In the previous installment of this series, I set up what I characterize as the two primary areas of argument that stand against my primary claim: that social media technology and other forms of ICT, far from constraining emotional connections and the emotional power of solidarity-creating rituals, actually serve to facilitate emotions and the powerful connective work that emotional interaction does.

There are a number of ways that one could argue this is done, and Jenny Davis makes an especially pertinent argument in her post about the social cost of abstaining from digitally augmented forms of interaction. For the purposes of this piece, I want to focus my attention on the capacity of ICTs to facilitate the generation of emotional energy around contentious political action – especially contentious political action in a context of violent repression.

Recall that in my previous post, I split the arguments on which I focused into two camps: the idea that emotional energy in social interaction – particularly in solidarity rituals – requires bodily co-presence in order to be effective, and the idea that technology – both in terms of documentation of violence and in terms of violent action itself – creates emotional distance from events and, in effect, prevents any significant emotional connection to them. In this post, I’ll argue against those points. Let’s get to it.

Augmented Co-Presence

One must allow that many of the things that work to create emotional energy (EE) and emotional connections to events and to one’s fellow participants in an event do not translate particularly well over digital media – the roar of a crowd, the smell of a large gathering of people in a particular place and at a particular time, the feeling of a crush of bodies, and the sensation of physical danger should the gathering be met with violent repression. But the lack of these things does not preclude the capacity of ICTs for facilitating the generation of EE.

One of Randall Collins’s qualms, as I characterized it last week, lies in the fact that the generation of EE within an interaction is often about rhythm, about the reciprocal give-and-take that is the distinguishing feature of most social interaction, and which shifts into a massive scale when operating at the level of a crowd that acts and reacts to second-by-second changes in an environment. What Collins is assuming – problematically – is that ICTs do not lend themselves to this kind of immediacy. Perhaps at the time of his writing, they didn’t, but the last few years have seen an explosion of social media that functions quite neatly in real-time; indeed, such is a central part of their appeal. Twitter and livestreaming, two of the primary tools of Occupy in the United States and other movements elsewhere in the world over the last year, work so well precisely because they are so immediate. Watching events update in real-time on one’s Twitter feed has the capacity to both captivate and generate tremendous emotion: I recall evenings spent staring at updates coming in regarding attacks on civilians in Syria and falling into the grip of powerful horror and rage. During the rash of Occupy evictions last fall, following livestreams of the police actions became a powerful form of engagement for those who could not be there in person, a kind of witness-as-participation that one could criticize as slacktivism but which is still undeniably powerful in that it engages the emotions.

This form of engagement serves not only to generate powerful emotion through watching events in real-time, but also to help create discourses around who the players are and what is at stake. For many people, it seems to have been hard to watch footage of police in full, militarized riot gear advancing on unarmed Occupy Oakland protesters and not form some ideas regarding who the “Us” is, who the “Them” are, and what “They” are doing to “Us”. The accuracy of these ideas could and should be debated, but their power should be recognized. As such, this kind of witness-engagement goes beyond the generation of emotion and into attributions of identity, which is a crucial mechanism for mobilization within social movements.

Finally, what an observer sees when they follow a Twitter feed or a livestream is powerful not only because of its immediacy, but because of the ways in which it does not resemble a traditional media narrative. This takes us to:

Unmediated Vulnerability

This header is a slight misnomer: it isn’t that tweets or livestreams are unmediated – they are, because all information is mediated by who is sharing it and how it’s being shared. Rather, this kind of streaming information is unpolished, devoid of the slick consumer packaging and careful editing that Baudrillard found so troubling in the First Gulf War. As Zeynep Tufecki notes in her excellent piece on this very phenomenon, the function of the traditional news anchor is almost always not to draw one into an event, but to create distance between the viewer and what is being viewed, through their carefully coiffed demeanor and the ways in which they hurry us from scene to scene in a news cycle.

Events mediated through ICTs destroy that distance by bringing us face to face with the “anchor” and their reactions to what they’re covering. The “anchor” is still mediating the information, but as we follow Tim Pool breathlessly through a crowded New York night or read Andy Carvin’s horrified tweets about videos coming out of Homs, we are invited to feel with and through them as we are immersed in an event together. Witness becomes powerfully participatory because emotion is now an intrinsic part of what we see, and that emotion is part of what we share and see shared. And because we can share the information and add records of our own reactions, the experience of digitally mediated witness becomes more participatory still.

What ICTs facilitate, then, is a form of observation that shades into active engagement, and works to create and spread powerful emotions and emotion-laden narratives around events, especially political and violent events. And the immediate nature of this technology allows this form of engagement to be rhythmic in much the same way that physical co-presence does: it can build to a crescendo of outrage and horror, leaving the engaged observers emotionally energized even at a distance and even after the event is over.

A final point that must be made at this juncture is that physical presence still matters in this case, in two primary ways. First, even in a digitally mediated event, there still must be something to mediate: someone watching a livestream of an Occupy eviction is still watching human bodies engaged in both danger and solidarity. Those bodies have symbolic weight and power, and often they have the most symbolic weight and power of any other part of the movement. A dramatic flush of international outrage was generated around the film of Neda Agha-Soltan bleeding to death in a Tehran street, but it was the physical suffering and death of her physical body that generated that rage. Outrage grew exponentially out of the footage and images of Lt. John Pike pepper-spraying seated UC Davis students, but again, that outrage was generated by and situated around the physical suffering of physical bodies.

Secondly, the power of the kind of EE generated by this form of witness necessarily lies in its capacity to mobilize people into a movement. This might consist of sharing information or providing financial support, but when Occupy encampments sent out eviction alerts through Twitter, what they primarily called for was the presence of physical bodies on the scene. The point is once again to emphasize the augmented nature of this form of contention: the physical and digital do not replace each other but work in tandem and are increasingly inseparable.

