[ICTs-and-Society] Plenary session 3 “Social Media, Democracy and, Politics in the Information Society” (Christian Christensen, Peter Dahlgren)

[Bruce Robinson]

No critical counter-attack, Andrew. (I did intend to write one to your 
post on Marx and agency but never got round to it!) I think what you 
wrote here is spot-on against both the negativists like Gladwell and the 
'Twitter revolutionaries'. The 'communicative' is both powerful and 
limited in its political force. Any radical change (i.e. beyond 
lobb*ying or* protest) does have to go beyond the Net and requires a 
physical presence, not least to challenge the state. (I think some of   
the ideas in critical geography about space and place might be useful in 
explaining why.)

Consider Egypt. Yes, the net played an important role in rallying, 
mobilising, passing information and conducting debate. But would Mubarak 
have gone without Tahrir Square and the battles there?

I also think that both pro and anti arguments tend to overgeneralise and 
do not take account of  the fact that the importance of the net may 
differ at different stages of a revolutionary process. Thus it may (and 
this is just a hypothesis at the moment) play a more significant role in 
an initial period where broad, relatively undifferentiated masses of 
people can be mobilised to bring down a hated regime than in subsequent 
stages where there is both a political differentiation and the task 
becomes more one of developing political parties and other organisations 
that can carry things further.

Bruce Robinson, Salford University, UK.

PS: I can remember typing stencils and cranking a duplicator and 
sometimes think these youngsters don't know how easy they've got it. ;)




