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

[Sean Cubitt]

this is, as Marcus says, a fascinating discussion, and a subject of great importance

a small note on the theoretical side: while I agree with Andrew Feenberg that Le joli Mai was not a roneo revolution, and that equally Taksim is not a twitter event, as a media scholar I have to believe that media do indeed matter. On the other hand, Jakob Rigi may overstate the case when he asserts that "means of communication determine the form of organization"

However, let us think for a moment which media are actually dominant, that is to say, which media are the means of domination. In the early 21st century, those media are spreadsheets, databases and geographical information systems. These data-driven media dominate in the sense that they facilitate the management of populations and the administration of economies (credit ratings, but also the consumer discipline that has largely replaced factory discipline in the global North).

The contradiction arises because capital today needs free labour, as Christian has been so astute in informing us. One role of that labour is to supply creative invention in an era of intense standardisation (including the standardisation of media formats). Capital is no longer capable of invention, only innovation, and therefore has to leave free spaces where creativity can operate.

But that creativity has the option of becoming grit in the gears of the perpetuation of the status quo (the combination of economic growth with social stagnation).

previous media-political and media-cutural moments (community video, cooperative publishing, community cinema, the xerox movement, the early web etcetera, not to mention email lists) also operated in the contradictions of dominant media: and used the affordances of avaiable technologies. Of course each time the hopes that thye tech would change everything were dashed . . .  but the incomplteness of capital is its worst enemy

sean

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.icts-and-society.net/pipermail/discussion-icts-and-society.net/attachments/20130710/182dddc2/attachment-0001.htm>