Presider: Malcom Harris (@BigMeanInternet)

Hashmod: Heather Rosenfeld (@brainvom)

This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Mobilized: Actors and Activism

By now, we’re all familiar with the significance of the presence of social media in protest movements. Theorizing the Web has made them a focus since its inception. But one of the most important features of political resistance via social media and the web in general is that it’s constantly evolving. In order to understand that evolution, we need to be sensitive to the sheer diversity of the places in which we find an enormously diverse selection of forms of resistance. This panel highlights a few of these, ranging from mobilization in Kathmandu to the creation of queer micropublics in the American South to gendered labor “strikes” in social media to counterperformance against hegemonic identities on Reddit. These presentations incorporate instances of social media facilitating – and not facilitating – protest in physical spaces along with instances wherein resistance is taking place largely online. Again, the diversity of representation points the way forward to a deeper and richer understanding of how protest and resistance is organized and moves with the digital in play.

Elizabeth Saldaña (@esaldana) “That’s Never Going to Work Here” – Social Media Mobilization in Kathmandu, Nepal
Since the Arab Uprisings and Occupy Wall Street, scholars, journalists, and activists have debated the utility and efficacy of social media in political mobilization and social movements. Perhaps with good reason, most of this work has been concentrated in areas of the world with relatively high Internet penetration rates – the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China – although recent work by Merlyna Lim and Mark Warschauer discusses the use of the Internet and social media in Egypt. At the other end of the spectrum, Mark Liechty, Heather Hindman, Tanel Saimre, and various non-governmental organizations have written extensively on the influx of Internet technologies and infrastructures into Nepal as a consequence of development. However, there is scant attention paid to how these technologies are actually used, and specifically to the possibility of social media as a mobilization tool in ‘developing’ countries. The significance and meaning of the Internet as a mobilization tool changes with lower Internet penetration, and models and theories of the web-based mobilization are not nearly universally applicable in Nepal.

In this paper, I examine a recent urban social movement, Occupy Baluwatar, which was the first social movement in Kathmandu to explicitly and consciously incorporate social media into their mobilization strategy. I present online ethnographic material from Twitter alongside site-based ethnographic material from Kathmandu, Nepal to show the difficulties and debates of using the Internet to mobilize in an area with low Internet penetration. I argue that in the case of Occupy Baluwatar, the question of social media as an organizing strategy divided the movement’s leaders and caused a deep fissure among organizers, splintering them into two groups. While this did not end the movement, it weakened the movement, and has serious implications for divergences in Kathmandu’s activist communities. This case study illuminates the problem of the digital divide within Kathmandu, and the political consequences of decontextualizing Internet use in social movements. Internet users in the ‘developing world’ has lessons to offer scholars of the Internet and activist communities alike, and this paper will bring some of these issues to light.

Laura Meadows (@A_L_Meadows) Queering Dixie: Movement Micro-publics and the Southern LGBT Movement
This paper draws on ethnographic research on the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) movement in North Carolina to theorize the concept of ‘movement micro-publics.’ Defined as informal groupings of individuals and organizations that share a set of political, social, and/or cultural sensibilities in relation to the goals of the movement, the development of movement micro-publics has allowed Southern LGBT movement activists to broaden their bases of support and to speak to people where they are. And, where they are in the South differs in significant ways from other regions of the country.

The South is more rural, more racially dichotomous, more religious, and more ideologically conservative than the rest of the United States. Whereas 80% of Americans nationwide live in urban areas, just 66% of North Carolinians do so. While African Americans comprise 12% of the population nationally, 22% of North Carolinians are black. Though the country as a whole is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country, evangelical, Mainline Protestant, and historically black churches thrive below the Mason-Dixon line. Finally, more than 40% of North Carolinians identify themselves as conservative, while just 20% label themselves liberals.

Working within this specific political, social, and cultural landscape, North Carolina’s LGBT activists have engaged in the instrumental practice of developing movement micro-publics to mobilize historically underrepresented publics with only tenuous connections to the movement, most notably in rural, faith, and African American communities. For instance, illustrative of this type of movement work is the Mitchell County Gay Straight Alliance (Mitchell County GSA). Organized by two local residents of Bakersville, NC, population 459, in conjunction with activists from the state’s largest LGBT organization, the group’s initial meeting was attended by dozens of protesters holding signs exhorting ‘Christian’ values and giving voice to fears that the group would work to ‘force their lifestyle’ upon the town. Less than two years later, in 2012, the Mitchell County GSA organized a reading of ‘8,’ portraying the closing arguments of the trial that overturned Proposition 8, a California ballot proposition that banned same-sex marriage. They held the event in the Mitchell County Historic Courthouse. More than 100 people attended. There were no protesters.

