Protest Technologies and Media Revolutions

The Longue Durée

Athina Karatzogianni, Michael Schandorf, Ioanna Ferra

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839826481
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Contains an Open Access chapter.
Protest Technologies and Media Revolutions portrays the critical role of mass connection in the success of any movement, resurrection, protest, and revolution.
The communication mechanisms for this connection have, at times, evolved and elsewhere undergone revolutions of their own. Authors debate this relationship, and the strategies and lessons of 'connecting to the masses' considering the development of media, technology and communication strategies over the last century. Key topics covered include revolution, communication, protest and technology, spanning from the Russian Revolution to the present day.
The discussion is not limited to historic cases of technology and revolution, nor to contemporary ones. The book, therefore, generates a debate about how art, media and communication technologies have been operationalized to connect, mobilize and organize, in different historical times, and in diverse national, political, and socio-economic contexts.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Protest Technologies and Media Revolutions in the Longue Durée

Athina Karatzogianni, Michael Schandorf and Ioanna Ferra

In November 2017, we invited contributors to ‘Connecting to the Masses 100 Years from the Russian Revolution: From Agitprop to the Attention Economy’. During a two-day conference, which took place at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam, we collectively investigated historical strategies and lessons of ‘connecting to the masses’ considering the development of media, technology and communication strategies over the last century.

The Russian Revolution offers a particularly valuable and relatively unconsidered place to begin the investigation of the modern political communication. The Bolsheviks grasped the opportunity to change their world in the here and now, rather than trust in the tentative promises of gradual reform in the face of rapidly growing inequality and alienation. Responding to the pressures and failures of the Russian aristocracy during WW1, and in the midst of rage, desperation and harsh conditions that included food shortages and worsening poverty, the Bolsheviks felt the undercurrents in the seas of history and spoke to the people, exactly when the relationship between the Tsar and the population and between the Provisional government and the Soviets were at a crucial tipping point. They did so violently and unapologetically. The effects of their actions ran through the Cold War and the confrontation with the West, and are felt to this day in the complex and intense relations between Russia and the United States in the failed engagements since the fall of the USSR, the world's first socialist state. Many questions evoked by the Russian Revolution directly reflect those that scholars of political and media communications wrestle with today.

Do charismatic leadership and movements remain the key connections to the general population or has algorithmic communication intervened to amplify and commodify populist leaders, without bringing in fruition claims of digital democracy/reform or radical sociopolitical change? How can contemporary movements most effectively utilize media and communication technologies to advance both their short-term goals and to sustain long-term development? Are the social media protests we now witness a flash in the pan, or are they able to sustain movements, parties, organizations in the longue durée?

The relationship between modern governments and the people they govern has been always hostage to rhetoric, propaganda and strategic public relations. Aggressive marketing and contemporary media industries have also been a consistent influence over the last century, altering the dynamics of healthy political communications. As in the Russian Revolution, the relationship between media and government has thrived on charismatic leaders, the ‘avant-garde’, who could feel the pulse of their population's grievances, demands and hopes for the future. Whether the Russian revolution of 1917 is interpreted as a product of class struggle, as an event governed by historical laws predetermined by the alienation of the masses as a result of monopoly industrial capitalism, or as a violent coup by a proto-totalitarian Bolshevik party, the Russian revolutionaries understood and connected to the masses in a way that the autocracy, bourgeois elites and reformists alike have consistently failed to do.

Connecting to the masses is critical for the success of any movement, insurrection, protest or revolution. The communication mechanisms for this connection have sometimes evolved and other times undergone revolutions of their own. Since the Russian centennial, scholars have examined how media and communication affect this connection to the masses in a double yet complimentary dynamic: how governments connect to the masses and how masses connect to their governments. To consider protest technologies and media revolutions in the longue durée drawing conclusions from historical trends and patterns through a longer period of time, we divide the contributions to this volume into two parts. The first part takes us from the Russian revolution to Post-Soviet Activism, while the second part focusses more on contemporary emergences of communication technologies and revolution of the last two decades.

