Comment susciter l’engagement pour inciter à l’action ? L’usage de la viralité par le collectif Pour un Réveil Écologique sur Linkedin

Abstract

The collective Pour un Réveil Écologique emerged in continuity with the “Student Manifesto for an Ecological Awakening” launched in France in September 2018 and signed by over 30,000 students and recent graduates mobilized in response to ecological crises. The objective of this association is to raise awareness among public authorities, employers, and stakeholders in higher education about ecological issues. Like many social actors who invest in socio-digital networks (Coutant and Stenger 2011) to maintain an online relationship and a new form of sociability (Casilli 2010), Pour un Réveil Écologique is particularly active and creative on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Our article specifically examines the virality of content published by this collective on LinkedIn, which represents the largest community, compared to other digital social networks, within this movement with over 177,000 followers. We hypothesize here that the collective’s use of virality has a direct impact on citizen engagement. In the era of relational web, engaging communication aims to seek virality. But how, beyond engaging subscribers, does this virality influence citizens to convince them to take concrete action? Based on the results of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the association's publications and user comments and supported by a literature review on the notion of “virality,” our article analyzes the discursive and communicational mechanisms deployed by the collective on the digital social network LinkedIn.