Social Movements and Their Technologies

Wiring Social Change

Stefania Milan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230309180
• eBook ISBN: 9781137313546
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziale Aspekte in der Informatik

Now in paperback for the first time, Social Movements and their Technologies explores the interplay between social movements and their 'liberated technologies'. It analyzes the rise of low-power radio stations and radical internet projects ('emancipatory communication practices') as a political subject, focusing on the sociological and cultural processes at play. It provides an overview of the relationship between social movements and technology, and investigates what is behind the communication infrastructure that made possible the main protest events of the past fifteen years. In doing so, Stefania Milan illustrates how contemporary social movements organize in order to create autonomous alternatives to communication systems and networks, and how they contribute to change the way people communicate in daily life, as well as try to change communication policy from the grassroots. She situates these efforts in a historical context in order to show the origins of contemporary communication activism, and its linkages to media reform campaigns and policy advocacy.

1

Stealing the Fire: An Introduction to Emancipatory Communication Activism

Prometheus is the Greek demi-god, who saw that the gods had fire and regular people did not. He saw this injustice, so he stole the flames and taught any other to make fire. “Stealing the fire”: we think it is a metaphor for the democratization of technology, for technology that is the servant of the political and social process of making decisions about our future. Not technology in the hands and at the service of elites.¹

This book tells the stories of groups and individuals who, like the mythological Prometheus, “steal the fire”. “Fire” here is a metaphor for technology and communication infrastructure, such as the internet and wireless radio. Stealing means “reclaiming and reappropriating” these communication infrastructures to set up autonomous means of communication, such as non-commercial internet service providers (ISPs) and community radio stations. By “stealing the fire” these novel Prometheuses seek to breach the monopoly of states as well as media, computer, and telecoms conglomerates (media from here on, unless specified) over the use and control of communication infrastructure. They aim to enable other social groups to convey their own messages, bypassing the filters of commercial and state gatekeepers.

The question of infrastructure might sound trivial in times of abundance of “free” social media, microblogging platforms and apps allowing people to voice their opinions and share pictures and videos at will, and at virtually no cost. But we often forget that these platforms are owned and controlled by media and telecoms corporations whose agenda focuses on profit and corporate interests rather than participation, empowerment, and social justice. With this in mind, in recent decades activist groups have increasingly challenged media corporations and state-owned broadcasters on their own terrain. They have created alternatives to existing communication infrastructure by setting up community radio and television stations, and alternative websites for self-produced information. Such grassroots media have allowed broader swathes of the citizenry to access media production and secure communication channels. They have become what DeeDee Halleck calls “infrastructures of resistance” (2002, p. 191) to the neoliberal order in the media and technology realm.

By creating independent communication infrastructure, activists seek to contribute to the efforts of contemporary progressive social movements to shape the world according to principles of justice, equality, and participation. Individuals and groups who have expertise in the field of media and technology (e.g., building radio transmitters, radio or video production, and computer programming) place their knowledge at the service of other social groups.

Far from being considered only as tools, media and communication technologies have become a site of struggle in their own right, and as such are subject to “object conflicts” (Hess, 2005, p. 516). At the same time, communication technology serves also as the digital backbone of many other social justice struggles. In this instance, technology is not an end in itself; it is a means to a political end. This is exemplified by the manifesto of a group providing internet services to activists, which reads: “tools are shaped in the digital sphere, but this does not imply they do not have a political impact. We start from the instruments, but use them to reach specific political goals, both in the digital and in the real world”.² By the same token, the slogan of another group goes: “Get off the internet – I’ll see you in the streets!”

I like to think of these “liberated technologies” as the outcome of emancipatory communication practices (ECPs). “Practice” evokes the hands-on approach of grassroots groups in promoting reform from below of the current communication system. “Emancipatory” refers to their commitment to share and redistribute technical knowledge, in order to extend also to non-experts the possibility of controlling communicative actions and bypassing commercial platforms. Broadening the picture, ECPs can be seen as a subdivision of the growing number of social mobilizations addressing media, technology, information, and culture issues.