The Volume's Structure and Contributions

Part I: From the Russian Revolution to Post-Soviet Digital Activism and the New Cold War begins with Maria Tsantsanoglou in ‘Art as a Form of Social Action in the Russian Avant-garde (1905–1930)’ (Chapter 2). Focussing on the period 1905–1930 in Russia, she argues that performance art in the first two decades of the twentieth century was part of the aesthetics of the historical avant-garde, especially the Russian avant-garde, Italian futurism and Dada. Tsantsanoglou examines the aesthetic and social limits of the political aesthetic that entrenched or defined the term ‘performance art’ as it emerged in a critical way in Russia as early as the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century.

Sebastian Haller in ‘Secret Police and Public Sphere: The East German State Security Service (‘Stasi’) between Media Control and Public Relations’ (Chapter 3) examines the control of the domestic press and West German media, television and cinema. He focusses on the work and history of the Department for Agitation, the main public relations arm of the State Security Service, which was reorganized in the 1980s under the name of Division 6/ZAIG. Haller's chapter focusses on the activities of the State Security Service regarding (fictional) television and film production through the existing secondary literature, and also files from the Stasi Records Agency, the German Broadcasting Archive and the German Federal Archives.

In Chapter 4, ‘The Russian Dream and Victor Pelevin's Generation “Π": Ideology in Post-Soviet Russia’, Angelos Theocharis showcases the rise of ‘Russian dream’ as a new form of national ethos in Russia that embraces the dreams and aspirations of Russian people, as well as the archetypes, historical cultural experience and contemporary official ideology embedded into the Russian mentality. The ideological phenomenon is approached through the analysis of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Sociological Survey on Russian Dream (2013) and Victor Pelevin's postmodern novel ‘Generation “Π"’ (1999), a novel famous for its political and ideological character and influence on the Russian cultural scene.

Ilya Kiriya in ‘Soviet Communicative Control: Some Implications on Digital Activism in Contemporary Russia’ (Chapter 5) suggests that Soviet communicative control was based on a particular balance between the manipulation of mass communication (propaganda) and restriction of interpersonal communication and on particular elements of social mobility control. Kiriya argues that some elements of this Soviet system of control are reproduced in the current Russian media and social system that has formed a passive attitude towards digital activism and to political life in general among the population. This phenomenon has significantly influenced the contemporary post-Crimean social consensus and led directly to the failure of the protest movements in the first-half of 2010s, which were largely dependent on social media.

In Chapter 6, Karatzogianni, Miazehvich and Denisova analyze digital activism comparatively in three Post-Soviet regions: Russian/anti-Russian during the Crimea action and online political deliberation in Belarus, juxtaposed to Estonia's digital governance approach. In authoritarian regimes, actual massive mobilization and protest is forbidden, or is severely punished with activists imprisoned, persecuted or murdered by the state. In resistant civil societies in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, cultural forms of digital activism, such as Internet memes, nevertheless thrive and produce and reproduce effective forms of political deliberation. In contrast, Estonia, which has been celebrated for its commitment to Internet freedoms, is innovating in digital governance with its residency program. The authors affirm the potential of Internet memes in addressing apolitical crowds, infiltrating casual conversations and providing symbolic manifestation of the burning resistant debates.

In turn, Galina Miazhevich in ‘Dis/engagement in Post-Soviet Communicative Ecologies: Reframing the “Chinatown” Dissent Campaign in Belarus’ (Chapter 7) problematizes the ‘communicative ecologies’ by exploring a collective protest campaign in Belarus that involved the construction of a so-called ‘Chinese industrial park’ in the outskirts of the capital of Belarus. The 5-year time span (2012–2017), marking the conception of this controversial project to the actual start of its construction, is particularly suitable for tracing the dilemmas and dynamic of new-media informed and enabled civic activism. Looking at the role of the national sociopolitical and media context, and exploring the mode of use of various media, as well as the dynamic of framing in the process of protest communication, this chapter examines public protest participation in the semiauthoritarian post-Soviet settings.

In ‘Media in Tooth and Claw: Ecologies of Post-Truth Suasion in Total (Culture) War’ (Chapter 8), Michael Schandorf discusses what the history of covert state influence in cultural production may tell us about the current partisan media ecology and transnational ideological media spaces. He shows that even before the Cold War, the US reaction to the rise of communism involved a drastic and militant counter-program of ideological purity beginning with the ‘Red Scare’ which soon involved direct and indirect influence in media and entertainment industries. In the ‘War on Terror’, many Cold War patterns and methods of covert propaganda and influence in media industries were reproduced in the ideological battle against a new enemy, as our late twentieth century ‘filter bubbles’ 'dissolved into a foam of contentious and fragmented political and media ecologies with the rise of numerous populist and other social movements.

