Media, Democracy and Social Change

Re-imagining Political Communications

Aeron Davis, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman, Gholam Khiabany

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529730135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

When we are told so regularly that we live in a 'post truth' age and are surrounded by 'fake news', it can be tempting to think of politics as primarily mediated. Discussion and analysis of public affairs is preoccupied with the power and reach of platforms or the passion and rage of social media exchanges. As important as these issues may be, a focus on the communicative risks downgrading the political. Media, Democracy and Social Change puts politics back into political communications. It shows how within a digital media ecology, the wider context of neoliberal capitalism remains essential for understanding what political communications is, and can hope to be. Tackling broad themes of structural inequality, technological change, political realignment and social transformation, the book explores political communications as it relates to debates around the state, infrastructures, elites, populism, political parties, activism, the legacies of colonialism, and more. It is both an expert introduction to the field of political communications, and a critical intervention to help re-imagine what a democratic politics might mean in a digital age.It will be essential reading for students, researchers and activists. Aeron Davis, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman and Gholam Khiabany all work at the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London, where they teach together on the MA in Political Communications.

1 Putting Politics Back Into Political Communications

Introduction

We are writing this book in 2019. Donald Trump has been President of the United States of America for two years. The UK is (endlessly) on the verge of leaving the European Union (EU). Established political parties have been shaken as new political parties have emerged and won power in France and Italy. Neo-fascist political groups are gaining in popularity across the US and Europe; Brazil, once a beacon of hope for new democratic practices, has elected the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. The political landscape is febrile and unstable; uncertainty abounds. In these circumstances, political communications has never been more relevant as a discipline, just as the practices and institutions that it interrogates have never been more central to the conduct of politics and public affairs. Trends, so readily tossed around by commentators, policymakers and politicians, from the emergence of ‘post-truth’ to the circulation of ‘fake news', and from the ubiquity of political marketing to the importance of data mining, are seen to shape political landscapes as never before. Political life is ever more thoroughly infused with symbolic practices and communicative dynamics; the idea and practice of politics is endlessly narrated, mediated, affected, imagined and technologised. Political communications, once a fringe specialism that occupied the borderlands of political science and media studies, has moved into the limelight of academic research and scholarly output.

Yet there is a problem. On the one hand, there is a danger that the lure of technology seduces the reach of our analyses into political communications such that they are entranced by the platforms, actors and rituals that we seek to evaluate; that, as we are part of the social order we are studying, so we too become mesmerised by the passion and rage of social media exchanges and the unfettered power of algorithms to shape public debate and knowledge; that we elevate media logics above often more fundamental (and less visible) conflicts concerning resource distribution, and end up defining power in relation to the management of symbolic spaces and the use of rhetorical flourishes rather than broader political economic systems. Perversely, this focus on media logics also serves to shift an emphasis away from politics itself. What types of politics communicated in what sorts of ways are able to address the current crises we face, are undoubtedly key questions for the field. But by prioritising the communicative we have too often relegated the political to a secondary order, only relevant in relation to the forms of communication it is manifest in rather than being a construct of the social, economic and cultural context it is part of. And so we begin this book with the contention that political communications runs the risk of diminishing the political and fetishising the communicative. And this is something we should be ever mindful of.

On the other hand, the context we seek to situate our analyses within needs to free itself from the straitjacket of taken-for-granted Western/liberal/secular assumptions of relative homogeneity as divergent voices emerge and demand recognition. As distinctions of left and right politics are challenged, as political elites from established parties are increasingly distrusted and rejected in elections, as citizens search for alternative political solutions to ever-increasing problems, the old recourse to liberal democratic political framing has been drawn into question and found wanting. Yet much work in political communications still takes Western concepts and practices of liberal democracy as its starting point, organising premise and ultimate aim. This is despite its many shifting configurations and failures: increased levels of inequality between and within nation-states, the change in the nature of the state at a national and global level, rejection of mainstream political parties too often seen as self-serving and non-representative, and the hollowing out of institutions in which publics have traditionally sought to engage in political activities. And so, as we engage with a critical political analysis, we also need to consider how we think beyond the confines of liberal democracy to what democracy could become, and the type of political visions that may be required to take us there.

