[ICTs-and-Society] Social Media, Democracy and, Politics in the Information Society

[Megan Boler]

Thanks all for the provocative discussion!

Since 2001 I have been closely studying the questions Christian posed in his initial note.

I am in the midst of a three-year funded research examining young people's practices and uses of social media in political organizing and activism.  Just this weekend I completed another 6 interviews with activists presently engaged in the Occupy Movement in San Francisco, which adds to 50 interviews conducted with Occupy Toronto and OWS participants.

Our research findings challenge Gladwell’s argument that social media offers only “weak ties” and others’ ongoing worries that online dialogue and debate leads to useless noise and chatter, or are somehow connected to “depoliticizing” people, or even that high use of social media should be blamed for some of the extreme accumulation of capital.  Both veteran and new activists drawn into Occupy Movement gathered in large part because of the how people used social media to broadcast the events of the Arab Spring (and to a lesser extent the Spanish Indignados movement of last summer).  Of course, no protest or revolution is possible merely through media practices, and of course, protests and revolutions require people taking to the streets and equally time-consuming assemblies, meetings, working groups, etc. which are the current and very active form of Occupy Movement (Occupy our Food Supply; stopping foreclosures; challenging corporate personhood, as well as countless local actions)

Activists again and again describe (in reply to our interview questions “Which social media do you use to stay informed and to inform others” ) the absolutely central role of Twitter and Facebook and email listservs as sources of news, organizing, and community-building.  

In contrast to those suspicious of attributing too much power to ICTs, I would argue (bases both on our interviews, my previous three-year study of digital dissent, and my studies of the impact of digital media on journalism which I began in 2001) that without the current forms of citizen and amateur journalism, and the affordances of flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, the "Arab Spring" would not have happened (which is not equivalent to saying that these social media are the only or the primary reason for the historic events).  In addition to the testimonies of many leaders in the Middle East about the central role of FB in catalyzing Jan 25, every Occupy activist we have interviewed was powerfully influenced by the citizen journalism captured through mobile media, and subsequently by the online dialogues and conversation sparked and inspired by the courage rendered so highly visible.  
As well, our findings show that Twitter and FB, in that order, provide THE sources of news presently used by those involved in Occupy as well as other activist movements.  

One can argue that this does not speak to anything *essential* to the media in question—ie, that the question is not about social media and could just as well have been tv or print or what have you.  But that is patently not the case:  again and again, new activists speak to the **interactivity** of FB and Twitter (as well as the other media I have mentioned) as part of the “stickiness” that helps establish, maintain, and proliferate communities.

What is novel with Occupy is the hybrid nature of this “long haul” movement.  It was the coincidence of establishing visible physical occupations/“camps” combined with the diverse uses of media, that created powerful new kinds of connections and established communities that are still ongoing (despite the Camps having been forcibly closed by the militarized state).  Through friendship networks--whether F2F or mediated--people followed one another into the agora/commons of these public tent communities established in 1500 places around the world as of October 2011.  At General Assembly Occupy meetings presently, and across our interviews, it is evident that we are witness to an entirely new level of dialogue between “strangers” about revolution/social change/envisioning a better world; and that this level and intensity of engagement is a phenomenon today’s generation of activist leaders has never before seen.  As well, in addition to this new hybrid form of social movement we are now witnessing, activists around the world are working together to create global agendas for challenging the unsustainable economic systems exploiting the 99%.  

Speaking of 99%:  if it had not been for the hybrid movement engaging social media and the force of online citizen journalism, bloggers, etc, we would not have so successfully reframed the public discourse from “class warfare” to “economic justice” and the intervention represented by the slogan 99% and 1 %.

The fact that GA assemblies are Livestreamed and that individuals use U stream is a major ongoing source of maintaining the communities and working groups established through the F2F camps. 

While I agree that some, a la Shirky, may be accused of “techno-deterministic uncritical 
optimism and techno-fetishistic ideological myth-making surrounding
"social media", I think we make a potentially serious error by suggesting any necessary connection between optimism about “social media” (understood as practices), and the underlying issues of profit and exploited labor.  Rather--along the lines of Mark Deuze’s point regarding what questions may be most useful--the connections between social media and capitalism more precisely forces us to recognize the contradictions inherent and inevitable within late-industrial capitalism, and our complicities within this system (tho in no way could one describe these activists as zombies!).  

It is no small matter that one of the key goals of the techno-geeks involved in Occupy is to develop an alternative physical Internet infrastructure not dependent on corporate ownership (idealistic, I know).   

For critical theorists interested in investigating the processes and practices being used by humans to challenge corporate ownership, it seems potentially shortsighted to criticize or dismiss the (troublesome) “master’s tools” (i.e., social media) on the basis of the fact that they are the master’s tools.  Why not consider how these tools—as materialized accretions of capital—are in fact powerfully being used to question that system of capitalism itself?  Do we not require a theory that contains both/and, and allows us to account for the deep contradictions that define our current techno-social “mediaopolis” as I like to term it?

