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

[ben klass]

Forgive me for not being clear previously.Jodi,You said: "If you associate interaction online with healthy deliberative democracy, then I would expect that you would associate more interaction online with more democracy or with healthier democracy." I have not argued that online interactivity is a sufficient cause of better and broader democracy. Of course it is not; I do not even think it is a necessary cause. What I do think is that access to networked communication media is a facilitator of democratic participation; it fosters the spread of information, awareness (of issues, viewpoints, events, etc), dialogue etc. Christian recognized this when he said: "Nobody doubts that communication technology as a tool [...] can support information, co-ordination, communication" and so on and so forth. This is relevant for a number of reasons, of which I would like to discuss two.First is the assumption, implicit in Gladwell's article, that "online activism" and "in-real-life (IRL) activism" are rival goods: that we play a zero sum game when clicking "like" on Facebook or participating in a discussion on reddit. This is clear when he says: "[Social media evangelists] seem to believe [...] that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960." This is the idea of "slacktivism": that a user will "like" some cause, or join some group, pat herself on the back, and then immediately return to looking at pictures of cats with grammatically incorrect captions. This is the technologically-determinate aspect that Christian described. Are Facebook and Twitter revolutionary, because they create the technical conditions for people to "like" causes? No, of course not. In most cases, the ideology that they are inherently revolutionary is designed to prevent them from being so. We must be critical of services that cast a shadow over people's ability to see them for what they are: capitalist companies aimed toward exploiting free labor generated by unsuspecting users.It isn't all bad though; the existence of slacktivism or hidden profit-motive does not detract from actual revolutionary uses of social media. While commercial media pundits were collectively scratching their heads, wondering "Just what does the Occupy movement stand for?" on National and Local TV stations, organizers were busy utilizing decentralized Web 2.0 tools to facilitate their protests. These tools allowed them to establish and expand an authentic, grassroots movement, prior to having to involve other, more short-sighted groups, for fear that they might be "like the SEIU, Teamsters and United Auto Workers, which are top down and centralized, joined at the hip with the Democratic Party and eager, even desperate, to be the junior partner of capital." Think of Andrew's example of mimeo machines (Had to wikipedia that one) and telephone trees. Without easy access to Web 2.0 types of communicative tools, which allowed individuals to develop, organize and express the Occupy movement on their own terms, would we have gotten the Occupy movement at all? Or would it have fizzled into a cacophony of bourgeois musings about the economy? Notice that the use of network media did not preclude or prevent the amalgamation of more traditional forms of protest down the line: Unions crucially lent support and people across the country, and in fact up here in Canada too, hit the streets in a still ongoing IRL protest, but only once network media-facilitated organization had taken place; the protest started on the Internet, and throughout, awareness of it, including its day to day events as well as its beliefs and demands, has been spread not by the mainstream media, but through the Internet.This leads to the second point. Our point of reference when gauging social media's efficacy as a tool is its predecessor, commercial media. Organized to develop lowest common denominator content aimed at passive receivers of information, with the goal of generating maximum ad-revenue, commercial media is and always has been an inferior mechanism for facilitating grassroots movements. I would be curious to find out the nature of the role the mass media played in framing the sit-ins Gladwell describes. I can only guess that they weren't portrayed in a positive light; I feel more confident in stating that they certainly did not facilitate organization of movements at anywhere near a grassroots or radical level. Viewed in this light, networked information media are clearly preferable to our previous option, the only one that was available on a wide scale before the emergence and critical-mass adoption of Internet media technologies. Exploitative capitalist motivations do not exert influence over networked media anywhere near the extent to which they did over traditional mass media, and as such I think that we should not be so quick to discount the benefits of mass media to revolutionary politics.I find it a bit curious that you would reference the thirty-forty year trend that saw a 275% increase in the 1%'s earnings. Interactive, Web 2.0 models only began to displace static-web, walled-garden (AOL-style) Internet use on a wide scale about 10 years ago. The rest of the period was dominated by commercial media. Is it appropriate or relevant to claim that "online interaction has been accompanied by immense concentrations of wealth" in such a direct way? Just my thoughts for now,Ben 		 	   		  
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