Hybrid Media Activism

Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms

Emiliano Treré

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315438153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is an extensive investigation of the complexities, ambiguities and shortcomings of contemporary digital activism. The author deconstructs the reductionism of the literature on social movements and communication, proposing a new conceptual vocabulary based on practices, ecologies, imaginaries and algorithms to account for the communicative complexity of protest movements. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on social movements, collectives and political parties in Spain, Italy and Mexico, this book disentangles the hybrid nature of contemporary activism. It shows how activists operate merging the physical and the digital, the human and the non-human, the old and the new, the internal and the external, the corporate and the alternative.

The author illustrates the ambivalent character of contemporary digital activism, demonstrating that media imaginaries can be either used to conceal authoritarianism, or to reimagine democracy. The book looks at both side of algorithmic power, shedding light on strategies of repression and propaganda, and scrutinizing manifestations of algorithms as appropriation and resistance.

The author analyses the way in which digital activism is not an immediate solution to intricate political problems, and argues that it can only be effective when a set of favourable social, political, and cultural conditions align.

Assessing whether digital activism can generate and sustain long-term processes of social and political change, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching radical politics, social movements, digital activism, political participation and current affairs more generally.

Introduction

The quest for communicative complexity within social movements

Outline of the chapter

More than ten years ago, at the start of my PhD dissertation on the media practices of the ‘Anomalous Wave’ student movement in Italy, I attended, together with other PhD students from different institutions, an online seminar on traditional social movement theories lead by an established professor in the field. I remember waiting patiently for the moment when we were supposed to discuss the role of media and communications within social movement dynamics. When that moment arrived, the professor quickly dismissed – in less than three minutes – the role of the media as being merely instrumental for collective action. ‘They are tools’, he remarked, ‘resources used to fulfil specific political objectives’. I tried to object to this but, being the only media scholar in the seminar, I couldn’t do much to sway the debate that immediately turned to other more pressing concerns regarding the relation between the macro, meso, and micro dimensions in social movement analysis. That professor’s understanding of the role of communication within movements is an expression of the communicative reductionism that characterises much of the social movement literature, i.e. the belief that media technologies’ role within social movement dynamics is either not relevant or merely instrumental. The purpose of this book, the result of ten years of research into the complex, fascinating relationship between social movements and media technologies, is to prove not only that media are much more than just tools in the hands of social movement actors but that social movements represent one of the most privileged loci for the exploration of the complexities, intricacies, and contradictions that characterise the role of communication technologies in our digital societies. Indeed, in this quest for communicative complexity within social movements and activism, I am well accompanied. In the last years, various scholars from different theoretical standpoints and backgrounds have provided rich accounts on the relations between social movements and technology.¹ Precious insights have come from media sociology (Poell and Van Dijck 2016, 2017; Waisbord 2016), political sociology, social movement studies (Flesher Fominaya and Gillan 2017; Gerbaudo 2012, 2017; Kavada 2013, 2015; Mattoni 2013, 2017; Milan 2013, 2015), and political communication (Chadwick 2017; Fenton 2016; Mercea 2016); from media anthropology (Barassi 2015; Juris 2008, 2011; Postill 2014), citizen and alternative media studies (Baker and Blaagaard 2016; Downing 2008; Harlow 2016; Rodríguez et al. 2014), and rhetorical studies (Foust and Hoyet 2018); and from political science (Bennett and Segerberg 2013), journalism studies (Russell 2016), digital culture (Peeren et al. 2018), political economy (Dencik and Leistert 2015; Fuchs 2014; Wolfson 2014), and media archaeology (Kaun 2016). While the approaches and the findings of these scholars vary greatly, they all tend to attribute to communication technologies a complex, multifaceted role within protest movements and activism, sharing the will to give communicative processes their due recognition within the dynamics of collective action. Yet, communicative reductionism still reveals itself in many different disguises even within these recent accounts. While its clearest expression, i.e. the assertion that media technologies are mere instruments in the hand of activists, is increasingly less common even in social movement studies (although still far from being eradicated), other varieties and manifestations of communicative reductionism can still be found across a wide range of contemporary interpretations. This book represents a holistic exploration of the complexities that define the mutual shaping of social movements and media technologies (i.e. the media/movement dynamic, from now on the MMD). Relying on the conceptual vocabularies of media ecologies, media imaginaries, and algorithms, I will endeavour to overcome the diverse manifestations of communicative reductionism, foregrounding the many facets that constitute the communicative complexity of contemporary activism. This introductory chapter is divided into two main parts: a pars denstruens, where the three spectres and the five fallacies of communicative reductionism that plague the media/movement literature are critically addressed; and a pars construens, where the case studies and the methods are illustrated and a new conceptual vocabulary relying on practice, ecologies, imaginaries, and algorithms is introduced, along with an outline of the sections and the chapters of the book.