At a time when established political norms are increasingly fragile, there are huge opportunities for a renewal not simply of political communications but of politics itself. When struggles for democracy in democratic societies and elsewhere have intensified, there is a need to go beyond the defence and recovery of hard-earned democratic rights within a liberal democratic framework that threatens to return us to the very politics that got us into these difficulties in the first place. This is particularly true for political communications that often begins and ends with the entirely understandable yet sadly misplaced defence of communicative plurality devoid of a critique of power and politics and the social and economic inequalities of unjust social structures. Liberal democracy reduced to a diversity politics of communicative abundance is where so much scholarship in political communications returns to and is most comfortable (Fenton and Titley, 2015). It is an approach that has become so normalised, so expected, so much part of a certain academic common sense, that it refuses to acknowledge its own assumptions and recognise that it too is operating from a particular political premise located often in a Western colonial past where liberal democracy is couched as a benevolent saviour. Or from a place where meritocratic, market-friendly understandings of equality and freedom feel most at home.

This book is an attempt to remind ourselves that at the heart of the political/communications nexus sits the unfulfilled promises of modern capitalism in this particular neoliberal moment: a heart that bleeds from a degenerative democracy, that aches from an exasperated citizenry, that is under attack from massive and increasing inequality, a weakened establishment and a degraded public sphere. Our objective is to assess how recent structural developments concerning neoliberal economics, state power and political engagement have affected the political communications environment, and to identify the ways in which media and communications can play a role in the radical critique of neoliberal democratic frames and the regeneration of democracy done differently.

So it should be clear from the outset that in its critique of political communications this book itself has a politics – just as all others do but so rarely acknowledge or care to reflect on what that politics might mean. Bringing politics to the forefront of political communications means recognising its genealogy in particular canons of thought as well as in particular political contexts and histories. And in doing so, it also allows the reimagining of what a democratic politics might mean in the digital age. Wearing our political hearts on our sleeves means that our critique begins from a different starting place that does not prioritise the communicative realm, but rather seeks to take account of the social order of institutionalised capitalism (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018) of which the communicative realm is a part. This then directs us towards an analysis of structural inequality, technological change, political realignment and the possibilities for social transformation (that are too often left out because they require a politics to be recognised and made relevant). In doing so, we hope to go beyond an analysis of the current moment to imagine how things could be otherwise.

This is where this book takes its leave. It is an argument for engaging with the political; an argument for the imperative of critical theory. Horkheimer (1982) once said that critical theory is adequate only if it meets three criteria: it must be explanatory, practical, and normative. Most of us get stuck on the first – how many of us ever do all three? Critical analysis must be empirical social enquiry and be framed by normative philosophical argument so that it can explain what is wrong with current social reality, identify the actors to change it and, in so doing, provide both clear norms for criticism and achievable practical goals for social and political transformation. To be explanatory, practical and normative requires interrogating ‘the political’ including our own political values and assumptions. Without it, we cannot understand what is going on or assess where we want to be and we cannot begin to determine how to get there. And so we are attempting to restore the centrality of politics – struggles over the reproduction of everyday social relations – to our scholarship, as we also attempt to understand how technologies and systems of communication are themselves shaped by and interact with these struggles.

There are many ways to refocus forms of critical analysis in political communications, but whichever way you do so requires the structures and consequences of capitalism and liberal democracy to be front and centre of our analyses. Such an analysis will include the formations and practices of the state as one means of unpicking the many ways in which capitalism and liberal democracy are entangled. But it also requires a deeper understanding of the imbricated relations between structural and cultural factors, including the history, legacies and contemporary lived experiences of colonialism outlined below. Crucially, a critical analysis must also include the identification of an emancipatory political vision.