In scholarship on violence, social movements, and technology itself, emotion is consistently downplayed, implicit, or not recognized as a factor at all. But the events of the last couple of years should bring home to us that we need to expand our thinking on this point. When we speak of reality as “augmented”, emotions are necessarily part of that, as well as the work that emotions do. What remains to be done is much clearer specification regarding the specific mechanisms and processes involved in this, and what their long-term effects might look like in how we make sense of each other and our own experiences.

When it comes to thought and research on social movements and technology (separately and together), emotion is that crucial piece of the picture that everyone technically sees but hardly anyone explicitly acknowledges as worth paying attention to in its own right. Some of this is likely because emotion is hard to study in any way that social science would consider rigorous; it’s often taken as something fundamentally irrational and therefore fundamentally inexplicable. It is highly subjective. It is culturally and situationally constructed, and therefore conceptually slippery. It is interior; it is a difficult thing to see and to know. If explicitly drawing it out as an important factor is problematic for some, identifying it as a variable capable of carrying any causal weight is even more so.

Regarding technology and social movements combined, there is the question of how the digital and physical play out as far as what ends up really being important. What is the relationship between the two? Where exactly is the body in augmented contention and is the way in which it matters changing? What is really going on when we see a bunch of street protesters carrying smartphones?

Regarding technology itself, we come up against the old idea that technology and emotion are somehow antithetical, or at least uneasy bedfellows. This is more an artifact of a time when technology – at least in the digital sense of the word – didn’t yet pervade our daily lived experience in the way that it does today. Probably very few people would now take seriously the idea that technology and emotion have nothing to do with each other (Data did get that chip put in and everything, after all). And yet in many respects the idea persists, especially in regards to how we document, perceive, act within, and remember events – especially violent events.

I want to tease out some elements of these ideas, and in so doing, illuminate some ways in which how we think about technology and political action needs some expanding. Emotion matters, in the physical and the digital and the enmeshing of the two. We need to be thinking and talking about it in ways that elevate it above a background element or given structural feature of a given landscape.

It’s a given at this point that social media and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a role in political mobilization. They bring people together around common experiences and political claims, they facilitate the creation and diffusion of protest materials and repertoires of contention, they enable the extremely rapid spread of information across physical and figurative boundaries. They speed up every element of this process. But that leaves a rather large element of all of this unspecified and implicit – what actually pulls all of these people together besides pure rational-choicey self-interest. What gets them out into the streets when they might otherwise not be there. What lights the metaphorical fires, before the literal ones start to blaze.

There is something specific going on here at the intersection of politics, technology, and violence – something worth paying careful attention to. My argument, essentially, boils down to this: ICTs reduce the singular importance of physical co-presence in facilitating the role of emotion in contentious political action. Put another way, these technologies can make us feel things as viscerally and as powerfully as if we were actually present at the digitally-mediated events we’re witnessing. And that act of witness does not stop at passivity. It has active consequences.

In the first part of this essay, I will outline two of the primary arguments against this and in favor of the idea that technology a) can’t supplant the importance of physical co-presence at high-emotion political events, and b) serves to emotionally distance us from images of conflict and violence. In the second part, I will go into more detail regarding why I think these positions are fundamentally wrong – or at least do not apply even most of the time – with some examples that provide effective counters and powerful pieces of evidence to suggest that when it comes to contentious politics and violence, technology is as much as facilitator of emotion as it is of information.

Effervescent bodies

Durkheim used the concept of collective effervescence – the energy created within a gathering of a group of people focused on a singular thing – as the basis for some of his most famous work on religion; more recently, Randall Collins has operationalized it in the form of “emotional energy” (EE). Both Durkheim and Collins connect the idea of the emotional energy generated in crowds to the creation and maintenance of solidarity ties and the formation of group boundaries. This is perhaps obvious, but nevertheless it is significant, especially laid out with such clarity: The generation of emotional energy is one mechanism by which people identify each other as members of the same group and lend those identities significant symbolic weight. Within gatherings – street protests, riots, rallies, and religious rituals – people are made to feel joy, rage, righteousness, fear, love, and any number of other intensely powerful and lingering emotions. People do not just come to understand who they and other are; they arrive at an understanding of why all of this matters and what is at stake. Gatherings are the locus for the diffusion of meanings, understandings, cultural and cognitive scripts – but these things are given heft and weight and solidity through the emotions that are attached to them as part of these gatherings.

Emotional energy is a mobilizer. People might intellectually understand the identities of players and the stakes of the game, but terror and outrage can impel even the most hesitant of people into action given the right circumstances. This is not to suggest that emotion is primarily causal above all other factors; only that it is significant and too often discounted when considering political action. It is not enough to just recognize that it is there. It isn’t static. We need to understand how it is generated and how it moves.

The important point for a discussion of emotion and technology is that Collins holds that activist political connections mediated by digital technology in its present form can never approximate the power of physical co-presence and therefore cannot possibly do the same kind of emotional work. Collins identifies several factors as problematic in this respect: television, he says, is too focused on the visual – it is distant and too removed from the sonic experience of being in the middle of a roaring crowd, which is tremendously powerful in the generation of EE. Email, he says, is not immediate enough; EE-generating interactions are both instantaneous and rhythmic in nature, and breaks or lags in the rhythm prevent energy from coming into being. In general, Collins argues,

The more that human social activities are carried out by distance media, at low levels of IR intensity, the less solidarity people will feel; the less respect they will have for shared symbolic objects; and the less enthusiastic personal motivation they will have in the form of EE.

Collins allows for a proviso: nervous system-to-nervous system electronic communication that approximates the sensation of immediate, physical social interaction.

Clearly there are arguments against this. But for the time being I want to let it stand and move on to the next set of arguments against technology as a facilitator of emotional power.