Pars denstruens: three spectres and five fallacies

First spectre: technological instrumentalism

The simplistic metaphor of media as tools for performing contentious activities – one of the most adopted metaphors for describing the effects of communication technologies (Nardi and O’Day 1999) – has infiltrated the study of digital activism and social movements from the very beginning (Treré and Barranquero 2013). Narrow-minded, uncritical, and instrumental visions of media as neutral channels have been pervasive in discussions of media within social movement studies (Carroll and Hackett 2006; Downing 2008; Huesca 2001; Tambini 1999), where technologies have been often considered nothing more than mere resources to reach pre-established political goals (Lasén and Martínez de Albeniz 2011; Rahimi 2011). In this context, digital media in particular have been conceived as impersonal channels that carry certain messages, adhering to what James Carey has labelled the ‘transmission view of communication’ (1989), an approach formed from a metaphor of transportation which emphasises the transmission of signals and glosses over the ritual and symbolic aspects of communicative processes. This is not to say that media and communications have not been addressed at all, but engagement with media and communications within social movement studies has been scattered and generally lacked structure and depth. Early social movement studies, such as the collective behaviour approach, looked at communication processes almost exclusively through the lens of the manipulation of the masses and the propaganda of leaders and dictators (Gusfeld 1994). In the early versions of the political process model, authors mentioned that the presence of a ‘communication network or infrastructure’ (McAdam 1982, pp. 46–47) in social movements was also crucial in determining the patterns of diffusion of the movement itself. Social movement scholars also evoked the importance of communication and media when they argued that social movements are said to ‘take place as conversations’ in which activists interact with ‘multiple audiences’ (Tilly 2002, p. 89). However, both the ‘political opportunity’ and the ‘political process’ perspectives – despite their emphasis on interaction – have paid relatively little attention ‘to the content, means and channels of communication of the groups involved’ (Della Porta 2009; Myers 1994; Van De Donk et al. 2004, p. 9). Overall, social movement theories of all types have embraced a rather simplistic and instrumental conception of the role of media and communications within protest movements, casting technologies as straightforward channels for transmitting information (Lievrouw 2011; Milan 2013; Pavan and Della Porta 2018).

Second spectre: functionalism and the disregard of collective identity

One of the dominant approaches in the field, resource mobilisation theory, has adopted a functional understanding of social movements and the media, positing that they exist prior to the communication that shapes them (Faust and Hoyt 2018), thus neglecting the consequences that the use of particular forms of communication can have on the internal structure of a movement and its several publics (Van De Donk et al. 2004, p. 8). This functional reading of communication in collective action tends to almost completely disregard the role of media technologies as spaces for the creation and reproduction of specific social imaginaries, values, and world views. Instead, it typically overemphasises the organisational dimension and the technological affordances of protest networks, at the expense of the cultural, symbolic aspects and emotional dynamics of social movements. Hence, it marginalises the ways through which technology intermingles with the various manifestations of collective identity and solidarity of social movements (Gerbaudo 2015; Gerbaudo and Treré 2015). Unsatisfied with more instrumental explanations of collective action, a few decades ago new social movements’ theorists (Melucci 1985; Touraine et al. 1983, 1987) highlighted instead the relevance of collective identity as the factor that accounts for mobilisation and individual attachments, pointing out the need to consider cultural factors, emotions, and networks of meanings when analysing social movements. This concept has been at the heart of an animated debate, especially regarding the slippery contours of its definition (Flesher Fominaya 2010; Polletta and Jasper 2001) and its functioning as an orthodoxy (McDonald 2002), but its usefulness has been vigorously reaffirmed as a ‘concept that continues to yield rich insights into the understanding of social movements’ (Flesher Fominaya 2010, p. 401). At its most basic level, collective identity is a shared sense of ‘we-ness’ and ‘collective agency’ (Snow 2001). Italian sociologist Melucci (1995, p. 44) describes it as ‘an interactive and shared definition produced by several interacting individuals who are concerned with the orientation of their action as well as the field of opportunities and constraints in which their action takes place’. Collective identity is a process, and scholars who embrace its application are particularly interested in scrutinising the potentialities of media technologies for circulating and connecting symbols and people. This key concept is premised on the importance of communication, since collective identities’ creation and maintenance in social movements require a continuous act of recognising and being recognised that implies a noticeable flow of information between social movement actors and the environment within which they act.

