Activism on the Web

Everyday Struggles against Digital Capitalism

Veronica Barassi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317974352
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Activism on the Web examines the everyday tensions that political activists face as they come to terms with the increasingly commercialized nature of web technologies and sheds light on an important, yet under-investigated, dimension of the relationship between contemporary forms of social protest and internet technologies.

Drawing on anthropological and ethnographic research amongst three very different political groups in the UK, Italy and Spain, the book argues that activists' everyday internet uses are largely defined by processes of negotiation with digital capitalism. These processes of negotiation are giving rise to a series of collective experiences, which are defined by the tension between activists' democratic needs on one side and the cultural processes reinforced by digital capitalism on the other. In looking at the encounter between activist cultures and digital capitalism, the book focuses in particular on the tension created by self-centered communication processes and networked-individualism, by corporate surveillance and data-mining, and by fast-capitalism and the temporality of immediacy.

Activism on the Web suggests that if we want to understand how new technologies are affecting political participation and democratic processes, we should not focus on disruption and novelty, but we should instead explore the complex dialectics between digital discourses and digital practices; between the technical and the social; between the political economy of the web and its lived critique.

1 The Ethnography of Digital Activism

DOI: 10.4324/9781315870991-1

Introduction

The use of media by social movement actors is certainly not new and has long preceded the development of internet technologies. Anderson (1991) and Tarrow (1998) suggested that the rise of small press publications was partly responsible for the development of different social movements during the eighteenth century. In the United States, Downing (1995) traced the roots of dissident publications back to the revolutionary pamphleteers of the American War of Independence and showed that media activism has been a central form of political action from the nineteenth-century women’s press and the suffragette movement to the civil rights movements of the 1960s (1995:180–191).

In the last two decades, the media produced by social and political minorities have become a growing area of interest in media and communication research. ‘Radical media’ (Downing, 2000), ‘citizens’ media’ (Rodriguez, 2000), ‘alternative media’ (Atton, 2002), ‘community media’ (Howley, 2005), ‘activist media’ (Waltz, 2005), ‘autonomous media’ (Langlois and Dubois, 2005), ‘tactical media’ (Garcia and Lovink in Hall, 2008:128), ‘our media’ (McChesney and Nichols, 2002), and ‘critical media’ (Sandoval and Fuchs, 2010) have all been used to provide insights into the multiple varieties of the media produced at the grassroots level. Within these works a picture emerged that described these media as complex communication systems defined by participatory practices and content that is more or less in explicit opposition to the one of mainstream media¹ (Downing, 2000; Atton, 2002; Curran and Couldry, 2003; Coyer et al., 2007; Waltz, 2005).

In the last decade, scholarly research in the field has grown exponentially, especially due to the developments in internet technologies and the extension of ‘digital activism.’² In fact we have seen a rapid proliferation of studies that have looked at how internet technologies and digital media have affected activists’ practices (McCaughey and Ayers, 2003; Juris, 2008; Castells, 2009; Hands, 2010; Rodriguez et al., 2009; Joyce, 2010; Earl and Kimport, 2011; Gerbaudo, 2012) or transformed alternative and activist media (Meikle, 2003; Atton, 2004; Lievrouw, 2011). All these works demonstrated that digital activism has widened the scope and reach of media activism, enabling the proliferation of new media forms and strengthening activists’ ability to mobilize and organize collective actions and mass protests in cheap, fast, and effective ways (Earl and Kimport, 2011).

Although we have seen a growing number of important analyses on activists’ digital media practices and on the opportunities and challenges of digital activism (e.g. Joyce, 2010; Earl and Kimport, 2011; McCurdy, 2011; Gerbaudo, 2012; Mattoni, 2012; Treré, 2012; Cammaerts et al., 2013; Wolfson, 2014), current research in the field – with the exception of some works in social anthropology (Juris, 2008, 2012; Postill, 2014; Juris and Khasnabish, 2013) – is constrained by a fundamental problem. This is the problem of ‘ethnographic refusal’ (Ortner, 1995). In fact even when scholars of digital activism claim to have used the ethnographic method (e.g. Gerbaudo, 2012), they often rely on a combination of participant observation and qualitative interviews. In doing so they distance themselves from the notion of ‘ethnography’ as developed by anthropologists who believe that the richness of the ethnographic method is based on a quest for thickness and holism³ (Marcus, 1998).

