@ is for Activism

Joss Hands

Description

How have politics and activism been transformed by digital media, including digital television, online social networking and mobile computing?



Since the emergence of new technologies, new modes of cooperation, deliberation and representation have risen to the fore, @ is for Activism maps out how political relationships have been reconfigured and new have emerged through the use of new technologies. A host of critical thinkers populate the study, from Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse criticism of technology's close relation to capitalism, to media networks' actualising the Habermasian ideal of collective communicative action, Hands delineates the potentials and the pitfalls of a technologised politics.



From anti-war activism, to global justice movements, peer production and 'Twitter' activism, we see how politics is being shaped by the new technological environment.

Introduction

1. Activism And Technology

2. The Digital Author As Producer

3. Protocol; Norm; Imperative: Networks As Moral Machines

4. Power-Law-Democracy

5. Mobil(E)Isation

6. @ Is Also For Alter-Globalisation

7. Constructing The Common: Cooperation And Multitude

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Political Advocacy
• Political Process
• Political Science
• COMPUTERS
• General officer
• Media studies
• Activism
• General
• Networking
• Herbert Marcuse

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849645393
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

@ is for Activism

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@ IS fOR ACTIvISm

Dissent, Resistance and Rebellion in a Digital Culture

Joss Hands

First published 2011 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

www.plutobooks.com

Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Copyright © Joss Hands 2011

The right of Joss Hands to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 2701 3 978 0 7453 2700 6

Hardback Paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, 33 Livonia Road, Sidmouth, EX10 9JB, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction 1. Activism and Technology 2. The Digital Author as Producer 3. Protocol, Norm, Imperative: Networks as Moral Machines 4. PowerLaw Democracy 5. Mobil(e)isation 6. @ is also for AlterGlobalisation 7. Constructing the Common: Cooperation and Multitude

Notes References Index

vii

1 23 48

77 99 124 142 162

191 195 203

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all those friends and colleagues who have given their time to discuss the book in progress, and who have read and commented on chapters: Sarah Barrow, Sean Campbell, Neal Curtis, Lincoln Dahlberg, Greg Elmer, Tanya Horeck, Tina Kendall, Clare Neal, Jussi Parikka, Eugenia Siapera, Catherine Silverstone and Milla Tiainen. Further thanks to all my colleagues, present and past, in the Department of English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and to my teachers and colleagues at the Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire – in particular Dave Roberts, Joss WestBurnham and Michael Loughlin. My appreciation goes to Douglas Kellner, and the anonymous reviewers, for their comments on the original book proposal. I am indebted to David Castle for supporting the project so well at Pluto Press, and to Charles Peyton for his great work getting the manuscript into shape. I would also like to thank Jason Cox, Mark and Jacky Heron, and Nev and Ibis Kirton, for their ideas, support and friendship through the writing of this book. Finally, thanks to my parents Bryan and Marilyn, and to my grandmother Esther, whose attitude to life one can only aspire to emulate.

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Introduction

On Monday 15 June 2009, the ‘Twitter Blog’ announced that it would be postponing a planned maintenance shutdown, given the recognition of ‘the role Twitter is currently playing as an important 1 communication tool in Iran’ (Twitter, 2009). On the same day as Twitter’s postponed maintenance, theNew York Timesreported that ‘Iranians are blogging, posting to Facebook and most visibly coordinating their protests on Twitter, the messaging service’ (Stone & Cohen, 2009). This was a response to the widespread unrest in Iran in the aftermath of the perceived fixing of the presidential election. Reports of unrest, street protests and images of youth thronging the streets, chanting demands for the election results to be fairly recognised and taking on the phalanxes of armed police, were flashed around the world. The tag line of the story, in tune with increasing awareness of the social networking phenomenon of Twitter, was the notion that this was a radically new kind of protest, coordinated online in real time and producing a new kind of collective intelligence. That this was taken very seriously cannot be denied, given that two days after the Twitter Blog post theGuardianreported that the new Obama administration had requested a planned downtime be deferred: ‘The Obama administration, while insisting it is not meddling in Iran, yesterday confirmed it had asked Twitter to remain open to help antigovernment protesters’ (MacAskill, 2009). This was not the first time that Twitter had been seen to contribute to such actions. Earlier, in April 2009, there had been the ‘Twitter Revolution’ in Moldova, in which for a while protesters, again reacting against a perceived rigged election, had occupied the Moldovan parliament. TheNew York Times reported that ‘[a] crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans materialized seemingly out of nowhere on Tuesday to protest against Moldova’s Communist leadership, ransacking government buildings and clashing with the police’ (Barry, 2009). But this was no mystery event; the protesters had organised themselves using Twitter, among other social media. TheIndependentnewspaper reported that one protester had tweeted: ‘North of Moldova TV IS OFF!!! but we have THE ALMIGHTY INTERNET! Let us use it to communicate

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