The preceding chapter contrasted digital media use and action framing in two differently organized economic crisis protest networks: the organizationally enabled Put People First connective action network and the organizationally brokered G20 Meltdown collective action network. These cases offered something of a natural experiment, as both protests occurred on different days during the same London meetings of the G20 in the early stages of the global economic crisis. With both the protest location and issue focus held constant and with the differently networked events occurring on different days, clear comparisons of action framing and technology deployments could be made.

This chapter examines an equally fortuitous quasi-natural experiment that enabled us to contrast two differently organized climate change protests that occurred later the same year around the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP15). In this pairing, both networks are connective action types, one organizationally enabled and the other crowd enabled. Even more felicitous, the organizationally enabled network that coordinated protests throughout the UK – known as the Wave – contained a number of overlapping members from the PPF network analyzed in Chapter 2. This overlap reflected a demand by many members of PPF that solutions to the economic crisis not come at the expense of the environment. Our analysis looks at the different roles of digital media mechanisms (Twitter in particular) in the UK organizationally enabled Wave network and the crowd-enabled network that emerged around the protests in Copenhagen at the time of the UN summit. Both of these mobilizations were impressive in size, with turnouts estimated at around 50,000 in the United Kingdom and 100,000 in Copenhagen.