder work of decision-making and staying power. In India, campaigns around sexual violence, farmers’ legislation, citizenship protests and disaster relief have all used phones, livestreams and WhatsApp chains. Significance is real for agenda setting, for documenting state violence, and for forming weak-tie publics that older unions never reached.

Limits of the assessment

The same infrastructure is used by rumour, hate and surveillance. A digital divide by class, gender and region means “the people online” are not the people. Slacktivism can substitute a like for a strike. Algorithms fragment publics. States and platforms can shut down the net. Resource mobilisation and political opportunity, in the older theories of McCarthy, Zald and Tilly, still decide whether a trend becomes an organisation with demands. Digital tools amplify; they do not abolish leadership, money or repression.

A balanced assessment is that the digital era has changed the ecology of movements—speed, visibility, personalised frames—without making organisation, risk and inequality obsolete. Significance is high for diffusion and narrative, mixed for durable institutional change.