Annie Brockett, Violet Degnan and Sarah Mellin
Here are the readings:
Juris, Jeffrey S. “The New Digital Media and Activist Networking within Anti-Corporate Globalization Movements.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597 (January 2005)
Castells, Manuel. “Occupy Wall St: Harvesting the Salt of the Earth.” Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. 2012.
England, Phillip. “Iceland’s ‘pots and pans revolution’: Lessons from a nation that people power helped to emerge from its 2008 crisis all the stronger.” The Independent. 2015.
Take a look at/skim through:
Eli Pariser. “Beware online filter bubbles,” TED Talk.
Alex Mallis. “Right Here All Over (Occupy Wall St).” Vimeo. 2011.
Bonilla, Yarimar & Rosa, Jonathan. “#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States.” Journal of the American Ethnological Society. 2015.
Activists have increasingly used media as an outlet to battle corporate globalization and to propagate their political/social agendas. In Juris’s article he explains the importance, growth and effectiveness of activist networking movements via media. Juris draws upon his fieldwork from his time in Catalan to explain how activists gained ground in Spain through their use of media channels. Juris further explains how corporations see media activism as a major threat partially because of its extensive backing but also because of the speed at which it can disseminate information. Juris states: “by significantly enhancing the speed, flexibility, and global reach of information flows, allowing for communication at a distance in real time, digital networks provide the technological infrastructure for the emergence of contemporary network-based social movement forms.” This makes them dangerous and powerful in the eyes of the government and global corporations in a capitalist economy.
Juris believes there are 4 general guiding standards or “cultural logic of networking” of anti-corporate globalization activists.
- Building horizontal ties and connections among diverse, autonomous elements
- Free and open circulation of info
- Collaboration through decentralized coordination and directly democratic decision making
- Self-directed networking
The Rise of Anti-Corporate Globalization Movements
Juris concludes in this section that although these movements begin locally and are “locally rooted” they are simultaneously “global in scope.”
Computer-Supported Social Movements
In this section, Juris harps on the importance of the internet in media activism. It allows quick dissemination of information to large masses of people.
Digital Technologies and the Cultural Politics of Activist Networking
Juris explains that the cultural politics of activist networking is defined by a loosely organized, decentralized, and adaptive structure. Allowing for communication among movements in order to promote multiple ideas and agendas. Juris discusses “horizontal expansion” through flexible activist networks/systems that allow for maximal communication and convergence/diffusion of ideas. Most anti-corporate globalization movements are an amalgamation of differing social movements with independent agendas. W. Lance Bennet describes these digital internet-driven networks as “ideologically thin” which means they allow “different political perspectives to coexist without the conflicts that such differences might create in a more centralized coalition.”
The New Digital Media Activism
Alternative media, according to Juris, is the “independent sources of news and information beyond the corporate logic of the mainstream press.” Juris’s example is Indymedia. Indymedia has an open publishing software to circulate information. This allows for more control in the media production process and makes for a speedier flow of info. Indymedia dismantles the power an editor would have in the production process.
Tactical media according to Juris disrupts dominant and established media platforms through guerrilla communication or culture jamming.
Social media and the internet has demonstrated its power for facilitating social movements and change, from toppling governmental regimes (Arab Spring) to protesting financial crises (Occupy) to mobilizing against police brutality and systematic racism (Black Lives Matter). While the narrative about the internet has largely been that of democratizing space, freedom of information, and tools of liberation, Eli Parsier’s work on filter bubbles presents a different type of web.
FILTER BUBBLES
The web you see is now dictated by personalization algorithms. Near everything, from Google results to the Facebook news feed, is tailored to you. In fact, Pariser points to a quote from Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt: “It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored to them.” What is personalized to you largely depends on what you are most likely to actually click on — thus, our filter bubbles become traps where we’re fed “information junk food” over and over again, instead of being shown information that is uncomfortable, challenging, and that presents multiple points of view. Pariser uses a Mark Zuckerburg quote to illustrate this, reminding us of the time Zuckerburg said that for many people, a squirrel dying in the front yard is more important than “people dying in Africa.”
Lest you think you are escaping from the filter bubble when logged out of your accounts, there are 57 signals that algorithms pick up on even if there is no account or browser history attached. These include signals like your location, the type of computer you are using, and the type of browser you are using. Filter bubble effectively act as digital information silos and since both the filtering and what is filtered out is largely invisible to us, it can be difficult to combat. Pariser calls on web companies to develop a set of coded ethics and civic responsibilities, similar to the way that newspapers in the 19th and 20th century did. Algorithms cannot, he argues, only be tuned to relevance.
The concept of filter bubbles and who controls the flow of information will be important to keep in mind as we explore our two case studies.