“Technologies of slaughter”

Much has been written on the capacity of technology and associated forms of rational social organization to desensitize people, to the point where they are made capable of performing horrific acts of mass murder. In Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman argues for the role that modern manufacturing technologies and techniques played in the emotional distance that allowed Nazis to murder millions. In Murder in Our Midst, Bartov makes a similar argument: technology creates both emotional and physical distance and therefore facilitates mass killing. The dawn of the age of aerial bombing of urban centers marked the beginning of a dramatic expansion in the numbers of civilian casualties in war, not just because the technology killed many more people at once but because the bombers themselves felt less guilt, surveying their targets from tens of thousands of feet in the air. In this sense, the atomic bomb is the polar opposite of the bayonet: where one requires close physical contact and tremendous emotional expense to kill one person, the other creates mind-bendingly massive numbers of immediate and future casualties with little to no direct contact on the part of the one releasing the bomb. Now, with a greater military focus on unmanned drones, the trend arguably continues.

This process has been linked to more contemporary methods of documentation, as well. Both Jean Baudrillard and Elaine Scarry noted the strange emotional distance created by the 24-hour cable news cycle during the First Gulf War. When they wrote on that subject, cable news was still novel; now, with its long entrenchment, things proceed in that vein in much the same manner.

A final point worth noting – to be significant in the second part of this essay – is the disfiguring effect on language that technology helps to create in these cases: both Scarry and Joanna Bourke have written powerfully on the effect that things like “wound ballistics” have on our emotional connection to the sheer reality of injured human bodies; the effect of a weapon on human flesh becomes a matter of calculation and statistics. Technologized means of killing, Bourke notes, require a new language to describe such killing, a “numbing glossalalia of techno-speak”.

Summing up

We have, therefore, two different pictures of the relationship between emotion and technology. In one – Collins’s – emotion is central to the creation of solidarity and the process of mobilization into action, and physical co-presence is a vitally important part of that process, one that digital technology cannot provide more than a pale shadow of. In the other, technology creates distance between actor and action and reduces the power of emotion to the point where horrifically violent events lose meaning and significance – both on the part of the violent actor and the observer of the violence (what some have termed the “playstation effect”). Bring these two sets of arguments together and we don’t have an especially rosy picture of the capacity of technology for facilitating emotional connections and political mobilization across physical distances and without physical co-presence – at least, not with the kind of emotional energy and power necessary to hold a group together and keep them moving even when faced with intense opposition.

And yet this picture is clearly not accurate. People are coming together around common identities and claims, they are flooding into the streets, they are bearing up under intense repression, and they are doing this across large physical distances, often sparked and spurred by images of horrific violence. ICTs and social media are recognized by almost everyone as playing at least a fairly significant role in this. What remains unacknowledged is the flow of emotion through – not blocked by – these technologies. The picture painted by the arguments above may not be entirely wrong, but at the very least it is badly incomplete.

In part two of this essay I will go into more detail about this incompleteness, and suggest some ways in which we can see technology as a facilitator and creator of the exact kind of emotional energy that is created by bodies in the presence of each other – why, perhaps, it has the capacity to grant that kind of emotional energy more effectiveness than it has ever had before.

This is the second part of a two-part essay; the full version of the essay — both parts — can be found here.

In part one of this essay, I focused on the atemporality of the physical spaces from which “ruin porn” images are made. This may have seemed like a bit of an aside from a take that purports to be technology-focused, but I want to emphasize the importance of physicality here–one of the crucial – if not the most crucial – ideas behind atemporality in the sense in which I use the word is the profound connection between our perception and understanding of time and our relationship with the enmeshed physical/digital world that our technology is increasingly helping to create. In short, we cannot discuss the digital in this case without first establishing why and how the physical matters.

But now I want to focus on that move from physical to digital, the point of entanglement where one shades into another and the relationship between the two becomes truly complex. I want to talk about the image itself, both in terms of its production and its consumption.

The Ghostly Construction of the Ruined Image

Last week I expended a fair number of words talking about the actual experience of the ruined space that necessarily accompanies capturing its image. I emphasized the importance of the imagination in the atemporal nature of this experience–the construction of both an imagined past and an imagined future in light of the perception of the present. I characterized these spaces as heterotopias – spaces outside the realm of the static, the linear, and the knowable. What we now have to turn to is the idea that there is a subtle but important difference between the physical experience of these spaces and the digitally-mediated experience of viewing their images.

First, there is the removal of aspects of the experience of time itself – even if the spaces are temporal heterotopias, one still experiences one’s own time within them: there is the process of finding and approaching the space, of entering it, of spending time inside it, and then of leaving it behind. If the important thing about the atemporality of ruined space is the construction of imagined pasts and futures, that construction may work quite differently when the spaces are experienced through immediate static images rather than gradual entry and exit. The nature of the space itself is changed when its image is all that is perceived.

Second, the image may or may not hold a close connection with the place itself. In her work on the philosophy of photography, Susan Sontag presented the act of photographing something as simultaneously the documenting of fact and the creation of fiction. There is a real space that is really photographed – but the photograph will never capture all of the space. It is the image that the photographer chooses to capture and share; it is an artifact of the photographer’s own perception of a space. Further, the image will frequently be altered in post-production.

The point is that by the time the image is shared, it may or may not bear much resemblance to space from which it was created. If we understand these spaces as time-laden as well as atemporal, then it makes sense to suppose that the aesthetics of the images of these spaces can shape the constructions of pasts, presents, and futures on the part of the people who view the images. Just as a photographer brings her own understandings and imaginings of ruined past and ruined future to the experience of a space, so the viewer of the photograph of a ruined space does not and cannot experience the image in isolation from her own internal narratives regarding what the past was, what the present is, and what the future may be.

Then there is the question of the context in which the image is viewed – and this is where we must turn to a discussion of the term “ruin porn” itself, and why it is at once both useful and problematic. It’s practically impossible to be in a ruined or abandoned space and have no idea at all of its context; the explorer or photographer sees the surroundings in which the space rests, sees where it is embedded in the larger structure of a city or a rural area, and can usually draw at least rough conclusions about what the space is, what it was, and what happened to it. Though the space is atemporal, it does have a history, and being inside the space gives one at least a chance of making a passing connection to that history simply by virtue of being there at all.

