The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism

Graham Meikle, Graham Meikle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315475035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism is a wide-ranging collection of 42 original and authoritative essays by leading contributors from a variety of academic disciplines.

Introducing and exploring central debates about the diverse relationships between both media and protest, and communication and social change, the book offers readers a reliable and informed guide to understanding how media and activism influence one another. The expert contributors examine the tactics and strategies of protest movements, and how activists organize themselves and each other; they investigate the dilemmas of media coverage and the creation of alternative media spaces and platforms; and they emphasize the importance of creativity and art in social change.

Bringing together case studies and contributors from six continents, the collection is organized around themes that address past, present and future developments from around the world. The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism is an essential reference and guide for those who want to understand this vital area.

PART I

Themes

1

LOOKING BACK, LOOKING AHEAD

What has changed in social movement media since the internet and social media?

John D. H. Downing

Introduction

A spring 2017 exhibition, Perpetual Revolution, at New York’s International Center of Photography (ICP) pinpointed image wars as a hallmark of our present time. It culled media imagery of six extremely critical current conflicts:

•climate change (e.g. Greenland ice sheet ‘calving’ – a zone the size of lower Manhattan but several times higher, disintegrating over a few hours – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC3VTgIPoGU);

•#BlackLivesMatter and state racism (e.g. photos of Black citizens gunned down by the police or vigilantes);

•LGBTQ movements and gender-bending (e.g. fantasy dress experiments, sharply framed videos, personal statements);

•the global refugee crisis (e.g. concentration camps, rubber dinghies, personal accounts of survival and of those who didn’t make it to ‘safety’);

•White nationalism and the 2016 Trump election (e.g. images of the all-purpose saviour of discarded workers and their families, capitalists yearning for tax breaks, an array of xenophobes, anti-abortion fanatics, panicked masculinists);

•ISIS/ISIL/Daesh recruitment media (e.g. come-and-join-us videos and websites for the Purpose of all Purposes, martyred in purity if so willed, living a meaningful life in the ‘­caliphate’ for the ultimate good of humanity).

These image vectors clash in multiple ways. The first three call for constructive change in the ways we live. The fourth image set attempts to render voices, faces and pasts to voiceless unseen millions. The fifth channels repressive populism, racism, sexism, Islamophobia and anti-Judaism lubricated in the US by shadowy billionaires and ‘Christian dominion’ fundamentalists. The sixth image vector, drenched in devotional green, redoes imperial masculinist militarism. (The list is rather US-centric, though that country’s current weight in world affairs does lend global heft to its domestic dealings.)

The curators proposed in their accompanying exhibition statement that ‘an ongoing ­revolution is taking place politically, socially, and technologically, and that new digital methods of image production, display, and distribution are simultaneously both reporting and producing social change’ (International Center of Photography 2017). But whether it’s best to talk about a revolution, which implies change is going in a detectable direction, or simply about intense ongoing flux, the deployment of media has unquestionably shifted to far more complex formats than thirty years ago, let alone during prior centuries.

Complex formats: as ever, varying media technologies, cultural shifts and political change are wrapped up in each other. If this essay focused solely on changes in communication technologies as such, it would shrink-wrap the dynamics at work. The ICP exhibition statement is right to glue media technologies and their affordances (potentials for use) to today’s often mutually clashing political/cultural movements.

Here, my purpose is to contrast activist media in earlier times with the contemporary scene, so as to see the here-and-now and the maybe-just-round-the-corner in the sharpest possible relief and not to dwell on the past for its own sake. Working conditions, joblessness, women’s subordination, climate change, racism, the overweening power of the 1 per cent, state surveillance and lifelong education are among the many issues that demand media activist strategies. But which strategies?

A bygone dualistic world?

It is tempting to see earlier eras as much simpler, at least ideologically, than the multi-faceted scenario presented by the ICP exhibition and, correspondingly, media as straightforwardly For or Against. Protestant Flugblätter (leaflets/pamphlets) versus Catholic ones in the Reformation in Germany in the 1500s. Pro-independence tracts and books versus pro-British publications in the American Revolution. Anti-royalty versus republican tracts in the French Revolution. The labour press versus the capitalist press. Anti-slavery media versus the racist consensus. Media advancing women’s right to vote versus media pooh-poohing the very idea. Anti-colonial media (India, Egypt, Vietnam, Algeria, Ghana, etc.). Antiwar media. Gay and lesbian rights media. Children’s rights media, patients’ rights media, prisoners’ rights media, global anti-apartheid media (i.e. the former White-supremacist regime in South Africa).

Correspondingly, the typical activist media narrative of those centuries was indeed a David versus Goliath one with tiny media projects challenging overwhelming state and religious censorship. Most often the media technology deployed was print (flyers, posters, pamphlets, books, newspapers), though political song, satirical jokes, street-plays, graffiti, poems, puppets, cartoons, paintings, dance and dress also played their roles. In the twentieth century, on a very small scale, photos, films and sound recordings made their appearance in social movement hands. Video activism began to make a mark in the 1970s. In many cases, as with the huge and multi-faceted Iranian revolution of 1978-1979, varying media formats were all in play (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Mohammadi 1994) before theocrats ruthlessly hijacked the movement for decades.