The chapter argues that lack of a ‘thick’ ethnographic engagement in the field of digital activism can have a serious repercussion on the type of data and knowledge that we have available about social movements and internet technologies. Drawing from Ortner (1995), I contend that ethnographic refusal leads to the production of a type of data that does not take into account the social life and internal politics of political groups, providing us with a ‘thin’ appreciation of the political cultures in which they are embedded. In contrast to these approaches, the chapter will argue that it is only through an in-depth understanding of activists’ political cultures that we can fully appreciate the way in which they organize their media practices.

Therefore, the first part of the chapter will describe the historical development and political cultures of the three organization studied. The chapter will argue that in order to understand the complexity of activist cultures we need to look at the relationship between political imagination and practice and we must appreciate how activists’ everyday political practices are shaped by specific political projects (Castoriadis, 1998; Taylor, 2003). This understanding, it will be shown, is essential also to the analysis of activists’ media practices. In fact, by introducing the concept of media imaginary, the chapter will argue that the relationship between political project and practice is at the very heart of activists’ media uses.

Activist Cultures and Digital Activism_ An Ethnographic Approach

Digital Activism and the Problem of ‘Ethnographic Thinness'

In the mid-nineties anthropologist Sherry Ortner (1995) argued that studies of resistance in the social sciences lacked an ethnographic perspective and that the failure to properly engage with the ethnographic method directly impacted the type of data that we had available on social movements. In the first place, according to Ortner (1995), the lack of engagement with the ethnographic method led to a ‘sanitization of the internal politics’ of resistant groups or, in other words, to the failure on the part of scholars to take into account the power relationships and hierarchies that defined the everyday realities of social movement actors (1995:176–180). In the second place, studies of resistance failed to appropriately contextualize social movements within broader cultural environments and did not appreciate issues of cultural complexity and variation. Consequently, according to Ortner (1995), they contributed to the ‘thinning of culture’ (1995:180–183). In the third place, the failure to use the ethnographic method in the study of social movements has produced a type of data that describes actors in broad terms as ‘resistant subjects’ but with little exploration of their biographical narratives (1995:183–187).

Almost 20 years after Ortner’s seminal contribution, it is striking that the study of digital activism today seems to be encountering the same problems that she described at the time. Not only do we have little knowledge of the internal politics of resistant groups and of how the biographical narratives of activists are intertwined with technological developments, but also we are often co-participants with the process of ‘thinning of cultures.’ Key examples of these problems can be found in works of those scholars who have chosen to study digital activism mainly by focusing on web platforms (e.g. Earl and Kimport, 2011; Hands, 2010; Stein, 2011) or in the works of those – like Gerbaudo (2012) or Castells (2012) – who despite maintaining a sociological stance do not consider the social complexities of activist cultures. Both authors, in fact, focus on the example of different movements, from Tunisia to Iceland, Egypt, Europe, and the United States, neither providing us with a thick analysis of the different cultures in which these movements are embedded nor offering us an insight into the complexity of their political cultures.

In contrast to these approaches, anthropologists have shown how important the ethnographic method is for the study of digital activism (Juris, 2008, 2012; Khasnabish, 2008; Postill, 2014; Juris and Khasnabish, 2013). In these works, ethnography is understood not simply as a set of qualitative methodologies, including participant observation and interviews, but also as a mode of analysis and writing (Juris and Khasnabish, 2013:3). Their approach is of central importance because it enables us to understand that activist political cultures, although inspired by specific waves of protest movements, are in fact the product of open-ended and complex processes of social construction, which change from context to context, from group to group. The research presented in this book was inspired by these approaches and was based on the understanding that what we are missing from current research on digital activism is an ethnographically thick understanding of activist cultures and of their everyday processes of negotiation with web technologies.

Understanding the Social Complexity of Activist Cultures

The project presented in this book was born out of a will to highlight the social complexities that define the relationship between activist cultures and digital technologies. In order to do so, I have chosen to work with three different organizations, in three different countries, and belonging to three different movements. The idea of the project was to shed light on the social tensions that emerge in activists’ web uses, by looking at the history of the three different organizations and considering the biographical narratives of the activists involved. Methodologically the research project was designed following the ‘old,’ ‘new,’ and ‘newest’ distinction in social movement studies.

During the 1980s, ‘new social movements’ scholars argued that the late 1960s and 1970s had seen a profound transformation in the political repertoires of social movements and that old social movements based on class struggles were being replaced by movements based on identity politics and single-issue campaigns (Touraine, 1985; Laclau and Mouffe, 2001; Melucci, 1996; Castells, 1983). In the late nineties, following the Zapatista uprising and the establishment of the ‘movements for global justice,’ newest social movements’ scholars highlighted another fundamental cultural shift in the political repertoires of collective action. They argued that the ‘politics of demand’ of the ‘new social movements’ had gradually been replaced by an understanding that the emancipations of political identities are constantly instrumentalized by power forces (Holloway, 2002; Day, 2005; Hands, 2010). The newest movements, according to the scholars, did not believe in the importance of identity politics and challenged the very idea of representative democracy in favor of a politics based on the notion of political autonomy.