The Structures and Consequences of Capitalism

Our media systems are indelibly connected to the political and economic systems of which they are a part. The brutal form of capitalism that many of us now exist within has massively increased inequality, with the accumulation of wealth in ever fewer hands (Cribb et al., 2018; Dorling, 2014; Oxfam, 2019), and has led to increasingly precarious and insecure labour (Armstrong, 2018), with increases in poverty (Armstrong, 2018; Piketty, 2014), and massive environmental degradation as a result of extractive relations to nature (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2018; McKie, 2017), alongside the hollowing out of democracy by market forces (Brown, 2015). And as Fraser notes, this has involved ‘the corporate capture of political parties and public institutions at the level of the territorial state…[and]…the usurpation of political decision making power at the transnational level by global finance’ (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 3). These contemporary characteristics of advanced capitalism form the social, political and economic relations that our media systems exist within. They are part of our social order, of our capitalist social formation and the practices and consequences that this social formation results in – from who owns what, to the forms of labour, the nature of production, the means of exchange, the operation of the markets, and the various stresses and injuries these exert on daily lives lived in debt, insecurity and fear. From the global digital giants channelling our desires for social connection and extracting our data to sell for vast profit to the now almost quaint, old-fashioned moguls of legacy media, capitalism is the vessel they travel in and the politics of neoliberalism creates the conditions for the journey.

If we think back to the Frankfurt School, or to early writings by Habermas, capitalism as a political economic system was central to their analysis. This was the school of critical theory that attempted to explain our social totality through an interdisciplinary project with an historical and material normative foundation and an emancipatory intention. The desire to understand capitalism was an attempt to reveal its deep structures, expose its contradictions and tensions and expound any emancipatory possibilities. When the desire shifted focus to wanting to understand media or technology at a more granular level, then the deep structures and economic systems too frequently became a ‘given'. Once capitalism as a political economic system with social and cultural consequences was no longer holding our critical gaze, an acceptance that we need not bother ourselves with alternatives to capitalism seemed to seep into every critical crevice. The digital age was upon us and we became blindsided by its infinite capabilities and potentials. Tools, gadgets, apps; mapping, describing and plotting networks took over. This was communication science and it looked so pretty, was so measurable and appeared to be so objective. While understandable as a means to get to grips with a technological revolution, it also left us with solutions stuck largely in a technological bind.

The ‘tech for good’ brigade

Examples of the technological bind can be found in the ‘tech for good’ brigade – look how crowdsourcing platforms can be used for gathering and sharing information to foster accountability in the workplace (Arora and Thompson, 2018); look how social media can link communities together and enable them to share resources (Tully and Ekdale, 2014); look how governments and parties can communicate with citizens so much better (Chadwick and Howard, 2009; Delaney, 2019; Gibson, 2015; Kreiss, 2016; Price and Cappella, 2002); look how it can empower citizens and connect family in far-flung places (Oreglia, 2014); look how data mining, contact tracing and machine learning can predict the likelihood of disease outbreaks and control their spread (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, 2013) – all of which may well be true of course, but in promising good things to come, our gaze is averted from bigger, broader and deeper concerns about the systemic harms that remain. The ‘tech for good’ brigade cannot be simplistically written off as the ‘cyber-utopians’ of yore hell-bent on fervent proclamations of the glorious wonders of technological revolution. Rather, this is a more tempered optimism that frequently recognises the many problems of the internet age (surveillance, data privacy, misinformation, trolling, loneliness, etc.) yet rarely seeks to interrogate why these problems exist. The solution therefore remains in better technology or regulatory reform of the ways technology firms operate. Being seduced by technology then blindsides us to focus on solutions bound to liberal democratic systems with the permanent offer of what could be without a keen critical analysis of what is. The ‘tech for good’ brigade promise just enough commitment to the public interest within this new form of platform commerce and just enough tinkering around the edges with minor reforms to hold technological raptures in check to ensure that capitalism is left unhindered. And so the link between social analysis and normative critique is severed.