But for movement campaigners and demonstrators, first prize was still usually news coverage of any kind in mainstream media, even when hostile in tone. It wasn’t that most activists were convinced mainstream media would never speak the truth or would never amplify movement voices, only that expecting, even hoping, for them to do so, was so routinely an exercise in frustration. Michela Ardizzoni, in her Matrix Activism (2017), argues that today’s conditions are far more fluid, and that now capitalist firms more routinely open up to certain kinds of radical media projects and voices. Huge capitalist firms – Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft – ­currently provide the wherewithal. Her international case studies are absorbing, and maybe she is right. Though conditions at the time of writing in 2017, with autocrats in full cry – in Russia, China, India, the US, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Central Asia, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines and Thailand – do not portend well for planetary fluidity.

The principal headache for media activists in the past, even in liberal capitalist regimes, was distribution. Major media firms had capital to expend on delivery vans, newsagent stores and advertising and, in some countries, concessionary postal rates for magazines and newspapers. They equally had capital to allocate to cinema chains for movies, for high-powered transmitters for radio and TV, and later for cable and satellite technology. Virtually none of this was accessible to the contemporary ‘pauper press’ (the title of Patricia Hollis’s landmark 1970 study of the UK’s rebellious Chartist movement’s print media in the 1830s–1840s).

On the other hand, the pauper press did have one ace in the hole, namely a highly conscious and politically engaged readership – a very different, socially energized audience from mass audiences. Arguably, especially in times of social turmoil, this vector enabled the pauper press to punch well above its weight. Its miniscule readership, compared to mainstream media’s, was not the last word on the matter. Plus, its tenaciousness over time was sustained by the ongoing, if intermittently ebbing, energy of social movements. Women’s right to vote, the right to contraception, the abolition of chattel slavery in the Americas, colonial freedom, an eight-hour day and paid work-vacations were not won in a year’s or a decade’s worth of social movement media activism. But they were won.

Let us pause for a moment to illustrate two evocative moments in the saga of pre-digital activist media, namely the US radical movements’ press in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, and US radical media in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. This will hopefully move our discussion closer to the ground (though with further apologies for US-centrism).

Black, White and Red all over

Linda Lumsden’s study (2014) examines US activist print media in the period 1900–1920, during the enormous industrial labour migration wave from Eastern and Southern Europe from 1880 to 1920. In a multi-lingual, multi-confessional, multi-national labour force, new in many cases to factory discipline and often vigorously resistant to it, newspapers and magazines of all kinds proliferated, as did a great variety of political trends (not all radical).

Lumsden devotes four chapters to socialist labour newspapers, and then a chapter each to the direct action of the IWW (International Workers of the World, commonly known as the ‘Wobblies’), the anarchist press, the leftist intellectuals’ press, the Black press and the women’s press. A majority were in English, but many were in other languages (Italian, Polish, Yiddish, Russian, Finnish, etc.). Starting with monthly and weekly newspapers, often with local city or state readerships (rural Arkansas alone had fourteen papers), even a daily press emerged, for example the Call, based in New York, and the Milwaukee Leader. The weekly Appeal to Reason, based in mid-western Kansas, sold three-quarters of a million at its height in 1913. Feminist–anarchist Emma Goldman’s monthly Mother Earth, beginning in 1906, generated social movement ricochets long after she was deported in 1919.

Lumsden (2014: 74) graphically describes reporters’ workplace at the Call:

Reporters clambered up a set of rickety stairs to desks lined up in a dimly lit sixth-floor loft littered with old newspapers. Linotype machines rattled and banged louder than the reporters’ clacking typewriters amid a foul odor wafting from the stereotyping machine. Everyone worked at least twelve hours a day, some seven days a week.

(Today’s term ‘to stereotype’ was drawn from this now-obsolete mass printing technology.) In the US socialist and radical press of that era, lethal working conditions, harsh pay levels, arbitrary firings, violence against union organizers and strikers, employer lockouts and scab labour were staple news items, though far from the only ones.

In 1960, New Yorker journalist A.J. Liebling sardonically wrote that ‘the freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one’. The costly distribution issue mentioned above was just one aspect. The ramshackle press technology owned by radical publishers in those days was usually pathetic by standards of the time, let alone the utterly different methods of today. Nonetheless, in their Lilliputian multitude, they succeeded in voicing and sharing the tribulations and sometimes agonies of many millions, and in agitating for organized pushback.

However, as Lumsden also notes (2014: 54), ‘the socialist journals’ numbers attest to radicals’ infinite faith in newspapers to educate and hence convert readers’. Implicitly, if not explicitly, this signaled a very common understanding of the rationale of social movement media as one-way political evangelism. By contrast, the degree of interactivity permitted by internet and social media use, and the educational philosophy of the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921–1997) – the notion that genuinely educative communication is mutual – were barely visible. We shall return to that issue below, but for the moment let us just note that a huge wave of political repression descended on the US once World War I was over, sometimes referred to as the ‘Red Scare’, and sometimes as ‘the Palmer Raids’, after then-Federal Attorney General Palmer. The radical press was not squelched out of existence, but was greatly diminished.

Smoking typewriters

The 1960s and 1970s were indeed turbulent times in the US, and as John McMillian’s study (2011) documents, an energetic and highly diverse activist press both lived from and fed the social movements of the period: Black and Latino Civil Rights, the Black Power movement, opposition to the Vietnam war, second-wave feminism, gay and lesbian rights and Native American rights. The Black press was far and away the oldest, with a long and energetic history dating back to the Freedom’s Journal in the 1820s. It needs to be understood, however, that these 1960s movements, while influencing each other at points, were mostly conducted separately from each other. Indeed, women’s negative experiences at the hands of men in both the Civil Rights and the antiwar campaigns (the ‘New Left’) significantly triggered second-wave feminism’s emergence – although some of the most active feminists had family roots in union and socialist househo...