The theoretical distinction between ‘old,’ ‘new,’ and ‘newest’ social movements has influenced the methodological choices of the research presented in this book. In fact, I have chosen to work with an organization that was embedded in the ‘old’ political culture of the Labor Movement and two organizations that were instead embedded in ‘new’ and ‘newest’ social movements, like the environmental and autonomous movements in Spain and Italy. Although the project was inspired by the debates in social movements studies, and by the classical distinction between ‘old,’ ‘new,’ and ‘newest,’ when I approached fieldwork I realized that such distinction does not capture the social complexities of activist cultures. Calhoun (1995) has rightly argued that the new social movement scholars of the late eighties, in order to mount the challenges to ‘old social movements,’ have exaggerated the extent to which labor politics was based on a Marxist meta-narrative of class unity, overlooking the importance of identity politics (1995:178–184). According to him, the main problem in the literature is that scholars keep focusing on transition rather than on the interplay between different political repertoires in the shaping of activist cultures. This same problem emerges also within the work on the ‘newest’ social movements (Holloway, 2002; Day, 2005) and in the research on digital activism (Earl and Kimport, 2011; Joyce, 2010; Hands, 2011; Gerbaudo, 2012; Castells, 2012). Scholars often emphasize the linearity and novelty of repertoires of political and media action without considering the complex interplay between old and new political cultures and without taking into account social movements’ internal ability to renew themselves.

It is important to understand that an approach that focuses on ‘transition’ rather than renewal and that does not consider the complex dialectics between change and continuity is flawed. Such an approach does not take into account the fact that different repertoires of political and media action coexist in a tension. Looking at this tension is of central importance to social analysis. This is because it sheds some light on social movements’ internal, innovative, and creative struggle to find new possibilities to bring about social change. In the next parts of the chapter I will explore the historical development and changing political repertoires of the three organizations studied. I will try to provide an analysis of the social movements in which they are embedded and will map the political projects and beliefs that define their political cultures.

The Cuba Solidarity Campaign and the Labor Movement in Britain

The Labor Movement, a Century of Struggle and the Creation of Solidarity Campaigns

Crossing Oxford Street on a Saturday morning in June 2007, I felt surprised to find it completely deserted. The early morning and its emptiness imposed a surreal atmosphere upon one of London’s busiest streets. It was early June and, before I realized it, I found myself once again in front of Trade Union Congress House. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) is the national federation of trade unions in Britain, comprised of 54 national unions affiliated with a total of about 6.2 million members. The Trade Union Congress House is located on Great Russell Street in Central London. It was constructed in 1958 as a memorial to the sacrifices made by trade unionists in the two World Wars, and since then has been the headquarters of the TUC. With its 1960s’ architecture and the sculpture by Jacob Epstein in the courtyard, Congress House has been one of the overlapping spaces of my multi-sited ethnographic research (Marcus, 1998). As often occurs in familiar spaces, that morning I knew where to go. I walked down the metal staircase, looked at the TV screens – which were announcing the SERTUC (Southern and Eastern TUC) Conference on Global Solidarity – and found my way to the plenary hall.

The TUC was founded in 1860 after more than a century of repression and criminalization of organized labor in Britain. In 1889, the TUC founded the Labor Representation Committee in the endeavor to stand for Parliament, and this led to the creation of the Labor Party in the early years of the twentieth century (Webb and Webb, 1919:570; Cole, 2001:182). The Labor Movement in Britain was a key contributor in the progressive and democratic transformations in Britain in the twentieth century. In the years following the First World War and leading to the Great Depression, trade unions largely increased in membership size and in political influence gaining many different successes in the development of workers’ rights. During the Second World War, trade unionism played a fundamental role in strengthening the domestic economy of war (Wrigley, 1997) and supporting the European anti-fascist movement (Buchanan, 1991). In 1945, the Labor Party won the national election an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Activist Cultures, the Web, and Digital Capitalism
• 1 The Ethnography of Digital Activism
• 2 Web 2.0 and the Agency of Technologies
• 3 Social Media Activism and the Critique of Mass Self-Communication
• 4 The Everyday Critique of Digital Labor
• 5 Digital Activism and the Problem of Immediacy
• 6 Activist Magazines in the Digital Age
• Conclusion: The Future of the Web, Big Data, and the Power of Critique
• Appendix 1: Activism on the Web: A Note on Method
• Bibliography
• Index