Information Politics in the Age of Digital Media

Discussant: Deen Freelon, American University

• “Internet Infrastructure: ‘Access’ Rhetoric, Neoliberalism, and Informational Politics” (Dan Greene, University of Maryland-College Park)
• “Academic Marginalization in the Age of Social Media” (PJ Rey, University of Maryland-College Park)
• “Social Media and Revolutionary Movements: Toward Research and Activist Agendas” (Mina Semeni, Randy Lynn, and Jason Smith, George Mason University)

This panel explores some of the opportunities for theoretical development and synthesis emerging at the intersection of public sociology and digital media. True to the conference’s remit, each focuses on a distinct form of publicity of interest to publics outside the academy. Dan Greene questions the prevailing neoliberal rhetoric of access to information technologies, arguing that it facilitates the concentration of power and prevent us from connecting related struggles for individual and collective emancipation. As a corrective, he proposes a frame he calls “informational politics” that overcomes this conceptual weakness by explicitly recognizing the links between digital media and the social contexts within which they are used. PJ Rey invites us to reconsider the roles of newer forms of scholarly communication such as blogs and tweets in evaluations of academic productivity. Journals and conference proceedings, which still enjoy preeminence among tenure criteria in most fields, are far too slow, costly, and obscure to effectively relay the fruits of public sociology to non-academic publics. Finally, Mina Semeni, Randy Lynn, and Jason Smith are interested in how activists use social media in contexts of social protest and revolution. In an attempt to move beyond totalizing and causal theories of the Internet and politics, they propose two mechanisms through which social media might abet protest: by increasing social capital and by strengthening existing institutions.

Dan Greene

Abstract:

Since the early and mid-90s when the Clinton administration touted the benefits of the ‘Information Superhighway’–and further back in MUD communities and speculative fiction—local access to high-speed Internet infrastructure has been promoted as a socioeconomic panacea by the telecommunications industry, educational administrators, and politicians at multiple levels of the US government. Something that could wipe away race- and class-based inequalities with World Wide Web-based upward mobility. Just this year, President Obama’s touted in his State of the Union address a plan to bring high-speed Internet to 98% of Americans, funded by wireless spectrum auction. Within this rhetoric, Internet ‘haves’ are figured to be more active and upwardly mobile citizens plugged into globalized economic opportunities, the latest and most desirable educational training, and meaningful cultural and political conversations. Internet ‘have-nots’ are left behind in all these arenas. Deconstructing this binary shows the cultural and historic discourses animating ‘access’ rhetoric and the complex power relations which ‘have’ and ‘have-not’ binaries obscure. As demonstrated by Lisa Nakamura and others, the historical development of the World Wide Web since the early 90s occurred amidst a perfect storm of early-adopter cyber utopianism and economic and cultural neoliberalism. These more recent developments build on discourses inherent to post-WWII information theories which disavow the material embodiment of information; and an even longer tradition of Liberalism where the ideal subject-citizen is freed from structural and material constraint.

Recognizing these roots is the first step towards deconstructing ‘access’ rhetoric, revealing who most profits from the maintenance of a ‘have and ‘have-not’ binary and why that powerful rhetoric persists. Then we can begin to see some of the more complex, actually-existing power relations obscured by such a binary: the over-representation of Latinos and African-Americans (especially youths) on the mobile Internet, the intersections of skilled Internet use with mental and physical disabilities, and the successes and failures of high-speed Internet rollout plans in different urban and rural communities. This shifting geography requires researchers and activists to recognize the always-linked material conditions and informational potentialities of any Internet infrastructure project; policing the separation of material and informational allows dangerous modes of 21st century upward redistribution to continue. Scholar-activists such as Lisa Duggan call for modern activists to always link cultural and economic causes; I want to conclude by suggesting a frame of ‘informational politics’ which link informational representations and technologies with material conditions and responses in order to advance social justice in multiple spaces. These politics are a research program and an activist manifesto, linking legislation with platform and infrastructure and experience with code and critique. These politics do not consider as separate the fight for Net Neutrality and the fight for improved urban education, for example. This is a model of coinvolved resistance gestured towards by Andrea Smith and others, recognizing that the experience of culture, politics, and economics has been fundamentally changed by the everyday use of specific information technologies—most prominently the Internet and the personal computer.

PJ Rey

GMU Public Sociology Presentation – The Academy & Social Media

Abstract:

In most corners of society, it’s a become a trope to say that the Internet has changed everything; but online communication is still far from integrated into the norms and practices of the academy, whose pace of change and adaptation is nothing less than glacial. Anyone familiar with academic careers knows that conventional (read print) journal publications are the be-all end-all criterion in evaluating potential hires—the meaning behind the well-worn cliché: “publish or perish.”

The practice of using journal articles as the sole criterion in evaluating an academic’s productivity is an artifact of an epoch long-passed. I the age of the printing press, journals were, by far, the most efficient and enduring form of communication. They enabled disciplines to have thoughtful conversations spanning decades and continents. They also facilitated the transmission of the knowledge produced through these conversations to younger generations. In fact, it is nearly impossible to imagine the emergence of Modern science without existence of this medium. Thus, in the beginning, journals become symbolically and ritually important because they were functionally necessary. (While journals were medium du jour during Durkheim’s productive years, he surely would have recognized the reason behind their status in the cult of the academic.)