This paper examines the ways activists have utilized platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to supplement older forms of face-to-face organizing to build and mobilize movement micro-publics in places such as Bakersville. Drawing upon a body of theory on ‘identity deployment,’ I argue that the larger LGBT movement will benefit from adopting a ‘Southern strategy’ to speak to people where they are in order to build a coalition of micro-publics capable of reshaping the social, political, and cultural contexts of their communities. While the LGBT movement has amassed a host of victories over the past several years, the path to full equality, both legal and cultural, runs through locations and publics historically understood to be antagonistic to the movement’s goals: farm country, churches, and communities of color. Movement micro-publics provide an exemplary strategy to navigate the road ahead.

Laura Portwood-Stacer (@lportwoodstacer) Free Labor on Strike?
If participation in social media networks constitutes a form of “free labor,” what would it mean for the workers to go on strike? Approaching this question from a feminist standpoint, this paper explores the nature of the work performed by online social networkers, specifically with respect to the caring labor often (though not exclusively) performed by feminine subjects. I bring this discussion of care work into conversation with my research on “media refusal,” my term for conscientious non-use of media platforms and technologies. Given that social networking has become a professional and personal imperative for those from whom caring labor is expected, I argue that we must question the extent to which “opting out” is a viable response to the many legitimate political problems presented by corporate social media platforms. While I do not rule out non-participation as a resistance tactic, I make the case that gender must be present in our analyses if we are to formulate effective strategies of protest and change.

Adrienne Massanari (@hegemonyrules) “Why are all of you such assholes?” ShitRedditSays, Gender, and Counterperformance on reddit
Participatory culture platforms and online communities are not only site of (potentially) liberatory, democratic discourse, but also spaces where dominant ideologies shape interactions. This is particularly true in a space like the social news-sharing site reddit, where the community votes on material that is most interesting or relevant to its interests. As a result, while reddit is made up of a large number of diverse communities of interest (called subreddits), patterns of interactions often reflect the site’s demographic realities: largely young male, cisgendered, straight, and college-educated. It is not surprising, then, that while reddit’s “ethos” suggests a post-racial or post-gendered social reality, actual talk on the site often reflects hegemonic tendencies. At the same time, reddit is also a space of carnival (Bakhtin, 1984) and inventive play. From novelty accounts that respond to other commenters watercolor images (/u/ShittyWatercolour) to pun threads to grotesque stories, reddit functions as a space of ritualized performance (Schechner, 1985; Turner, 2001) where wit and depravity coexist.

Enter /r/ShitRedditSays (SRS) and related subreddits (called the “Fempire”). SRS creates a counterperformance of reddit’s “circlejerk” tendencies. Specifically, it functions as a safe space for redditors to highlight problematic interactions – those that exhibit sexist, homophobic, racist, or ablest tendencies – while not having to explain why these interactions are disturbing. In addition, SRS was instrumental in Pedogeddon, a campaign to, “paint Reddit…as a den of child pornography – and free-speech-loving redditors as complicit pawns in its spread,” (Morris, 2012) which eventually lead to the shut down of /r/jailbait and doxxing of infamous moderator Violentacrez (Chen, 2012). Not surprisingly, SRS has earned the ire of some other redditors, and led to the spawning of a number of anti-SRS subreddits (for example, /r/SRSsucks and /r/antiSRS).

This paper attempts to theorize and interrogate the concept of counterperformance (Alexander, 2004) in online spaces such as reddit. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of doxa, I analyze the ways in which SRS Fempire creates its own space within, around, and in opposition to the rest of reddit – and how the larger community receives these actions. I argue that much of our understanding of online communities such as reddit tend to overstate their democratic, open potential while downplaying the significant infrastructural, social, and cultural barriers that limit and close the kind of discourse that occurs in practice. And yet, ritualized counterperformances like those that SRS engages in highlight the possibility for resistance, but also raise panoply of other questions regarding ethics and free speech in these spaces.