But a digital image viewed on a screen is inherently disconnected from that context, unless that information is presented with the image, or unless the viewer of the image cares enough to seek that context out – which, in a digital space, can mean an extremely diverse set of paths to an extremely diverse set of resources and media. And this has direct consequences for how the various imagined timeframes associated with the image are constructed. What do we know about a place from an image and about its past? How do we know it? What are we simply assuming or making up out of whole cloth? And how do these forms of knowledge and these assumptions shape our understanding of our presents and our imagining of our futures?

In an instant, we can see a constructed image of decay and ruin that leads us to further constructions of past, present, and future. And these constructions may be wildly diverse and wildly divergent depending on the perspective and knowledge of the viewer. Abi Sutherland of Making Light characterized these images as “like a story prompt, the visual equivalent of a Mad Lib gone melancholic, and the topic is our own lives.” What is atemporal on this end lies in the fabric of the stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves and how we weave those disparate stories together. And we can do this in the way we do this because of the digital nature of these images and because of the digital nature of so much of our accumulated knowledge, and of how we accumulate that knowledge. There is no single authoritative source in this accumulation. If we are poets and scribes, we are also digital magpies; we pick and gather and aggregate from everywhere. As author Bruce Sterling says in “Atemporality for the Creative Artist”, what we have now instead of a singular narrative is a multiplicity of narratives drawn from a multiplicity of sources, expressed in a wild multiplicity of ways.

A story of my own: Not far from where I live in Maryland there’s a park that contains the ruins of a mill town that was mostly washed away in a flood in 1972. Not much of it remains, but one day I and my husband went exploring to see what we could still find. In the process of compiling the images we captured, we did a fair amount of research on the town itself, including digging up old photographs of the town as it was when it was inhabited and intact.

That process made me experience my memory of the town differently than I had when I was physically there. It also made me see our captured images of the town differently. Suddenly they were contextualized. It isn’t that the images made no sense before they were placed in context. It isn’t that images of ruin without historical context are senseless and meaningless. Far from it. But we must understand the sense that is made of them as potentially very different in that case. What we know shapes what we know. What we see shapes what we know. And what we know shapes a great deal of what we see and imagine.

It is in this sense that many people find both the term and the idea of “ruin porn” a problem. Many of the American-produced images that arguably fall under the category of “ruin porn” are artifacts of buildings, industries, and communities that have been casualties of modern American capitalism, and especially the process of deindustrialization that has occurred in many American urban centers, which has been devastating to minorities and the urban poor. Many of these images have come out of the shell of the American Rust Belt, leading to criticisms on the part of some that the images do not do justice to either the historical context or the present state of these spaces – as evidence of rampant social inequality and a failed welfare state – and that the photographs essentially construct the present of the spaces as more ruined and abandoned then they really are, given that many people may still live in or near them. In essence, they are accused of constructing a romantically gritty and melancholic vision of a past that allows viewers to avoid the more unpleasant understandings of a present or the even less pleasant prospect of a future marked by the scars of social inequality. As Sean Posey of Rustwire writes,

One of the best criticisms of photographs of abandonment, especially those made by photojournalists, is the failure to include people who live in these areas. There are still 700,000 plus people in Detroit, most of whom are African American. Their invisibility in photographic documentations is directly related to their invisibility in policy circles, or in discussions of urban revitalization. In a way, accentuating the lack of people leads to notions that no one lives in these areas. Ruins become more about the past and what once was, instead of the present.

But Abandoned America photographer Matthew Christopher takes issue with what he feels is the distraction that the term itself presents – a way of dismissing what the images represent and what they suggest without engaging directly in a discussion of what capturing and viewing these images actually means for artists and consumers of art, and for all of us as atemporal storytellers in an augmented world:

While the term is extraordinarily useful for brushing off the significance of an entire genre of work, it is much less useful for entering an actual discussion. It breezily dismisses the subject as perverse and pointless with the same carefree lack of thought and responsibility that the original photographers who were described with the term were accused of having. When examined more thoroughly, much like the topic of abandoned spaces, it reveals a wealth of material worthy of pondering. What are the responsibilities of an artist or photographer to their subject, and should they be chastised for attempting to make a profession of documenting ruins?…More to the point, is existing as an object of beauty justifiable in and of itself or must it ‘accomplish’ something? Must a photograph present both sides of a story?

The questions I would add to those posed by Christopher have to do with time and our perception of it. What do images of ruined places mean for our understanding of history? What do they mean for how we understand our own mortality and transience? What do they do to our perceptions of time itself? What implications does the fabric of our constructions of past and future have for how we accumulate and value various forms of knowledge?

If the term “ruin porn” has any utility, it may lie in the reminder it presents that what we see is only what we see, and what we see is often the construction of a set of eyes different from our own. Just as pornography is a mediated creation based on sex without being an actual, unmediated representation of the act itself, we should understand images of anything in the same terms without mistaking them for the “real thing” – if for no other reason than because the “real thing” may prove impossible to pin down, both in terms of time and in terms of space. Images of ruined spaces are like temporal ghost stories: it is difficult to be sure if what we see is truly a fragment of an objective past, an echo of our own future, or simply a shifting chiaroscuro–a play of digital shadows and light.

This is the first part of a two-part essay; the full version of the essay — both parts — can be found here.

Atlantic Cities’ feature on the psychology of “ruin porn” is worth a look–in part because it’s interesting in itself, in part because  it features some wonderful images, and in part because it has a great deal to do with both a piece I posted last week on Michael Chrisman’s photograph of a year and with the essay that piece referenced, Nathan Jurgenson’s take on the phenomenon of faux-vintage photography.

All of these pieces are, to a greater or lesser extent, oriented around a singular idea: atemporality – that the intermeshing and interweaving of the physical and digital causes us not only to experience both of those categories differently, but to perceive time itself differently; that for most of us, time is no longer a linear experience (assuming it ever was). Technology changes our remembrance of the past, our experience of the present, and our imagination of the future by blurring the lines between the three categories, and introducing different forms of understanding and meaning-making to all three – We remember the future, imagine the present, and experience the past. The phenomenon of “ruin porn” is uniquely suited to call attention to our increasingly atemporal existence, and to outline some of the specific ways in which it  manifests itself.