Not to mention: while “too much social media optimism” may appear to overlook the underlying economic structures, if one doesn't recognize the productive role of social media, one risks discounting the vast investment of intense communicative labor of those engaged in this radical social movement that precisely seeks to develop an alternative to the present oligarchies and corporate greed. 

Finally, regarding the relationship of these practices to “democracy”: my other motives for engaging this research of young activists’s social media practices, is my hypothesis that many young activists do not define democracy or politics in the ways political theorists/academics/politicians traditionally have.  They do not even frequently use these terms today.  They are well aware that democracy has come to be nearly synonymous with capitalism. Just as they rarely make any distinction between on- and offline, what is “social” for this generation bleeds almost indistinguishably at times into what is “political.”  These operative conceptions and practices of “politics” evidences the need to re-examine how we define the political/politics and its relationship to ‘democracy,’ and how we are challenged to understand new modalities of social and communicative networks and communities based on emergent values and visions.  What is the significance of Occupy emphasis on consensus, process, listening, and dialogue?  It is clear to me that culture and politics are, in this movement, inseparable, and that the ethos that is developing through the hybrid social media/F2F movement for economic justice, is as much about new modes of human relations and interaction as it is about new economic models.

Meanwhile, I must agree with Andrew that we are likely to have only a short time remaining with the extent of access to Internet that we now have.  Last year at a conference I co-organized here at Univ of Toronto –“DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media”—Ron Deibert suggested that we will look back on these as the incredible 15 years of internet freedom we once had…(And the recent international protest against the U.S. legislation SOPA and PISA reflects the emergence of the global citizen aware of the precarity of the access we have to come to cherish as a ‘human right’).

(the length of my post, for better or worse, reflects my deep immersion in these very questions....)

sincerely,
megan

Megan Boler
Professor, Theory and Policy Studies
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
252 Bloor Street West
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6
416 978-1231
www.meganboler.net
________________________________________
From: discussion-bounces at lists.icts-and-society.net [discussion-bounces at lists.icts-and-society.net] On Behalf Of Mark Deuze [deuzemjp at yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2012 7:31 PM
To: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
Subject: Re: [ICTs-and-Society] Social Media, Democracy and,    Politics in the Information Society

alas, I cannot make it to what promises to be an exciting conference - so perhaps I can throw in my 2 cents on this discussion from across the pond.

there are a lot of issues to disentangle when collapsing social/political activism and online/mobile/social media in a contemporary context.

a lot of the mass protests we see today are anti-capitalist, oppositional to Empire, aimed to give voice to the voiceless vis-a-vis the 1%.

at the same time, the key organizing, communication, and participation tools for all these protests are the products and services and infrastructures and artifacts of distinctly imperial and often corporate entities: commercial social media platforms, telecommunication providers, consumer electronics, privately operated servers/wires/routers.

does the one aspect negate the validity of the other? not necessarily. but one should not rush to judgement too quickly by all too easy theorizing (I'm not saying Marx or the 1960s have nothing to do with the current situation... I'm just noting that they may have as much as they do not).

although there are certainly many people who click a "like" button and then move on to FunnyorDie. others smash their iPhone and pitch a tent on a public square. the effectiveness of either method of activism is again not necessarily something 'caused' by its method.

several folks have argued that much of todays new social movements and forms of political activism - anything from the Arab uprising to Planet Occupy, from the UK riots (and subsequent cleanups) to the Italian blogosphere, and so - seems to infused with web values.

in fact, a lot of these protests, riots (and clean-ups) around the world do have certain properties that remind one of zombies: first, they tend to be based on social movements without leaders, lacking clear hierarchical structures, and generally having no clear goals. If anything, the sheer diversity of goals seem to cancel each other out. Second, they involve people from all walks of life: from East to West, North to South, black and white, men and women, old and young - again negating distinct classifications. Finally, not only does the social arrangement of these protests rely heavily on the use of media (which in turn enable the active involvement of people not necessarily present) - they seem similarly infectious and viral as media can be.

as so many people seem to suggest that our concurrent exposure to and immersion in media runs the risk of turning us into living dead (of which slacktivists are a mild form one could argue), it is perhaps not so strange that the relationship between contemporary media and equally current forms of political activism gets expression in zombies.

and, as literary theorists would argue: isnt the revival of zombies as the benchmark of contemporary popular culture premised on a globally felt frustration with caring about the world (its nature and its peoples) but feeling disempowered en disenfranchised to do anything about it?

perhaps we should talk about that, and a bit less whether liking something on facebook is good or bad for you, or good or bad for democracy.

thanks for allowing me to pitch in!

yours sincerely,

Mark Deuze.

twitter: @markdeuze
blog: deuze.blogspot.com
facebook (why the hell not): facebook.com/markdeuze