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

[Dean, Jodi]

Folks,

I am reluctant to write much more since I've already made my points a couple of time on this list and have presented the arguments more thoroughly in books and articles.

Regarding Occupy: what makes it different, important, and fresh is that people have been amassing out of doors, working together face to face with strangers, in class struggle (so
I am relieved that the language of economic justice has not displaced that of class struggle in New York). The hard elements of Occupy are the ideological clashes within the movement, the challenge of maintaining physical space in urban areas, reaching consensus. delegating tasks, determining what to do next, getting enough people to show up for things and to do the work. 

Media "interactivity" is ubiquitous in communicative capitalism. Most of my students think of Twitter as a medium for following celebrities, the way Lady Gaga stays
connected with her fans. To this is not to critique Twitter or interactivity. It is to say that the presence of this media use is our ether, the dominant culture, the dominant and
expected mode of interaction--so there is nothing unique or surprising in the fact that people use the same media to engage politically. Using media is what we already do.
 
Megan writes: "this level and intensity of engagement is a phenomenon today’s generation of activist leaders has never before seen."  The key words might be "this generation." If we go back just a few years, we recall the February 15, 2003 anti-war protests around the world. Millions mobilized in opposition to the threat of the US invasion of Iraq. They amassed, but it didn't
stop anything.  A few years before that, the anti-globalization movement was very strong. We can keep going back and look at radical environmentalism, the anti-nuclear movement, ACT-UP, and then further and further. Since there has been "participatory media" there have been arguments that these media are essential to movement --this is true in that the movements are part of settings that are mediatized. But this truth doesn't tell us more than that. 

I think we should be wary of urges to capture political struggles in the terms of the dominant culture because these terms hamper our ability to conceive radical, revolutionary change
and induce us to absorb all political activism into a loose acceptable soup of democratic participation. 

Jodi