Part II: The Road to Occupy and its Influence starts with Anastasia Kavada's ‘Creating the collective: Social Media, the Occupy Movement and its Constitution as a Collective Actor’ (Chapter 9). This chapter examines the process through which Occupy activists came to constitute themselves as a collective actor, and the role of social media in this process. Based on interviews with Occupy activists in New York, London and other cities, she discusses the communication processes through which the movement drew the boundaries of its environment, creating codes and foundational documents, while speaking in a collective voice. Kavada shows that social media tended to blur the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the movement, but the presence of the movement on social media also led to conflicts and negotiations around Occupy's collective voice as constructed on these platforms.

In ‘Ground the Drones: Direct Action and Media Activism’ (Chapter 10), Kevin Howley explores direct action campaigns and other grassroots efforts aimed at grounding the drones. He highlights the importance of alternative and activist media in the formation of an oppositional order of discourse to drone warfare. This discourse draws from news and official statements regarding targeted killing, survivor and witness testimony, as well as the language of civil liberties, criminal justice and racial inequality. Howley examines an exemplar of activist media practice – the grassroots educational organization KnowDrones – and the strategies and tactics used by this group to organize popular resistance to America's drone wars, pointing to the significance of ‘ironic media activism’ that generates public awareness of the (purposefully) hidden costs and consequences of drone warfare.

Alberto Cossu, in ‘Beyond Social Media Determinism? How Artists Reshape the Organization of Social Movements’ (Chapter 11), writes about how artists and creative workers have been engaged once more in the social and political space (e.g., Occupy, Tahrir Square), have created movements of their own (e.g., Network of Occupied Theatres in Italy and Greece), have experimented with alternative economic models and currencies (e.g., Macao and D-CENT) and have carried out social research and radical education in partnership with institutional and social actors. In doing so, creative actors and activists have supported neighbourhoods, filled the void left by states' retreat from the social and hosted and coproduced art at a time when the budget for culture and independent art is being decreased in numerous countries across the world. Here, Cossu investigates the case of Macao, ‘The New Centre for Arts, Culture and Research of Milan’, which involved a two-year ethnographic study, including participant observation, digital methods and semistructured interviews.

In Chapter 12, ‘The City is a Work of Art and Everyone is an Artist: Collaborative Protest Art, Participation and Space Reproduction at the 2014 Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement’, Georgios Patsiaouras synthesizes empirical findings from the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement. He uses Lefebvre's (1991) theory of spatial reproduction to examine how space was reproduced through the employment of protest art, not only at the main protest camps but also throughout the city of Hong Kong. Patsiaouras finds that the strategic display of protest art's universal symbolism and multifarious creativity attracted massive audience attention and strengthened the movement's collective identity. The research indicates how a variety of spontaneous and all-inclusive collaborative arts projects shaped the city's public spaces and modified the dominant conceived spaces of public transport and commercial activity.

Adrija Dey and Shola Olabode, in ‘A Comparative Study of the Delhi Nirbhaya Protests and the Occupy Nigeria Movement: Evaluating Uses of ICTs and Social Media’ (Chapter 13), look through the lens of the Delhi Nirbhaya movement in India and the Occupy Nigeria Movement protests, in order to consider the use of ICTs. The comparative analysis adopts a qualitative case study approach and relies on semistructured interviews with participants in both protests and an analysis of online audiovisual and textual data about the movements. Dey and Olabode contend that digital media tools have become engrained in the general workings of social movements in developing countries, and appear to be having a direct influence on resistance and sociopolitical change in the polity.

In Chapter 14, ‘From Classical Syndicalism to Spain's 15-M Movement’, Cristina Flesher Fominaya tracks the tensions emerging from classical syndicalism to Spain's 15M movement. She argues that within the transition from workers' movements to the emergence of new social movements, we can witness a significant transformation in the political cultures within social movements that begin to emerge in the 1960s and that continue to develop in a progressive way today. This points to the differences between the logics of collective action between what we could call the institutional left and autonomous movements. Here Flesher Fominaya argues that the most relevant differences lay in their political cultures or their practices, which combine ideological elements and forms of practicing politics.