ECPs represent a challenge to dominant powers in the communication and media field. The power at stake is, at the most basic level of all, power over access to public communication: in other words, the power of deciding who should speak and what messages should be transmitted. But at stake is also the power of participation, which refers to the possibility of making informed contributions to democratic decision-making and public life. At the macrolevel, challenging the power structure means resisting the increasing commercialization and monopolization of the mass media and communication platforms by a handful of global corporations. It implies pressuring national regulators to license non-profit media and protect freedom of expression online. It entails opposing the decisions of international bodies, such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), when they appear to be too exposed to the influences of governments and business actors. At the microlevel, challenging communication power structures means creating separate spaces of communication where freedom of expression, participation, and self-organization are practiced independently of social norms and laws. It involves defending the right of disadvantaged communities and minorities to make their voices heard. It implies protecting local content, and independent producers and voices, and fighting “the escalating cultural and mediatic censorship of imagination, and the attempts to sell us pre-digested dreams”.³ It includes finding new ways of sharing knowledge and rejecting the ever-tightening intellectual property regimes. It means resisting increasingly aggressive filters on interpersonal electronic communication imposed by governments in the name of the war on terror and cybersecurity strategies. In sum, it involves looking simultaneously at the “technological” and the “social” of communication infrastructure (cf. Bijker and Law, 1992), because all technological artifacts can embody specific forms of power and authority (Winner, 1999).

“Stealing the fire” is a way (or, better, ways) of social organizing. It is in their guise of organized collective action that I look at ECPs, using the conceptual tools of social movement research. I do not focus on the content that these liberated infrastructures broadcast, or host in their wires. Rather, I focus on the microsociological processes behind the creation of such infrastructures by social actors: why and how these practices emerge, who is behind them, how activists interact with institutions and norms, and what these liberated infrastructures mean for contemporary societies.

This chapter serves as an introduction to emancipatory communication activism. In what follows, I explore why people mobilize on media and technology issues, and I offer some theoretical grounding to the analysis. I define ECPs, and present the study and its conceptual toolbox.

Why people mobilize on media and technology issues

We live in the so-called information age, an era in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become the very foundation of political, economic, and social development (Castells, 1996 and 2000). The internet is changing the way we understand power (Nye, 2011). Access to and control over symbols, norms, and interpretations of current events play a critical role in contemporary societies. Think, for example, of WikiLeaks and the reaction of national governments at the online publication of thousands of classified documents: actors who produce, distribute, and rank information hold an increasingly important position in the contemporary social order (Castells, 2009). Notwithstanding the proliferation of social networking and microblogging platforms that “can expand political, social and economic freedom” (Diamond, 2010, p. 70), traditional mass media, government-led political communication campaigns, and commercial search engines are still the actual “gatekeepers of the public sphere” (Hackett and Carroll, 2006, p. 1).

Yet, the official discourses on the evolution of the information society privilege economic and technical aspects, dismissing other essential attributes, such as people’s participation, the protection of human rights, and human development. Market-driven media and communication policies seem to be too specialized and technical for citizens to be involved. As a result, people are usually left out of policy-making processes that take place over their heads, leaving room for a “symbiotic relationship” between dominant institutions and media industries in the development of norms, goals, and policies for the sector (Hackett and Carroll, 2006, p. 9).

Telecommunication infrastructure, such as the World Wide Web, has changed the perception of national boundaries. Transnational media corporations and communication empires control the markets for media content, devices, and infrastructure. However, these sectors are still largely regulated at the national or regional level, and there is no integrated global policy arena for media and communication governance. Beyond national borders, regulation takes place at multiple sites, including supranational summits and United Nations (UN) agencies, and corporate forums like ICANN. Non-state actors, in particular the industry, play an important role through lobbying and mechanisms of self-regulation.

