The term "social media" itself is a strange creation, bringing up the question if there are any non-social media. Given that human phenomena are all products of society, society gets objectified in complex ways in its own products, including media.

Specific media tell us something about the times they are or were part of. The times we now live in are interesting times – times of deep crisis, change, hopes for new societies, despair, revolutions, hyper-neoliberalism. So looking at the media in these times may tell us something interesting about society. This is a first reason why media research matters for Occupy.

Social media has come to be used by many as a signification for social networking sites, blogs, microblogs, file sharing sites, video platforms, wikis and related media. These media are said to be about collaboration, communication, sharing, communities, etc and to constitute a new media revolution, in which “web 2.0” substitutes “web 1.0” (see works by Tim O’Reilly).

Yet much earlier than Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia, we had team and group work for collaboration, the telephone for communication; photocopiers, tape and video recorders for sharing, and pen pals as a form of mediated community. So if those who actually set out to conduct the revolution are being told that the revolution happens online and that actual revolutions are “Twitter revolutions” (conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan claimed in 2009 that "the revolution will be twittered,” or “Facebook revolutions”), then they have all reason to be skeptical. And this is a second reason why media research matters for Occupy.

For many people, the use of platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia and Reddit has become an everyday activity. It may therefore be a quite logical consequence that these media are employed as tools for information, communication, coordination and collaboration in collective political action.

Yet the use of the Internet and “social media” varies from country to country: 78.1% of the U.S. population are Internet users and 52.9% Facebook users. In the U.K., the Internet usage rate is 83.6% and the Facebook usage rate 51%. In contrast, the Internet usage rate in Greece is 53.0% and the Facebook usage rate 35.8%.

In Spain, these access rates are 67.2% respectively 26.2%. The Internet usage rates in Tunisia and Egypt are 39.1% and 35.6% and the Facebook usage rates 30.2% and 14.1%. The usage conditions quite vary, yet all of these (and other) countries have after the start of the global capitalist crisis experienced very significant political protests.

In those cases where the protests turned into revolutions, such as Tunisia and Egypt, the Facebook usage rate varies quite significantly, and in both cases it is far below the levels of the U.K and the U.S. This begs the question: Do “social media” play a role in revolutions and rebellions or not? This question is a third reason why media research matters for Occupy.

In the intellectual public, a fierce debate about these questions has emerged: Malcolm Gladwell argued in 2010 in a piece published in the New Yorker that activists in revolutions and rebellions risk their lives and risk becoming victims of violence conducted by the police or the people their protest is directed at. Activism involves high risks. Facebook and Twitter activism would only succeed in situations that do not require one “to make a real sacrifice.” The revolution, then, will not be tweeted.

Evgeny Morozov defined slacktivism as “feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact. It gives those who participate in slacktivist campaigns an illusion of having a meaningful impact on the world without demanding anything more than joining a Facebook group. Slacktivism is the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation: why bother with sit-ins and the risk of arrest, police brutality, or torture if one can be as loud campaigning in the virtual space?”

Political theorist Jodi Dean argued in 2005 that online slacktivism results in depoliticization, something she terms based on Slavoj Žižek post-politics:

“Busy people can think they are active – the technology will act for them, alleviating their guilt while assuring them that nothing will change too much. By sending an e-mail, signing a petition, responding to an article on a blog, people can feel political. And that feeling feeds communicative capitalism insofar as it leaves behind the time-consuming, incremental and risky efforts of politics.It is a refusal to take a stand, to venture into the dangerous terrain of politicization.”

Media analyst Clay Shirky, who has frequently been bashed in such debates as being an optimistic techno-determinist, responded to critics in an article published in 2011 in Foreign Affairs, admitting that there are attempts to control, censor and monitor social media, but at the same time that these attempts are unlikely to be successful in the long run and that social media are “long-term tools that can strengthen civil society and the public sphere."

In his book “Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age," the Internet researcher Manuel Castells voiced a view that is quite similar to the one by Shirky: that the Occupy movement “was born on the Internet, diffused by the Internet, and maintained its presence on the Internet." His argument implies that in the studied cases, Internet communication created street protests, which means that without the Internet there would have been no protests.

Castells' model is simplistic: social media results in revolutions and rebellions. He shares the widespread ideological talk about “Twitter revolutions” and “Facebook rebellions” that became first popular by the conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan’s claim that the “revolution will be twittered” in the context of the 2009 Iran protests.

Movements are not created by the Internet, but rather spring from the antagonistic economic, political and ideologial structures of society. This is the reason I have started the OccupyMedia! Survey, which sets out to analyze what role social media has in contemporary occupations. We can only find out by actually conducting empirical social media research. What I have tried to argue in this piece is that such social media research matters not only for media researchers like me, but also for activists themselves.

Christian Fuchs is professor of media and communication studies at Uppsala University.