First of all I want to talk about how cultural movements are created regardless of the the use or non-use of social medias.

For this topic I will base my ideas on the study of Herbert Blumer, who was one of the first scholars to study cultural movements. In his study he identified four stages of a cultural movement, which nowadays are known as: “Emergence”, “Coalescence”, “Bureaucratization” and “Decline”.

The first stage, emergence, can be described as a widespread discontent. In this stage a group of people may disagree with a policy or something but they haven´t take any action against it.

Following the emergence stage, there is the coalescence. In this stage there is no longer an individual feeling of injustice, people start to realize each other and organize themselves. At this point mass demonstrations may already occur.

In the bureaucratization stage the movement has already had some kind of success and generated big awareness, so they need a good and coordinated plan onwards. At this phase the movement needs professional trained staff that uses politic in its favor.

The last phase is when the end of a mass mobilization is marked.

Now focusing on the social media sphere of cultural movements, I think it´s pretty clear to all of us that media has a huge influence in the success or failure of a cultural movement. 

If we take a look at cultural movements 30 years ago we realize that they took months to organize, and nowadays it only takes a viral publication to generate a big and impactful cultural movement. For example in America in 2009 the “Tea Party” movement was created with a viral media of a tele journal and then spread into huge movements across the country which then generated change in America. As in this case is pretty clear that the media can in fact generate very impactful movements in our days.