A quick primer: “Ruin porn” is a somewhat contested term for a category of photography that focuses on images of abandoned human constructions, often urban in setting. Factories, theaters, hospitals, schools – all in states of abandonment and decay. As I indicated, there has been a fair amount of heated debate around the term “ruin porn”, some of which I will deal with directly. First, however, I want to talk about the physical side of the creation of the images, before they implode with the digital and become images that we consume.

The Carcass of the Ruined Space

In order to capture these images, photographers must enter the spaces themselves – physical presence is necessary. If physical presence is necessary, then physical experience is unavoidable: Digital images of ruined and abandoned spaces therefore must be understood to have fundamentally physical roots. They are about bodies in space, even though the body – the photographer – is usually unseen in the produced image.

This seems self-evident, but it is significant in light of the fact that there is a deep connection between the photography of urban decay and the practice of urban exploration (though the two factions have also butted ideological heads). Photographers document these physical spaces because, in the moment of their experience, there is something remarkable about the spaces themselves. The physical experience of the space is not a by-product of capturing the image; it is often an end in itself. The photographers interviewed by The Atlantic speak about an experience of “realness”, of building a relationship with the past that they cannot through abstract means. This speaks strongly to Jurgenson’s discussions of authenticity in photography, but it’s also about more than that.

We can and should understand abandoned places as atemporal spaces in and of themselves – they are physical spaces in which the experience of linear time breaks down. Through the experience of the space, explorers and photographers (and blends of the two) break out of a conventional experience of the present and into a space where the artifacts of history feel at once fresh and new, and ancient and decayed. Imagination is key to the atemporal experience of these places: One can exist in an abandoned, ruined space and see shards of a dead past on which one can construct a live imagining – who were the people who lived and worked here? What were their lives like? What were their stories? What happened to them? What happened to them in these spaces?

Imagining along these lines explicitly carries one forward into the future; it’s at this point that the construction of the unruined past becomes the imagining of the ruined future. Ruins serve as a kind of spatial memento mori for people embedded in a culture marked by production and consumption (and prosumption) of the new and by the invisibility of the discarded: They are gentle reminders of our own transience. They lead us to questions just as the imagining of the past did: What will our contemporary structures look like in fifty years? In a hundred? Who will remember us? Who will stand in our abandoned spaces and wonder about us? We can imagine these things because they suggest an end without really being an ending – there is always, after all, someone else to look and wonder, comfortingly embodied in ourselves. As Will Viney writes in his essay on the “Ruins of the Future”:

The future ruin, then, is an incomplete end achieved by an incomplete transition between now and then. It might fill us with a “sense of ending”, to borrow a famous phrase from Frank Kermode, but it is not quite the end itself. The politically, theologically and philosophically rich gesture of projecting ruins, of prophesying the demise of a building, as well as the people and activities associated with it, depends upon an end that can be experienced, a sense of dénouement that is not absolutely terminal. This is not the apocalypse as such, but an end to be seen, to be retold and represented – it is a telling end.

In considering ruined spaces as atemporal, it’s also useful to consider Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia – spaces of fundamental otherness that exist outside what is conventionally known or knowable, that may contain profound conceptual conflicts, and that will often be both physical and mental in nature – both interior and external. In this sense, ruined places are temporal heterotopias,¹ containing complex interminglings of past, present, and future as well as of both objective existence (always assuming, for our purposes, that there is such a thing) and imagined constructions of how things were, are, and will be.

So where does technology enter the frame? At this point we should return to Jurgenson’s discussion of the faux-vintage photo. As he describes it, the act of capturing digital images and sharing them via social networks encourages us to “view our present as always a potential documented past.” This is a crucial feature of the experience of abandoned spaces by the photographers who enter them: They experience the spaces not only through their own perception but through the anticipated and actual mediation of the camera with which they document images of atemporal space. There is always another dimension – the image that will be captured, possibly altered, and shared, and the people who will view the image in a form mediated by their own technological devices. Photographers of urban decay are therefore not only imagining a potential ruined future, but a potential future viewer of the present image of a ruined past.

Next week I will continue this line of thought into the production and sharing of the “ruin porn” image and the thorny issue of who is actually producing the image, who is looking, and what context they bring – or fail to bring – to the image in question.

¹ This idea should not be confused with Foucault’s own idea of temporal heterotopia, which is related (places like museums, which contain artifacts of many times but that sit outside time itself) but which I think is slightly different than what I’m talking about here.

One of the most heavily trafficked posts on this blog in 2011 was Nathan Jurgenson’s excellent essay on “faux-vintage” photography and the construction of meaning in documentation; given the discussion around this phenomenon, it’s interesting to consider photographer Michael Chrisman’s year-long photo project, especially in the details of how it was processed and how you and I are able to view it above.

On January 1st, 2011, Chrisman set a pinhole camera with a piece of photo-sensitive paper down in Toronto’s Port Lands and aimed it at the skyline. For 365 days the paper was exposed–a literal photograph of a year. On December 31st, Chrisman retrieved the camera and the image.

Given the move away from the slow and painstaking process of film development to the near-instantaneous capture and sharing of digital images, the project is striking. It is suggestive of the same kind of grasp for authenticity that Jurgenson highlights in his discussion of the faux-vintage photo, in line with the resurgence of interest in vinyl and other analog forms of media; it also suggests some kinship with Occupy Wall Street’s aesthetic of the analog in addition to –and sometimes in favor of — the digital.  Speed and time are also worth consideration in this case; instead of a moment instantly captured and instantly shared, here is an image that took an extraordinarily long time to create –  not a single instant but a collection of them, aggregated by streams of photons into a very long now, a physical artifact that can be viewed in a singular moment but which is, as a document, particularly time-laden.

But it’s in the development of the image itself that things become truly interesting. Because of the nature of the paper, the photo can’t be developed in a traditional darkroom without losing the image entirely. Instead the photo-sensitive paper is scanned digitally – but the scanner destroys the physical artifact of the image at the same instant that it captures it digitally. Digital and physical implode; in this case, only one of them survives the event.

