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I wanted to clarify that when I noted "Also grounded activists rarely
have a technological bias" in the earlier email, I may have sounded
ambivalent considering the next sentence. What I meant was "Grounded
activists rarely are technological determinists."
Also, in light of discussions on surveillance and of bodily
disconnections in the earlier threads by Anaïs and Tim, I was curious
if at some point we might want to think more closely of the
entanglements of data bodies and street bodies.
Another aspect was the public-ness of social media. Social media help
organize public protests in materially public places, but they too are
to some extent public spaces (of discussion), albeit privately owned.
Social media cannot be idealized as public sphere or public space
because they are often privately owned: they are semi-public forums as
Thérèse Tierney among others have argued. They also can be relatively
anonymous. A related point: do social media need to idealized public
spheres/public spaces for social justice efforts? Sometimes, perhaps
anonymity would help more than online visibility.
Quoting mra...@sas.upenn.edu:
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I appreciate the focus on entanglements of social media and social
justice with power. Indeed, social media is being used by different
groups for different reasons as David and Tim note. Social media
itself as something very different from broadcast or mass or
mainstream media needs much debate (though differences exist and
need to be accounted for). The proclivity to suggest that social
media is essentially decentralized or distributed, and not
hierarchical, is again untenable. To be selective about social
media's uses would also be a mistake. All this said, activists in
situated contexts are trying to find ways of using social media for
translocal resistance: they are disrupting and shifting flows of
capital for lobal gestures, to borrow from Ricardo. Activists, I
talk with, understand electronic medium's power dynamics, are aware
of capital's (re)appropriations and sometimes are disenchanted too,
but more often than not, they seem to remain committed to tactical
trespasses believing another world is possible. Activist
idealizations can be problematic and yet one can be self-reflexive
about them.
Also grounded activists rarely have a technological bias: as I
earlier noted, an activist said knowing Twitter Trends algorithm can
help only to a limited extent; unless enough urban people can be
found in Twitter who are interested in rural issues and can
circulate them, algorithms cannot work by themselves. Furthermore,
as I mentioned before, social movement organizing in campaigns for
social justice, depends on many kinds of media and not just social
media (if we really have to categorize or separate social media from
rest of the media at all). In the cases I discussed, Twitter was
only one social medium in a configuration of multiple media. In some
cases, text messages sent from a cellphone (with a dying battery
(life)) proved most crucial. In medial configurations related to
environmental movements I discuss, media include radiation
detectors, protest performances, street graffiti: one could argue
these media are pretty social. Much can be said about (and should be
said about) surveillance in social media, data bodies and metadata
collection,and journalists and activists battling surveillance (in
social media) negotiate these challenges. A very everyday practical
exercise I witnessed was platform jumping - shifting from one
platform (where one's identity or anonymity is threatened or
expression/article is blocked) to another.
Thanks, rahul
Quoting David Golumbia <dgolum...@gmail.com>:
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