Today, academia finds itself in a state of hysteresis (à la Bourdieu); that is say, our habits have become maladapted to the field or environment in which they are performed. Let us consider recent developments in the nature of academic discourse. Fifty years ago, the democratization of commercial flight made face-to-face communication between professionals in various disciplines a reality. Conferences becomes a more rapid and efficient method of communicating ideas—but, this form communication was not durable. Thus, the conference proceeding emerged as a supplementary medium to compensate for the shortcomings of face-to-face communication. In some younger or more progressive disciplines, proceedings have been elevated to a status akin to that journals. These proceedings are printed, circulated, and come to occupy the shelves of offices and libraries across country, if not the world. And, for many decades, this was the only way to transmit and store the content of conferences.

In the proceeding two decades, however, the practical justifications for the production of print journals or conference proceedings has evaporated in light of the Internet’s emergence. These vestigial organs of the academy should have slowly withered away, becoming fossilized in archives. Yet, print media remain firmly entrenched, retaining all their symbolic significance, while lacking any of their earlier practical import. Our cult-like worship of print media is far from benign; the privileging of the print over the digital, in fact, has the opposite effect than was originally intended. Instead of facilitating the rapid dissemination of ideas, it hinders it. Print is a solid, heavy medium (as Bauman explains); it travels slowly and is expensive to reproduce. Digital information is liquid and light; it travels instantaneously and is free to reproduce.

It would be superficial, however, to simply criticize print article (and to promote digital articles). The article itself an artifact of print media and native to that form. There ought to be a debate within the academy that seriously considers whether the article optimally utilizes the potential of digital platforms. Are there more effective, indigenously digital mode of communication? Is the article a undead corpse, reanimated to inhabit the digital realm? Of course, this is a loaded question—no doubt exaggerated by the fact that the medium currently in use is an indigenously digital blog, not an article.

De facto, academics in every discipline are utilizing blogs, Twitter, video, and other “new media” to communicate their ideas (and, incidentally, to communicate them to much wider—read interdisciplinary and lay—audiences). De jure, however, we still valorize the article, particularly, the print article. Who/what suffers? Young academics, socially-active academics, the quality of conversation within the academy, and anyone layperson or community who stand benefit from the fruits of academic knowledge. Who benefits? Those entrenched in the old system, whose habits are better suited to yesteryear and who still have sufficient power to resist within the academy to resist any change in the standards of evaluation. What can we do? It’s time for the a younger generation and those on the outside to fight our way on to hiring committees. It’s time for us to establish a unified agenda that involves developing more expansive and inclusive criteria for evaluation. It’s time (as Patricia Hill Collins once said) to leverage our power as “outsiders within”—to learn to function, even thrive, within the system as we systematically work to reform it.

Mina Semeni & Randy Lynn (with Jason Smith):

Social Media and Revolutionary Movements

Abstract:

Although the conspicuous role of social media in the strategic and tactical operations of recent revolutionary movements has generated sudden and prolific interest from scholars in the diverse fields of communications, media studies, information technology, and social movements, extant research has yet to produce a compelling and coherent account of this burgeoning phenomenon. Limited in part by the rapidity with which these digital tools have been taken up and are appropriated daily for novel uses, researchers in general have nevertheless preferred to direct their efforts toward descriptive or speculative studies, largely neglecting the important question of how social media does or does not aid the causes of revolutionary movements.

This submission seeks to move beyond the qualified promises and perils and posit theoretical mechanisms by which research and activist agendas may be guided. Broadly, scholars approaching the phenomenon from a social movements or communication and information technologies perspective have rarely been as utopian as some critics have claimed, focusing largely upon social media’s empirically identifiable benefits of coordinating political action, communicating important information among participants, raising awareness of events and goals among nonparticipants, and the resourcefulness by which participants have successfully used social media to navigate around attempts by state or corporate interests to suppress movements. Conversely, researchers adopting Marxist, prosumption, media studies, or otherwise critical frameworks have rarely been blind to these actual or potential benefits while raising provocative points regarding the implications of corporate ownership of social media, the ease with which political regimes may use these same tools to disrupt movements, the technologically deterministic assumption that social media inherently produces exploitable social benefits, and the diverse array of other factors required to yield a successful revolutionary movement.

We posit two interrelated mechanisms by which social media may lead to empirically verifiable benefits in the context of revolutionary movements: a social capital mechanism, wherein social media increases social capital among actual or potential participants, which may then be converted into effective political action; and an institutional mechanism, wherein social media is situated in a larger institutional framework that includes other forms of new media as well as traditional media and is used to gain institutional support and compete discursively with oppressive regimes. Although some studies have hinted at or suggested the salience of these mechanisms, they have generally neglected the implications of the more poignant criticisms of critical scholars and stopped short of articulating an empirical research agenda informed by these hypothesized mechanisms.

This submission will begin to develop a more rigorous understanding of social media and revolutionary movements by integrating the findings of the extant literature and employing case studies of recent revolutionary movements to sketch a theoretical framework that may be used both to advance empirical research as well as to provide useful knowledge for participants involved in struggles against oppressive political regimes. Integration with the social movement literature will enable discussion of what benefits the use of social media confer, the extent to which these benefits are unique to social media’s enabling capacities, and how movements might continue to reap these benefits in spite of state or corporate interference. Implications and limitations will be discussed.