Andrew Feenberg wrote:
> I want us to consider a naive observation about social media. A recent New Yorker article dismissed the political uses of the Internet by contrasting the courage required to participate in a sit-in in the 60s and the triviality of signing an online petition. This sort of critique of the Internet mistakes completely its significant civic role which is communicative. It enables discussion and makes it cheap and fast to assemble masses. I had a student write a biting critique of the destructive effects of the Internet on civic culture, only to organize a successful and quite large "Slut Walk" in Vancouver shortly afterwards in just a week using the Internet. I went just to tease her and asked her if she knew what mimeo machines and telephone trees were. She had no idea. I told her this would have been her communication system when I was organizing demonstrations. So, of course the Internet does not "make" revolutions. But it plays a role in them just as did Khomeini's cassettes or the leaflets passed around in the May Events in 1968. A total government and corporate takeover of the Internet might well reduce it in the future to the abject state of television, but until that happens let's celebrate its positive role where we find it. I await your critical counter-attack!
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Christian Fuchs" <christian.fuchs at im.uu.se>
> To: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
> Sent: Sunday, 26 February, 2012 11:00:29 AM
> Subject: [ICTs-and-Society] Plenary session 3 “Social Media, Democracy and, Politics in the Information Society” (Christian Christensen, Peter Dahlgren)
>
> In plenary session 3 of the Uppsala conference "Critique, Democracy and 
> Philosophy in 21st Century Information Society", Peter Dahlgren and 
> Christian Christensen will discuss fundamental challenges for 
> contemporary politics and democracy in the context of digital media.
>
> They ask questions like: What is transparency? How can media advance the 
> transparency of power structures? Is transparency a viable political 
> goal? What is the relationship of WikiLeaks to power, transparency, and 
> the mainstream media? How does the relation between alternative media 
> and mainstream media in the age of the Internet look like? What is a 
> civic sphere? What is the role of the Internet for the civic sphere? 
> What are the political opportunities and limits posed by social media? 
> What is democracy today? What are the political and democratic 
> potentials and limits of critique today?
>
> Discussions and comments on these contributions are welcome.
>
> Best, CF
>
> CHRISTIAN CHRISTENSEN
> Uppsala University, Sweden
> WikiLeaks: Mainstreaming Transparency?
> ABSTRACT: In the period shortly after the release of the “Collateral 
> Murder” video, “Afghanistan War Logs” and “Iraq War Logs”, it appeared 
> that WikiLeaks had done something that many had thought unlikely: the 
> insertion of a radical critique of US military and geo-political power 
> into mainstream popular discourse (particularly in the US). While The 
> Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel (the three newspapers chosen by 
> WikiLeaks for the release of the first leaks) are not the newspapers of 
> choice for many in the US, UK and Germany, the very presence of the 
> material on their front pages opened up the possibility that the murky 
> world of US power might now be forced to concede ground to transparency 
> advocates. In this paper, I address the often contentious 
> WikiLeaks-mainstream media collaboration, and the potential impact of 
> this relationship upon the evolution of transparency as a political 
> philosophy.
>
> SPEAKER INFO: Christian Christensen is Professor of Media and 
> Communications Studies in the Department of Informatics and Media at 
> Uppsala University, Sweden. His primary area of research is in the use 
> of social media during times of war and conflict, but he has also 
> published on the representation of Islam, post 9/11 documentary film, 
> and international journalism.
>
> ***
>
> PETER DAHLGREN
> Lund University, Sweden
> Social Media and the Civic Sphere: Crisis, Critique and the Future of 
> Democracy
> ABSTRACT: While the advent of social media has already had a significant 
> impact on people’s daily lives, it has also come to alter the character 
> of the civic sphere, i.e., the broad social terrain of citizens’ 
> activities.
> Thus, social media in their various forms quickly became incorporated 
> into discourses about democracy and the political. Clearly, social media 
> can play a useful role in the advancement of democracy, but it is by now 
> quite clear that they offer no simple solution to the ills that beset 
> contemporary democracy. On the one hand they can just as readily be used 
> for purposes that are anti-democratic, on the other hand – and in a more 
> complex perspective – the contingencies of late modern capitalism 
> generate a variety of conditions that intercede, in problematic ways, 
> between even progressive “produser-citizens” and the advancement of 
> democracy via social media. These contingencies have to do with a number 
> of factors, including power relations at different societal levels 
> (including the growing separation between power and formal politics), 
> the imperatives of consumer society, late modern cultural currents of 
> individualism, and the architecture and political economy of the net 
> itself and its Web 2.0 affordances. As the global crisis deepens, these 
> contingencies become more pronounced.
> This presentation will highlight and exemplify these aspects, arguing 
> that research needs to become more alert to such obstacles in regard to 
> social media’s role and potential in cultivating the civic sphere. Even 
> the notion of democracy – too often deployed as incantation – needs 
> critical interrogation to elucidate its multiple and at times contested 
> ideals.
> In this regard, the latter part of the discussion will probe the notion 
> of critique, suggesting that there is a methodological dimension that 
> can be retrieved and applied to social conditions, practices, and 
> discourses for progressive political purposes. The concept of critique 
> of course remains multivalent; I focus on the lineage from Hegel’s idea 
> of the critical reflection on unnecessary constraints on human freedom. 
> Its concern is with “emancipation”.
> Historically, various intellectual and political movements on the Left 
> have used the no-ion of critique. Today, however, the concept seems to 
> have lost its punch, due to the decline of the Left, the rise of 
> neoliberalism, the growing social uncertainties, the ironic 
> sensibilities of liquid modernity, and not least the current global 
> crisis, in which no clear political alternative has emerged to galvanise 
> the many heterogeneous strands of opposition.
> I intend to explore the notion of critique as it still can be found in 
> the writings of a number of contemporary theorists – Laclau and Mouffe, 
> Boltanski, Bauman, and Žižek – and extract some common threads. These 
> will be applied to social media and the civic sphere, against the 
> background of the current crisis, with an eye towards reinvigorating 
> critique as an intellectual endeavour. Also, I will briefly address the 
> notion of ‘emancipation’ to see what useful meaning can be elucidated in 
> regard to our contemporary horizons.
>
> SPEAKER INFO: Peter Dahlgren is Professor Emeritus at Lund University, 
> Department of Media and Communications Studies. His research focuses on 
> democracy, the evolution of the media, and contemporary socio-cultural 
> processes, including identity formation.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discussion mailing list
> Discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
> http://lists.icts-and-society.net/listinfo.cgi/discussion-icts-and-society.net
> _______________________________________________
> Discussion mailing list
> Discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
> http://lists.icts-and-society.net/listinfo.cgi/discussion-icts-and-society.net
>