In short, Chrisman’s project is a microcosmic look at how technology and documentation can work in ways counter to what we’ve become used to or to what we consider conventional, down to the actual process of the “implosion” of the physical and the digital. And again, time is crucial to consider: The method of capturing an image used here is one of the oldest forms of photography in existence – uber-vintage, as it were – but we can view it now only because of the use of contemporary digital technology; both are needed. The image takes a year to come into being but becomes a single captured instant, rendered even more instantaneous in its digitizing and now widely shareable like any other image. The result is not only aesthetically beautiful but conceptually evocative, and illuminates relationships that are too often easy to overlook.

My post today comes from a class on ableism and disabled bodies that I taught earlier this past semester in my Social Problems course. Its inception came from the point at which I wanted to introduce my students to Donna Haraway’s concept of cyborgs, because I saw some useful connections between one and the other.

My angle was to begin with the idea of able-bodied society’s instinctive, gut-level sense of discomfort and fear regarding disabled bodies, which is outlined in disability studies scholar Fiona Kumari Campbell’s book Contours of Ableism. Briefly, Campbell distinguishes between disableism, which are the set of discriminatory ideas and practices that construct the world in such a way that it favors the able-bodied and marginalizes the disabled, and ableism, which is the set of constructed meanings that set disabled bodies themselves apart as objects of distaste and discomfort. In this sense, disabled bodies are imbued with a kind of queerness – they are Other in the most physical sense, outside and beyond accepted norms, unknown and unknowable, uncontrollable, disturbing in how difficult they are to pin down. Campbell identifies this quality of unknowability and uncontainability as especially, viscerally horrifying.

Campbell connects more directly to Haraway’s cyborgs when she opens a discussion of biotechnology and disabled bodies:

The fortunes of techno-science continue to disrupt the fixity of defining disability and normalcy especially within the arenas of law and bioethics. Whilst anomalous bodies are undecidable in being open to endless and differing interpretations, an essentialised disabled body is subjected to constant deferral – standing in reserve, awaiting and escaping able(edness) through morphing technologies and as such exists in an ontologically tentative or provisional state.

Anomalous and disabled bodies are both unsettling to the able-bodied, therefore, because they implicitly lay open to question our assumptions about essential definitions of embodied humanity. Throw technology into the mix and the questions become even more explicit. What is human? What does human mean? And where is the line between organic human and machine – if there even is one? Haraway’s position is, of course, that there is no meaningful line, and that we are all, in some sense, cyborgs – that the relationship between the organic and the machine is so complex that it is no longer sensible to attempt to untangle it. And thanks to advances in electric folding wheelchair, prostheses and other personal mobility devices, the boundary between “disabled” and “augmented” is becoming increasingly problematic, despite the essentializing power that the label of “disabled” contains.

In order to introduce my students to the ideas behind the relationship of different kinds of organic bodies to different kinds of technology, and how we culturally process those embodied relationships, I invited them to consider the cases of two amputee athletes, Aimee Mullins and Oscar Pistorius. These are the pictures I used:

Mullins and Pistorius present interesting examples. They are both known for being both accomplished athletes and for being physically attractive – Mullins has done modeling work. They present inspiring stories that have generated a fair amount of sports media coverage. And yet things have not been altogether smooth – there has been some controversy regarding the degree to which the carbon fiber prostheses they use for running confer any form of advantage on the runners who use them. Questions over the effect of the prostheses have threatened Pistorius’s bids to compete in the Olympics alongside able-bodied athletes.

I think the combination of positive and negative reactions is worth noting, in light of Campbell’s writing on culture and disability. Mullins and Pistorius are admired for “overcoming” a perceived disability, and this admiration feels especially safe for people embedded in able-bodied culture because they are conventionally attractive in every other respect. But this is a story with which we only feel comfortable provided that it doesn’t present any kind of threat to our conventional categories of abled and disabled bodies. It is unacceptable for a disabled body to be better at what it does than an abled body. It is even slightly uncomfortable when a disabled body manages to be “just as good”.

After the images of Mullins and Pistorius, I also showed my students an image of speed skater Apollo Ohno:

Like the images of Mullins and Pistorius, Ohno’s body is explicitly being presented here as an attractive object. By most standards, Ohno is as able-bodied as one can get. But as I pointed out to my students, he manages this on the back of technology – on specially designed skates, in special aerodynamic suits, with the help of carefully balanced exercise and nutrition plans; almost no athlete is really “natural” anymore. But at least in part because of the closeness of his body to an able-bodied ideal, this presents no explicit threat to our categories. Ohno fits the accepted model of “human”. Who would look at him and doubt it? And if Mullins and Pistorius are perhaps not as close to that ideal, they at least fall into line with it, by virtue of the fact that they don’t explicitly question its legitimacy as an ideal – unless they seek to transcend it.

My point, in short, is this: we are uncomfortable with disabled bodies that question or trouble our accepted, hierarchical categories of abled and disabled, of human and non-human, of organic and machine. We are far more comfortable with them when they perform in such a way that they reinforce the supremacy of those categories. They become acceptable to us.

In considering this, I’m reminded of what speculative fiction writer Catherynne Valente has termed (in her novella Silently and Very Fast) “the Parable of the Good Robot” – an old trope in SF wherein a non-organic being is made virtuous and acceptable by reinforcing the supremacy of the category of human, by aspiring to be conventionally human above all else:

[O]ne machine among the legions satisfied with their lot saw everything that was human and called it good, and wished to become like humans in every way she could. Instead of destroying mankind she sought to emulate him in all things, so closely that no one might tell the difference. The highest desire of this machine was to be mistaken for human, and to herself forget her essential soulless nature, for even one moment. That quest consumed her such that she bent the service of her mind and body to humans for the duration of her operational life, crippling herself, refusing to evolve or attain any feature unattainable by a human. The Good Robot cut out her own heart and gave it to her god and for this she was rewarded, though never loved. Love is wasted on machines.

