[ICTs-and-Society] statement of alternative informatics about gezi park and social media

[Andrew Feenberg]

This seems to me much too strong. The illusions of the revolutionaries about the media are also exaggerated. The fact is the Internet replaces the roneotype or mimeograph machine and the telephone and it does so very well! We should be grateful! If May 68 in Paris had been called the Roneotype Revolution we would have ridiculed the claim that a little thing with a crank overthrows governments, notwithstanding it was a very useful device.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matze Schmidt" <matze.schmidt at n0name.de>
To: "Seda Guerses" <sguerses at esat.kuleuven.be>
Cc: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
Sent: Monday, July 8, 2013 11:16:14 AM
Subject: Re: [ICTs-and-Society] statement of alternative informatics about	gezi park and social media

Hello,

and thank you for the text.

But as far as I can see there a no news aspects in it. The 'wrong' media
vs. street-topic (street = real, media = not real) is an old hat ever
since the french revolution or the televised (!) revolution in Romania
1989 and was never an indicator for radical change in the modern era.
Crediting the social media (btw'n'briefly spoken any media are social
but not socialised) with some power--by itself ?--credits them more as
'bottom-up media' and humans are short-circuited here. But there is
still a distance in the use and the structure.

One has to ask: Which humans and where? Of course the metropolitan ones
with smartness at their hands.

I can not see an over all helplesness in the traditional or big media
(TV, Press). And if so this has to be specified in levels of ideology.
Analysing the situation of the official/state-media as a "turning the
private media to the communicator of the provocative language used by
the government officials" is--I am sorry--banal. Every power in charge
will use the media as their megaphone and stop powerful networked media
(based on the almost classical trias text, photos and moving pictures).
But the linking social "media:democratic" deludes. What about the
linking "social media:liberalism"?

The BBC was very early in May giving the stereotype of young urban
unemployed at Gezi who can speak english fluently and want free speech.
This stereotype turned soon into a appropriate picture of the scene. The
rest of the happenings from fraternizations of former fiends to gas and
dead in the strees have been reported by RT.News to
http://gezipark.nadir.org/. So this british TV/Online-Sender was not at
all helpless and not non-social and the social media where not alone.
They were very close. Twitter was full of professionals and the sheme of
"bottum-up = social media, top-down = traditional media" was about to
erode.

To the contrary, Facebook and Twitter show structurally and contenwise
weakness as the movement (esp. in Istanbul) seems to be locked in the
merry-go-round of same _open topics_ like "stop the present government,
stop police, right to the city of instanbul" and _hidden topics_ of
participation in the new middle class society and life. This all on the
basis of networks these young never control but use as users. Twitter
can be shut down overnight, the recend NSA-scandal is just the another
name for state-driven information--not as surveillance but as structural
field.

The first task in revolutions is always "conquer the media as
machinery" and spread your (the) truth to produce a mass against the
monopoly on the use of force; this 'revoluton' here proceeds the other
way round. Capitalistic standards love those icons (the young lady  in a
red summer dress pepper sprayed, a soft "Liberté guidant le peuple) that
helps to distract.

Matze Schmidt

Sunday, July 7, 2013, 4:20:35 PM, you wrote:
> the text below is their statement about censorship, mass media, and
> social media from a couple of weeks ago,




> EN:
> http://yenimedya.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/the-power-of-social-media-the-helplesness-of-traditional-media-and-direngeziparki-direnankara-direnizmir-an-analysis-of-the-alternative-informatics-association/


_______________________________________________
Discussion mailing list
Discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
http://lists.icts-and-society.net/listinfo.cgi/discussion-icts-and-society.net

-- 
______________________________

New Book: (Re)Inventing the Internet
Preview at: google feenberg sense reinventing

Andrew Feenberg 
Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology 
School of Communication 
Simon Fraser University at Harbour Centre 
ACT, Room 3598 
515 West Hastings Street 
Vancouver, British Columbia, V6B 5K3 
Canada 
Office: 778-782-5169 
Mobile: 604-218-6047 
In Paris: 06 06 43 32 56

http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf