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

[Christian Fuchs]

 From lukejh at unimelb.edu.au

Hi all,
It was pleasure to boot up this evening after being away and seeing such 
a lively discussion developing.

The point of merely awareness and organisation that Jodi enunciates for 
the social media masses does seem to follow the viral Zombie* motif that 
Mark offered. However, OWS in their person to person, direct action seem 
to be repeating the meme: in Romereo's films, Zombies gathered outside a 
mall of consumerism much like OWS gather outside the investment banks, 
waiting for their bourgeoisie. Do OWS IRL protests, produce effective or 
affective political results? That is to say what are the tools building 
or destroying? OWS seems closer to the utopic global protest practices 
Jeffery Juris has explored, including festival encampments and even 
violence, than 'effective' politics I would think although each is 
necessity to certain parties and viewpoints, only in tandem are they 
sufficient for change?

I would have to agree with Ben's sentiment on online action's potential 
to create political change and suggest some of his evidence to be 
indicative of approaching the 'desirable form' of democracy he described 
('one in which the public, as a network of individuals, can inclusively 
deliberative and express their desires and interests based on a neutral 
platform; which desires and interests will then be collectively 
translated into substantive political action that is reflective of them').

However, I'd suggest that a neutral platform is unnecessary and indeed 
'imaginary'. Ben's statement that, Facebook 'itself, is not radical. But 
its uses potentially are', is key. That the neutral platform is 
unnecessary can be seen in some of danah boyd's work with youths who, 
within Facebook's, restrictions, consumption, and surveillance, find 
innovative ways to subvert and manipulate the platform to their own 
social needs while rejecting some of the former's assumptions / 
exploitations. This pattern might be what Megan was encountering in the 
research she shared below; media platforms appropriate users to their 
design and are appropriated by their users for their own designs, which 
is not a new idea. The idea of neutral platform as 'imaginary' critiques 
the critical/utopic notion of any media that can be evolved to a 
specific ideal. The study of politics and governing after open-source by 
George Dafermos, Nathaniel Tkacz and others hint at the lack of final 
critical emancipation that is idealised from media or IRL. In this vein, 
I look forward to Peter Dahlgren's paper that will "will probe the 
notion of critique" for actually effecting democracy.

Finally, I will suggest that if social media add anything new to 
understanding and explaining politics and movements of emancipation, it 
is a shift from the antagonism available in classical critical studies 
to multiple adversarial modes of critique and existence in the vein of 
Chantall Mouffe. My contention is that the multiplicity of possibilities 
that Megan wrote as 'hybrid modalities [affording] *new* kinds of 
visibility, accountaibility, and organzing' will also shift the notion 
of critique away from the antagonism of industrial Marx and class. 
Possibly in its place, adversarial modalities of critique and even 
democracy can exist in multiplicity beside, underneath and by inverting 
capitalism, are becoming available.

I would argue WikiLeaks inversion of privileged state secrets provides 
an example of an adversarial organisation of/through media. Dmytri 
Kleiner provides an adversarial 'critique' to venture capitalism in 
"venture communism" that makes productive commons transparent to allow 
an emancipatory existence in adversarial spaces with capitalism. To what 
extent Peter Dahlgren's talk will embrace radical movements away from 
structural class based explanations of politics will be interesting. How 
these (possibly) adversarial modes of critique and action tie into 
radical transparency are fascinating to me and will (hopefully) be 
relevant to the conclusion of Christian's paper about transparency as a 
political philosophy.


best,
Luke