Torsten Geelan and Andy Hodder, in ‘The Trials and Tribulations of Using Social Media to Enhance Transnational Labour Solidarity’ (Chapter 15), examine the UK's largest trade union, Unite, and the founding of Union Solidarity International (USI) in 2010. After two years of planning, USI was launched in May 2012. As a new actor in the international union arena, USI presents a unique opportunity to explore the specific advantages and limitations of using digital technologies to enhance transnational labour solidarity outside of the constraints of traditional union organizations. The case study of USI is introduced by way of a background with analysis of the USI's communication strategy and their digital media (website and Twitter) audiences.

In Chapter 16, ‘The Online Communication Strategies of a Small-scale Social movement: The Case of the Greek “Do Not Pay” Social Movement’, Stamatis Poulakidakos, Anastasia Veneti and Maria Rovisco investigate a small-scale, everyday form of grassroots resistance and solidarity imitative, the ‘Do Not Pay’ Social Movement in Greece. The intensity, frequency and size of ant-iausterity protests have been most notable in Greece, primarily as a result of the severe economic policies implemented in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and the ensuing signing of the bailout treaty in May 2010. Despite a growing body of literature on mass social mobilizations, scant attention has been paid small-scale, everyday form of grassroots resistance. This chapter addresses this omission.

In the ‘The EU Referendums in the Twittersphere: #Grexit, #Brexit and the #Catalanreferendum’ (Chapter 17), Ioanna Ferra and Dennis Nguyen argue that online media as means of public engagement and tools of (mass) organization became decisive factors with an inherent unpredictability. The study develops by looking on a three-year period of the three referendums, concentrating on the evolution of the political debates that signified the dispute of the EU values. The authors examine how different actors used Twitter to engage and shape the online debate and discourse, which enables an exploratory analysis of how online media influence public discourses, as well as the organization of protest in moments of political upheaval in the European context.

In the final chapter of this book, Athina Karatzogianni and Michael Schandorf discuss agency, control and surveillance in protest movement mediation technologies (Chapter 18). They argue that activists are notably consistent on security, privacy and surveillance, and on the need for alternative protest technologies to be produced in the service of media revolutions. This is all the more remarkable when set against the broad inconsistencies in the ways that activists understand their own agency, their position in their own society and the exact ideological order of dissent to which they are pitching their ideology and organizational activities. Local and national specificity of technology use is a salient factor for social movement actors at a local level which have vastly different experiences of the actual use of technologies, of corporate vs autonomous technologies, of the digital/contemporary public square (surveillance), of the development of alternative infrastructures and of how networking (social structures) are embodied in transferable skills (digital networking and social organizing), as well as of the possibilities and limitations of f2f and digital communication.

Connecting the Mediated Masses: The Transnational Struggle

Since the contributors originally met in Amsterdam in November 2017, empirical developments in the field have been spectacular. In France, the Yellow Vests mobilized in November 2018. They have succeeded in halting legislation that would increase fuel prices, gained a promised wage increase of €100 and won the cancellation of a planned tax increase for low-income pensioners. Their demands expanded to the return of the tax wealth, the implementation of Citizens' initiative referenda, and ranged from a reduction in presidential powers to asking for President Macron's resignation. Although the movement has not succeeded in forcing Macron to resign, the French government was forced to initiate ‘the great national debate’ in the hope of halting the protests. The latter escalated to levels of violence matched only by the France of the 1960s, minus the joyfulness that partly characterized the 1968 student movement. At least a couple of dozen dead and pictures of protesters with face injuries and loss of eyesight from the use of ‘flash balls’ were among the results of the state response, which included injuries of thousands of both protesters and the police forces. The violence prompted Amnesty International's intervention to ask the French government to end use of excessive force against protesters and high school children in France. Internationally, the yellow vest symbol has been used both by movements with similar demands (democratic representation, reversal of inequality, tax justice, relief from high-living costs) and by those movements that also use the yellow vest as a potent symbol of resistance: Yellow vest protests have erupted in Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Taiwan, Tunisia and the United Kingdom.

Typically, digital...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Editor
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• About the Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Protest Technologies and Media Revolutions in the Longue Durée
• Part I From the Russian Revolution to Post-soviet Digital Activism and the New Cold War
• Part II The Road to Occupy and Its Influence
• Index