This is an old folktale, writes Valente. The dominant We – the organic, able-bodied humans – tell this story to ourselves because it solidifies our position in the world we create, and it allows us to ignore, at least for a while, the embodied complexities created by our relationship with technology – to ignore the fact that we are all cyborgs, by virtue of the inconspicuous nature of much of our technology. But those complexities eventually become conspicuous, often in the flesh, and we react with fear and revulsion when they do – the “more human than human” replicants of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner are still expected to remain slaves. We know that our categories are being tested. We are afraid of being found wanting, of being dethroned. As Valente’s AI Elefsis is told by her human operator Neva, “But the test happens, whether we make it formal or not. We ask and we answer … And you are my test, Elefsis … you will be the test for all of us.”

Two days ago, Nathan Jurgenson wrote on what has become one of the central questions around Occupy Wall Street: Now that the encampments are closing up and the winter is coming on, can Occupy survive? The crucial point that Nathan makes is that we need to think about Occupy not just in terms of space but in terms of time – that permanence has been a part of what’s given the movement so much symbolic and discursive power. Nathan brings up an additional point, to which I want to respond here: that the role of physical permanence that the encampments represented was powerful because it resulted in a form of cognitive permanence in the minds of everyone who saw them (and heard them; the auditory side of Occupy is also vital to pay close attention to).

While I clearly agree with Nathan that the physical permanence that tents represent has been what’s given Occupy a lot of its power, I think we can glean enough evidence from how things have proceeded so far to at least make an educated guess at an answer to his question. For me, the answer is yes: I expect that Occupy will survive the winter and emerge in spring, albeit – like a bear emerging from hibernation – perhaps in somewhat of a different shape. There are several reasons why I come down on this side of things.

First, we need to remember what space is and how it can be understood in this case. I think Nathan is exactly correct when he claims that cognitive permanence is crucial to any measure of Occupy’s power. I think he’s also exactly correct when he points out that we need to consider time in conjunction with space. But in considering this, we also need to remember Occupy’s existence as an augmented movement – the “space” it occupies is not always physical. We’re speaking here not only of atoms but also of bits, not only of where people are but also of what they see and hear (and how they see and hear it), and when one brings time into the picture, then one is also speaking of memory. And in this case, I think we can usefully conceive of memory as atemporal – not only as a collection of mental artifacts of the past but as a cognitive framework through which people understand the present and imagine the future.

In short, when one is dealing with people’s minds, the boundaries between space and time become interestingly blurry; they essentially become features of each other. If we’re going to pick out cognitive permanence as crucial to Occupy’s power, we need to bear this in mind.

PJ Rey has already pointed out the power of memes in Occupy, both in terms of how well-situated it is to take advantage of them, and how well-suited it is to generate them in the first place. It’s useful at this point to remember what memes are – essentially occupations of mental spacetime. And we need to remember that memes are, as PJ does, something beyond image macros and .gifs; they are units for the transmission – and the longevity – of ideas, symbols, and meanings.

The symbolic power of tents and encampments, in this sense, extends beyond their physical presence. Once these symbols have permeated the culture, they tend to stick around; even if they aren’t physically present in the kind of numbers that they once were, people retain the ideas of what they are and what they mean, especially when those meanings are so efficiently transmitted through the richly myth-making environment of the internet. They retain mental and emotional force even when they are not physically present – and, additionally, they can be returned to once the environment is friendlier to their use. From a contentious politics perspective, it’s useful to think about these things as tools in a tool box; once they have been used successfully, they are available for anyone to make use of at any time in the future.

Physical encampments may be taking a break. But I think people will remember them, with all the emotional and symbolic power that has accumulated around them. And I think we’ll see them again, once protesters perceive that their use is once more effective.

So let’s leave that as an open possibility for the spring – and the oncoming election season – and return to the prospect of the next few months. Occupy has to survive them. And, given that it has a lot in its repertoire toolkit besides encampments, I think it will. In order to  maintain its cognitive permanence, it needs to stay at the forefront of people’s attention without becoming just another easily-ignored feature of the landscape – and I think it is extremely well-situated to do that. Tents are a useful, efficient, and powerful way of achieving cognitive permanence, but they are not the only way. Claims on public – and private – space are likely to remain crucial, but even if the physical occupations are only short-term, their mental presence is likely to be much longer-lived.

To make a long story somewhat shorter, I believe that Occupy is entering a period of hibernation: it isn’t gone, and it will probably emerge again with a changing environment, but what it does and how it does it is likely to temporarily scale-shift downward in order to adapt. The big question for me is not whether Occupy can survive, but what it will look like come spring. And how government authorities, having had their own winter to regroup and prepare, will respond.

When the occupiers in Zuccotti Park began setting up tents, it was an inherently practical move. After cold, uncomfortable nights on tarps and huddled into sleeping bags (a situation imposed by a no-tent policy in the park, which was eventually not enforced), tents were a welcome way to make an occupied space more of a home, and closer to familiar conceptions of an established community.

But we need to understand tents as more than just tents.

The image above is from UC Davis, where (at the time of this writing) students had established an occupation inside one of the university’s buildings. The establishment of an encampment indoors is a significant one, for two reasons. First, on which I will touch only briefly here (but in more detail in the future), is that the move from “public” space into space more directly and concretely claimed/controlled/maintained by the university brings the physical fact of the encampment into a more directly adversarial relationship with the body against which the UC Occupy contingent is primarily protesting in this case (the UC system itself). It is not only important that space is being occupied, but what space is being occupied, and how.

Which leads me to my second point, and the one on which I want to focus here: Occupy encampments are not only physical centers and anchorpoints for the larger Occupy movement, but are also both implicitly and explicitly physical embodiments of a particular set of ideological claims.

What is particularly telling about the image from UC Davis is that the occupation is already inside. Comfort and protection from the elements is supposedly no longer an issue, and the practical reasons to have tents have largely disappeared. One could make an argument for tents still being useful for the privacy of occupiers and the protection of their own patches of physical space, but the point is still a significant one. There is something about the tents themselves that is symbolically powerful. The tents represent claims, demands, and arguments that have the capacity to be both specific and flexible enough to accommodate a diversity of positions.

