Northern Ireland, the public sphere and activist media

Modern traditions of activist media grow out of the increased opportunities for intervention into the public sphere created by the Internet and modern technology. In recent years online media activism has been said to have been at the centre of uprisings during the Arab Spring, the development of countercultural movements like Occupy and the populist right. In Northern Ireland, this form of activism emerged but it failed to diminish much older, deeply historic tradition of activist journalism and writing in Irish republicanism. Journals, pamphlets, newspapers and free sheets all persisted in the years after the signing of the Good Friday peace agreement providing a challenge to the narratives of digital utopianism and its claims for a public sphere dynamically and completely restructured by the Internet.