Digital social movement studies and collective identity: from appreciation to indifference

The first studies on digital media and movements focussed on emails, mailing lists, online forums, bulletin boards, and websites. Studies related to the organisational dimension of social movements always held a centrality within the literature; however, in the first wave of studies on digital activism, several works addressed how other movements’ aspects were being reshaped by diverse communication technologies, paying particular attention to the construction and maintenance of collective identity through digital media (Ayers 2003; Castells 1997; Cronauer 2004; Gamson 2003; Hara and Estrada 2005; Kavada 2009, 2010; Nip 2004; Pickerill 2003; Wall 2007). The contribution that digital media bring about to the construction and maintenance of collective identities is a controversial issue, with some authors arguing that communication technologies do not have a significant impact on identity formation (Ayers 2003; Pickerill 2003), other scholars pointing out both benefits and concerns (Kavada 2009), and others contending that in the online environment identities can be successfully formed and maintained (Hara and Estrada 2005, p. 504). Yet, beyond the dissimilar outcomes of the scholarship, these discussions pointed to a vivid interest in the exploration of the link between collective identity and digital communication and signalled a specific consideration for the exploration of the internal communicative dynamics of social movements (in particular emails and mailing lists) and the connection between everyday activists’ practices and identity maintenance over time. The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and in particular of social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, and their integration into social movements’ communication repertoires have given birth to another wave of studies on digital activism that urges to develop ‘theory 2.0’ approaches (Earl and Kimport 2011), that is, a renovation of our theoretical toolkit in order to understand the game-changing dynamics of networked movements. The massive quantity of data produced by activists through their online protest activities has contributed to a computational turn (Tufecki 2014) in social movements and media studies, i.e. a significant growth in the application of quantitative methods in the examination of enormous protest-related data sets available on social media platforms. Most of these studies profess a quasi-religious reliance on quantitative ‘big data’ analysis that glosses over the understanding of the cultural, social, and political contexts where protest develops (Rodríguez et al. 2014). In this new wave of research, the interest for the formation and upholding of collective identity has progressively vanished (with some remarkable exceptions, see, for instance, Kavada 2012; Svensson et al. 2015), in favour of more instrumental/functionalist aspects of social movements. This aspect is clear if we look at the studies developed in the last years (for an extensive review, see Earl et al. 2014), where the analysis of the dimension of organisation in relation to communication technologies prominently surpasses other less instrumental effects on movements.

Connective action and the missing backstage

In one of the most significant theories that in the last decade has been advanced in order to understand the role that digital media play in contemporary mobilisations, i.e. the logic of connective action (Bennett and Segerberg 2013), the authors emphasise the role of communication as an organising principle in personalised, digitally networked action and suggest that digital media become in fact organisational agents. The authors contend that if within mobilisations that adhere to the conventional logic of collective action digital media do not significantly alter the outcomes, in the ‘purest’ form of connective action, the crowd-enabled type (as in the Occupy movement), digital media’s role is paramount: communication technologies become organising agents and change the dynamics of action, replacing the need for strong organisational control and for the symbolic construction of a united ‘we’, that is, the need for collective identities. This disinterest for the dimension of collective identity has been paired by the progressive disregard for internal communication dynamics, i.e. the ‘backstage’² of digital activism (Facebook chats and groups, email lists, WhatsApp exchanges, etc.), with the attention of researchers focussed on external communication processes (the ‘frontstage’ of digital activism, i.e. Twitter streams, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, etc.) and their impact on organisational capabilities. Most of these accounts neglect the everyday communication practices that sustain social movements over time (Barassi 2015; Flesher Fominaya 2015; Ganesh and Stohl 2010; Jordan 2013), failing to address them as fertile environments for the creation of expressive forms of communication, the exchanges of meaning, and the construction of a new sense of belonging. Functionalist approaches rely on an atomised understanding of society (Gerbaudo 2015) that downplays the affordances that technology offers to activists for the exploration of their multifaceted identities (Svensson et al. 2015), and show little interest for the conceptualisation of movements as collective spaces where media imaginaries and cultures are forged and nurtured. As various researchers have illustrated (Benski et al. 2013; Flesher Fominaya 2007; Romanos 2013), digital media not only provide the organisational infrastructure in which protests and mobilisations are propelled and coordinated, but also constitute the communicative backbone where the expressive forms of communication that characterise the networked generations are manufactured, shared, and appropriated. Hence, in contrast to these functional and instrumental understandings, this book will emphasise the ongoing relevance of collective identity processes within contemporary social movements, with particular attention to the construction and maintenance of solidarity and cooperation within the backstage spaces of digital activism. Moreover, it will consider social movements as convocations of the radical imagination, privileged sites for the creation and the reproduction of the most significant technological myths of our age. Debunking instrumental conceptions on the MMD, this book will thus connect the study of social movements to ...