The ‘tech for good brigade’ are a hangover from the naïve utopianism of the 1990s dot-com bubble. The unbridled enthusiasm claiming an epochal technological transformation of all the world's ills may have dampened, but the deep furrows of this ideology are still very much with us and can be found in many areas of media and communications, and particularly in areas focused on social and developmental change. In information and communication technology (ICT) for social change and ICT and development literature there is a strong tendency to look to ‘the digital’ as a means of removing barriers, building wealth and creating sustainability (Elder et al., 2013) when much of the evidence suggests otherwise, or at least problematises simplistic understandings that tend to disregard or under-emphasise power relations (Madianou, 2015, Madianou et al., 2016; Mansell, 2010; Silva and Westrup, 2009; Thompson, 2008; Unwin, 2009). The notion that expanding internet access is the path to deliverance from poverty, inequality and precarity assumes that a lack of integration into global capitalism is the main cause of these problems rather than the reverse. It supposes that worldwide economic divides can be overcome simply by improving digital literacy, rather than tackling the massive digital corporate dominance of the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon that seek to turn the world and all our data into a massive advertising and marketing enterprise. The ‘tech for good’ ideology supports a raft of government and non-profit initiatives to expand internet access and make non-governmental organisations (NGOs) more tech savvy. In turn, these also provide a convenient public relations (PR) gloss for platform capitalists keen to extend their reach and expand their consumer markets (Arora, 2018).

The ‘tech for good’ approach also refuses, or at least is very rarely willing, to recognise that they too have a politics. If you believe the internet (more or less in its current form) can solve inequality then you believe that ultimately you can align the desire for social good with profit-driven greed – in other words, that advanced global capitalism can work for the good of everyone despite all the evidence to the contrary. This politics is also associated with what Zuboff (2019) calls ‘instrumentarianism': an approach based on the logic of and power that comes from recording and anticipating human behaviour, while refusing to tackle the fact that this data harvesting is also part of a system of capitalism that is using that data to sell to advertisers. In other words, faith in computation replaces politics as a basis for governance.

The ‘tech as resistance’ posse

It is not only the ‘tech for good’ brigade that is captured by capitalism, but also those who see the path to resistance of the tech giant takeover as being through disrupting technology in order to unsettle the systems that exist rather than offering broader political economic visions of emancipation. Here we find the hackers and the pirates who may arrive with a revolutionary impulse, but are quickly swallowed up by the geeks’ desire to believe in the power of technology as an unruly force that can undermine dominant power and challenge authority. Often the politics of these disruptive interventions align with an anarchist tradition.

Anonymous is a social movement that stems from the online image board 4Chan and originally circulated via subcultural memes across the web, before also spreading offline with the distinctive Guy Fawkes masks visible at many protests around the world. Anonymous ‘rejects morality or constraints and features call for absolute freedoms, especially freedom of speech’ (McQuillan, 2015: 1372). Lulzsec, a spin-off from Anonymous, specialised in hacking private security firms and state surveillance agencies and then releasing their data to the public. Anonymous caused disruption by launching Distributed Denial of Service Attacks to overload websites of organisations they believed were complicit with corporate and government control. This chimes with Castells’ argument that the internet offers multiple prospects for intervention and manipulation, coming from myriad social nodes that can combine to create a new symbolic counter-force capable of shifting dominant power relations and empowering sovereign audiences through the creative autonomy bestowed upon them. Ultimately, Castells suggests this could provide ‘the material and cultural basis for the anarchist utopia of networked self-management to become a social practice’ (Castells, 2009: 346), such that ‘significant political change will result, in due time, from the actions of networked social movements … Minds that are being opened up by the winds of free communication and inspire practices of empowerment enacted by fearless youth’ (Castells, 2015: 312). Such accounts depend on the implicit assumptions about the consequential relations between networked communications and political demands that will result in social and political change. This is a leap of faith that is hard to reconcile with the enduring realities of poverty and the burgeoning wealth of the 1%.

Crucially, this also leaves us with the increasing incorporation of the political into the symbolic and an underlying techno-determinism in approaches to social change. Political participation is construed via the role of the individual subject that develops new techniques of the self as autonomous acts of resistance in a networked world. These acts of resistance will form multitudes that will become social movements, and enlightened capitalists can do the rest by doing their best. But the networks we function within are deeply c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Coronavirus Foreword
• 1 Putting Politics Back Into Political Communications
• 2 Infrastructures of Political Communications
• 3 The State of Political Communications
• 4 Elites, Experts, Power and Democracy
• 5 Democracy Without Political Parties?
• 6 The Violence of an Illiberal Liberalism
• 7 Political Communications, Civil Society and the Commons
• 8 Intellectuals and the Re-imagining of Political Communications
• References
• Index