Neoliberal deregulation and privatization processes prompted the ever-expanding concentration of media and telecommunication infrastructure in a few multinational firms (Flew, 2007; McChesney, 2013).⁴ Global regimes like the WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and bills like the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) contribute to tightening intellectual property rights globally (Sell, 2003; Haunss and Shadlen, 2009). At the national level, knowledge sharing through peer-to-peer networks continues to be sanctioned, and, in many countries, autonomous communication projects are targeted by repression. In Brazil, for example, regulators regularly shut down “free” unlicensed radio stations for illegal broadcasting (Milan, 2004a). Servers of activist projects, such as Indymedia, Autistici/Inventati, and Riseup, have been seized repeatedly (Milan, 2004b; Riseup, 2012). Supranational organizations such as ICANN, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have become powerful players in the management of communication-related goods and processes, but their operations remain largely outside any form of democratic control (Ó Siochrú and Girard, 2002). Intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency in the US increasingly invest in pervasive surveillance systems (Bamford, 2009 and 2012), such as PRISM, the mass electronic surveillance program revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden in 2013; autocratic regimes like China, Russia, and Iran back a vast cybercriminal underworld. Meanwhile, “in liberal democratic countries we are lowering the standards around basic rights to privacy just as the center of cyberspace gravity is shifting to less democratic parts of the world” (Deibert, 2013, p. 131). New technologies have become tools of political control (Curran et al., 2012).

Yet there is a growing public awareness of what media and communication mean to society, and collective action on media and culture issues has emerged at both the national and the transnational level. Over the past 40 years, with a significant acceleration towards the end of the 1990s, initiatives to democratize public communication have mushroomed in both Western democracies and postcolonial societies. Either through advocacy campaigns or protest, or by creating alternatives to existing communication flows, activists have tried to change the factors shaping media systems and the power relations embedded within them. Examples include national and transnational advocacy campaigns such as the German campaign against the European Union (EU) directive on data retention in electronic communication (Löblich and Wendelin, 2012), and the transnational Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) campaign, which emerged around a UN summit (Thomas, 2006; Mueller et al., 2007). Major policy advocacy activities have appeared. For example, media reformers in the US lobbied the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) in support of net neutrality (Kidd, 2009), for a community radio bill (President Barack Obama eventually signed the Local Community Radio Act in January 2011), and against SOPA and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). There is also a vast range of do-it-yourself (DIY) media projects, committed to providing alternative content, infrastructure, software, and hardware. These include independent information platforms on the web, such as the global Indymedia network (Brooten, 2004; Kidd, 2010), community radio and television stations (Jankowski and Prehn, 2002; Rennie, 2006; Howley, 2009), self-organized wireless networks (Powell, 2008a and 2008b), open-source software development projects (Coleman, 2013a), and non-profit ISPs such as GreenNet in England (Hintz and Milan, 2009b). Occasionally, activists seek to disrupt computer networks and websites through jamming, net-strikes, defacement of websites, and distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) such as those launched by the online community known as the Anonymous (Coleman, 2013c; Frediani, 2013). These actions, also known as hacktivism, aim to make computer resources temporarily unavailable to users in order to protest against companies or policies, or bring under the spotlight issues like freedom of speech or digital rights.

Recent openings in national and transnational policy arenas, offering citizens (partial and often unequal) access to policy-making processes, have provided lots of diverse groups with visibility and a chance to make their voice heard. These represent what students of social movements call “political opportunities”: novel opportunities for contention interpreted by some groups as an open policy window for active participation and lobbying (Kingdon, 1995), and by others as “carriers of threats” (Tarrow, 2005, p. 25). In particular, the 2003–2005 UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), and its offspring the annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF), offered an extraordinary chance for many grassroots groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with an interest in communication and social change to connect, recognize each other as part of the same struggle, and plan joint interventions. The Council of Europe (CoE), the EU, and national regulators such as the US FCC and the UK’s equivalent (Ofcom) have also provided windows of opportunity for civil society to organize on media and internet governance issues.

