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

[Megan Boler]

hi all, I appreciate and understand Jodi's points though I disagree with some. I have noted the points of disagreement below based especially on our ongoing interviews with Occupy activists.  It is valuable to be able to debate these matters constructively!
________________________________________
From: Dean, Jodi [JDEAN at hws.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2012 6:17 PM
To: Megan Boler; Mark Deuze; discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
Subject: RE: [ICTs-and-Society] Social Media, Democracy and, Politics in the Information Society

"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.

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."

       MB reply:  I understand your point but I do think the present fact of participatory media tells us more than that "movements exist in mediatized settings".
      Because of social media, there are vast differences today in the visibility of the Arab Spring and Occupy compared to previous movements you name.  Namely, there was a major media blackout, dismissal and underrepresentation of the anti-war protest numbers from 2002-2004 in particular.  Today, such misrepresentations can be solidly corrected and countered because of ubiquitous media.  

     For years as I spoke internationally (about my research on digital dissent against the invasion of Iraq), I have had to stress to audiences that the protests on Feb 15, 2003 were the largest EVER international anti-war protests in history. Most people are unaware of this!  And will ask me with disbelief, "You mean there was an anti-war movement in the U.S.?  We thought all of the US was behind Bush's invasion..." This, because the MSM was still a primary source of news prior to the extensive use of social media now, a decade later.  As well, today we have much greater access to digital archives of MSM broadcast news which allows the powerful practice of visual remix of news, which in turn enables people to call out political administrations and the media on lies and revisionist histories.

    So, this first point is that social media has radically changed visibility, and that social media of citizen journalism ensures international witnessing not only re: the scale/size of protests but of events such as govt and police crackdown and violation of human rights. 

     Secondly, while the Internet was used to organize the anti-war protests in Feb 2003 alongside traditional forms of announcements in alternative press, we did NOT have access to platforms such as Twitter or FB which function now as sources of up-to-the minute news and/or information for protesters to shift strategies mid-stream in response to given police tactics on the day of, etc etc.  To my mind, this is not a small matter of "more of the same except faster": rather, current social media use fundamentally changes the practices of organizing, the potential to organize immediate, direct, "flash" actions, the visibility of such actions, and the sustainability of movements in terms of maintaining ongoing struggle and organizing through one-to-many and many-to-many social media.  During 2003, much of the anti-war protest focused on large, mass, one-off gatherings vs. the level of local and ongoing organizing that is part of the present Occupy movement (I am speaking here from interviews from leading activists who are presently organizing within Occupy, and who were also involved in pre-Twitter/FB organizing, and these are distinctions they make.)

Jodi writes: "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."

     MB response: My concern with this characterization, Jodi, is what I expressed in my previous email: Why should we be especiially skeptical about THESE "master's tools" when in fact almost everything we engage within capitalism is complicit?  It seems to me that an account of the lived contradictions is more useful? 

     Secondly, the activists we have been interviewing most certainly radically question tossing "all political activism into a loose acceptable soup of democratic participation." You express concern that our "ability to conceive radical, revolutionary change" is being hampered... Rather, what I am finding first and foremost in our interviews is that participants are in NO way limited to describing a vision, world or goals with existing terms.  I have been amazed at even first-time activists' insistence on envisioning radically new forms of social and political relations, forms of governance, etc. We are witnessing, as I intimated in previous email, a profound redefinition of terms like "democracy," "politics," "political"--in thought AND action.  By means of this new, hybrid (F2F and social media) Occupy movement, participants are asking radical questions such as: what kind of governance is desired? what social systems could look like? Will some remix of "democracy"  in fact shift the connections between capitalism and democracy? And the latter, given testimony we have heard, looks as dubious to many activists on the ground, as it does to critical theoretical academics.

     What fundamentally is risked by using the powerful tools we presently have at our disposal?  What *if* participatory media is redefining the potential of social movements?  I am interested in understanding how these hybrid modalities afford different and, I would argue, *new* kinds of visibility, accountaibility, and organzing.  

     The greatest risks seems to me to be surveillance, which is a given (and raises another topic: namely, the transparency of Occupy or other social movements who do use these social media) and the likelihood that our current, relatively easy access to internet will soon be highly censored and limited by multinational corporate ownership (as was recently narrowly and temporarily derailed by widespread, international, web-based (!) organized opposition to SOPA and PISA).

sincerely,
megan