ICELANDIC BANKING CRISIS
Following the global financial crisis of 2008, numerous nations were forced to confront the reality of bank collapse, their citizens’ loss of faith, and even violence. Alongside this unrest, social movements began to arise and called for economic reform. One such movement that became relatively successful occurred in Iceland, affectionately called the “Kitchenware Revolution.”
In the years leading up to 2008, people in Iceland were earning wages much higher than their counterparts in almost any other part of the world and the country’s economy was stable and profitable. Unfortunately, that success was partly due to illegal scheming by Iceland’s three largest banks; when those failed, the Central Bank tried to fix the situation by buying them out, which pushed the country deeper into economic collapse. According to Manuel Castells, “In proportion to the size of the economy, it was the largest destruction of financial value in history.”
As the country approached this collapse, a man named Hordur Torfason staged a protest outside the parliament building in the capital of Reykjavik in October of 2008, with nothing but his guitar as a prop. A movie of this first action made it onto the internet, and within several days there were thousands of protesters expressing their solidarity. As the movement progressed, social media came to play an increasingly integral role in facilitating actions and gathering public information for the creation of government reform and new legislation.
Iceland claims to be one of the oldest democracies in the world, and many citizens saw the recent financial finagling as completely antithetical to this. So the government organized an election that would allow citizens more input in the formation of a new constitution; using the internet, they collected questions, comments, and ideas from anyone in the country. They also established ways for the people to talk to specific members of the government and fostered public discussion of the issues at hand. In the end, more than 16,000 comments were taken into account, leading people to refer to the new document as the first crowdsourced or “wiki” constitution (Castells, 39) and providing an impressive example of direct democracy.
US BANKING CRISIS
The genesis of Occupy Wall St came, ironically, from a Vancouver-based counterculture journal in the form of a blog post. It rallied against corporatocracy and Washington politicians whose views had been bought out by those with bigger pockets. The blog called for rallying into lower Manhattan. Anonymous was also involved in the genesis, defending the websites of activists who were posting information about the financial crisis and political reform while also directly calling for demonstrations.
A few thousand people did occupy Zuccotti Park on starting on September 17th. However, it was the takeover of the Brooklyn Bridge that sparked the mass support. 5,000 people blocked the bridge and the police proceeded to make hundreds of arrests; at this point, the social media imagery was moving at rapid fire and labor unions decided to join. On October 5th, there were 15,000 people occupying Zuccotti Park.
Occupy movements sprang up around the nation, representing spaces for civil disobedience, debate, autonomy, and movement from “contesting an unjust system to reconstructing a society from the bottom up.” (Castells, 168). It was also, as Castells points out, building a “new form of space, a mixture of space of places, in a given territory, and space of flows, on the Internet.” Occupy movements used Twitter, Tumblr, and Livestreaming to organize, publicize, and educate.
Because of the way that Occupy manifested across networked space and labored to include a multiplicity of voices, it was distinct from the Icelandic protests because “[Occupy] demanded everything and nothing at the same time.” Each person brought their own grievances and concerns; no manifesto was lifted above another and each Occupy sub-movement addressed different concerns, depending on where their community was located and what their community was struggling with. Overall, the movement was leaderless, instead adopting a General Assembly format with facilitators who rotated in and out of the role. Occupy embodied paradoxes of many kinds — a movement as much digital as physical, with “no demands, but every demand,” “not a piece of this society, but the whole of a different society.” (Castells, 188)
Regardless of these paradoxes, the value of Occupy is in its ability to engender awareness and public discourse about social inequality and class struggle. Most notably, in the 2012 aftermath of Occupy the Pew Research Institute released survey which found 66% of the sample believed there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and the poor. This reflects an 19% increase since 2009. 30% said there are “very strong conflicts” between the rich and the poor, which is “the largest percentage expressing this opinion since the question was first asked in 1987.” (Castells, 195).
CONCLUSION
We are using the two social movements spurred on by protesting big banking to frame a discussion of how social movements and social media intersect. We deliberately chose two very different types of society (Iceland being small and homogenous versus US being large and comparatively diverse) in order to explore where and how certain social tactics work.
Here are some preliminary questions to think about as you do the readings:
- Can a social movement be productive even when it has no leaders and no (or extremely dispersed) demands?
- Since social movement requires social buy-in, how can we escape filter bubbles to educate and mobilize across boundaries?
- To what extent is social media useful and applicable in disseminating messages when it comes to broad social movements?
- Can we apply lessons from Iceland to other parts of the world, or does the country’s homogeneity make a similar situation unrealistic in areas that are more diverse and globalized?
- Are anti-corporate global movements successful in dismantling the power structures they protest?
- Are social movements more successful when rooted in one social problem? When movements become intersectional, (assuming it does become harder) how can the movement maintain momentum?