The emergence of these mobilizations can be seen as a reaction to the escalation of media concentration and to the “media’s democratic deficit” (Hackett and Carroll, 2006, pp. 2–14), both of which have increased public awareness of media influence, and nurtured demands for democratization and public access to the media. It is also linked to the diffusion of cheap broadband connections and mobile devices, the availability of inexpensive tools (e.g., digital cameras, tablets, and smartphones), and the growing technological expertise, especially among the youngest generations. However, the creation of independent media and internet infrastructure is not a new phenomenon, nor is it linked solely to the availability of ICTs and the internet. Counterinformation projects are as old as social movements; waves of creation of “movement media” include, for instance, the 19th-century labor press in the UK, the US, and elsewhere, and the free radio season in Italy and other European countries in the 1970s (Downing, 2001; Granjon, 2010; Padovani, 2010; Purkarthofer et al., 2010). What is new in contemporary ECPs is the scale, as well as the autonomy and self-sufficiency, of the phenomenon. These communication projects are not solely serving other political issues or movements such as the environmental movement or the unions. Rather, they are the signals of a growing awareness of the relevance of technology and media issues as such to contemporary democracies. For the first time in history, these issues mobilize a broad and diverse public that also includes non-specialists.

Two perspectives on communication as a site of struggle

Activism in this field has been called many names: media reform movement (Vincent et al., 1999; Mueller et al., 2004b; Napoli, 2007), media justice movement (Rubin, 2002; Dichter, 2005), movement for communication rights (Calabrese, 2004; Padovani and Pavan, 2009; Padovani and Calabrese, 2014), media democracy movement (McChesney and Nichols, 2005; Uzelman, 2005), and democratic media activism (Hackett and Carroll, 2006). But while the role and use of media and digital technologies in social movements have received substantial attention (e.g., Bennett, 2003; Kavada, 2005 and 2009; Juris, 2005 and 2012; della Porta and Mosca, 2009; McCurdy, 2010 and 2011; Bennett and Segerberg, 2011 and 2012; Mattoni, 2012; Treré, 2012; Cammaerts et al., 2013), as have alternative media (Downing, 2001 and 2010; Rodriguez, 2001 and 2011; Atton, 2002 and 2004; Couldry and Curran, 2003; Langlois and Dubois, 2005; Coyer et al., 2007), mobilizations on media and technology have entered the scholarly agenda only recently. The literature emerged mainly within the fields of international communication and public policy. It is episodic and case-oriented, and segmented by means of communication (Napoli, 2007). Curiously, scholars of social movements do not seem to consider “ ‘communications-information’ to be a single policy domain capable of mobilizing the public” (Mueller et al., 2004b, p. 11).⁵

If we focus on recent policy-oriented research in English-speaking academia, we can identify two main streams of scholarship. The first developed around the WSIS and earlier institutional processes, such as the debate known as the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), which emerged within the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the 1970s with the ambition of tackling the existing imbalances in international communication flows. In particular, the WSIS emphasized the degree and intensity of activism in the field, prompting scholars of media policy, international communication, international relations, and global governance to address the phenomenon. The second stream concentrates on the media reform movement in the Anglo-Saxon world, where such mobilizations have a longer tradition compared with other Western countries. It is grounded in critical media studies, normative theories of democracy, and only partially social movement research. In this section, I provide a critical overview of the existing literature on this activism and derive valuable insights to be used as points of entry for this study.

The first coalitions of civil society organizations, individual media activists, scholars, and professionals active on media and communication issues emerged during the 1990s. They promoted events like the MacBride Roundtables, documents like the People’s Communication Charter, and networks such as the Platform for Communication Right...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Stealing the Fire: An Introduction to Emancipatory Communication Activism
• 2. Three Decades of Contention: The Roots of Contemporary Activism
• 3. Movement Formation and Identity Building
• 4. Organizational Forms
• 5. Repertoires of Action: Mobilizing Inside, Outside, and Beyond
• 6. Like a Karst River: A Transnational Movement in the Making?
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Methods and Epistemology of Engaged Research
• Notes
• References
• Index