Abstract

Emerging cyber-collective movements have frequently made headlines in the news. Despite the exponential growth of bloggers in Muslim countries, there is a lack of empirical study of cyber-collective actions in these countries. We analyzed the female Muslim blogosphere because very little research attempts to understand socio-political roles of female bloggers in the system where women are frequently denied freedom of expression. We collected 150 blogs from 17 countries ranging between April 2003 and July 2010 with a special focus on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns for our analysis. Bearing the analysis upon three central tenets of individual, community, and transnational perspectives, we develop novel algorithms modeling cyber-collective movements by utilizing existing social theories on collective action and computational social network analysis. This paper contributes a methodology to study the diffusion of issues in social networks and examines roles of influential community members. We also observe the transcending nature of cyber-collective movements with future possibilities for modeling transnational outreach. Using the global female Muslim blogosphere, we provide understanding of the complexity and dynamics of cyber-collective action. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to address the lacking fundamental research shedding light on re-framing collective action theory in online environments.

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