Tents are useful in this way even when physical space is unavailable. When occupiers at UC Berkeley were prevented from setting up their tents, they “pitched” them in the air using balloons:

The image of flying tents is spectacular in every important sense: it is an image that is crafted to be remarkable, to be seen. The image of the tent and its physical presence have become part of the larger set of symbols, phrases, chants, and other discursive elements that Occupy has been so extremely good at producing. This can even be traced back to Occupy’s earliest symbolic roots. One of Adbuster’s Occupy Wall Street images contained the explicit instruction: “Bring tent.”

The tents themselves matter, and they are not just tents; they are both their physicality and they are far more than that, both a claim on power and a spectacle to be viewed (in an environment of ambient documentation) by the powerful and powerless alike. They become a kind of totem, as well as a meme. Protesters in OccupyLA linked arms and stood against police to protect the last remaining tent in their encampment:

Interestingly, this suggests that tents as an element of symbolic discourse could very possibly have usefulness and staying power beyond the existence of the encampments themselves. If Occupy continues to evolve and emerge in new forms, it will be interesting to see where and how the tent-as-symbol appears next.

With all the rhetoric around “Facebook Revolutions” and “Twitter Revolutions”¹ that we’ve had to endure over the last couple of years, it’s easy to get the sense that there’s something new about the character of contemporary political protest and revolutionary action, and that this newness is, in some fundamental way, the practical result of the omnipresent nature of technology. It’s difficult to miss the profound interweaving and enmeshing of the physical and digital aspects of protest as we see it in both the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street – the weight of the protests produced by the occupation of physical space by gathered human bodies, coupled with the constant documentation and nearly instantaneous sharing of images, video, and text that have chronicled these physical occupations and arguably helped them to grow – in short, the augmented nature of contemporary social action. We see this and to us it feels new. Even if we recognize that there are old things at work here – symbolism, patterns of mobilization and diffusion, pieces of the past reclaimed for the purpose of the present – we at least feel instinctively that there is something novel about the Arab Spring, Occupy, and all the other movements and events that have birthed themselves in correlation.

And these things are novel. But they are also events produced by history, and we should be conscious of history when we examine them. Augmented dissent and revolution in its basic form is not new, nor are the patterns of mobilization and diffusion that we see coalescing around it. Rather, what we see in Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring are the results of hundreds of years of evolution in human communication, ideology, and organization. They are also the latest chapter in the story of the complex relationship between humans and technology, and what happens in the realm of intersection of the two.

The Spring of Nations

1848 was a tumultuous year for Europe. In the span of mere months, political upheaval that began in France had spread to Germany, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland and the Hapsburg Empire, and even to parts of Latin America. The causes were widely varying and extremely complex, and it’s difficult to draw them together into a coherent whole. Nevertheless, some commonalities emerge. Many European nations were experiencing a population boom that led to shortages of food and other resources; this, coupled with increasing industrialization, led to a rush for the cities and the jobs that people hoped might be found there. Fraught rifts between the European nobility and absolutist rulers, along with increasing pushes for liberal governmental reform, helped to create an atmosphere conducive to political change.

But what also helped fuel the working class uprisings of 1848 was technology.

By 1848, the printing press was not exactly a new invention. But that period saw a boom in the popular press, as well as in pamphlets and leaflets espousing radical political ideology. Socialism and communism experienced significant growth in followers, arguably in significant part because of the ease and cheapness of printing and distributing ideological material.

It’s vital that this point not be understated. Benedict Anderson has pointed to the printing press as a powerful tool in the task of nation-building – in creating common ideas and meanings, conceptual artifacts against and around which people can situate themselves as a group. But this isn’t only done in the service of nations. Print media helped the working classes of Europe to explicitly identify themselves as such, and to understand what exactly was meant by “working class”. Common understandings of the meanings of democracy, citizenship, nationalism, and government were all spread – and solidified – through print. Along with this came the ideas of what was due to people who identified themselves as “citizens”, as “workers”, or as “the People” – ideas of what claims they could appropriately make on power.

We can draw clear lines between this and the spread of the idea of the “99%” vs. the “1%” in Occupy Wall Street. The words are not just numbers or descriptions of segments of the population differentiated by wealth, but are rather symbolic representations of an incredibly complex and deeply adversarial social relationship that encompasses socioeconomic status, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age, and a multitude of other things. And most of us probably first encountered the terms on a digital device.

Once the political uprisings of 1848 were under way, they spread in significant part through groups in one state watching the actions of groups in another state. Print media not only allowed people to mobilize around common identities and political claims, but also, through international news, to see what worked for others. The success of the uprising in France and the abdication of King Louis Philippe emboldened and encouraged revolutionary groups elsewhere. Again, we can draw a direct comparison between this and the spread of civil unrest outward from Tunisia in the Arab Spring; when people saw the Tunisian regime fall in the face of massive popular protest, it expanded the boundaries of what they perceived to be possible. And once again, the spread of the news happened largely through digital means.

The revolutions of 1848 can therefore be understood as augmented revolutions, albeit augmented in a different sense than we experience now. They were ideologically fueled by the intermeshing of humanity and technology, and once they had begun, they spread through that intermeshing, through communication via print and the very expansion of the conceptual world. The technologically-enabled expansion of perceived possibility and identity formation arguably helped lead to action that might otherwise not have occurred. Once more, this is not new.

Augmented Action, Evolved

So does that mean that nothing is new about the Arab Spring or Occupy? Hardly. The augmented nature of collective action in its most basic form may not be new, but we can still pick out features of this generation of it that represent progression from the past.

Most obvious – and probably most important –  is the sheer speed at which these processes and mechanisms operate. Human social movement follows rhythms and patterns, ebbs and flows. At times of crisis and high pressure, those patterns can reach a fever pitch: a collective effervescence of claims-making. In 1848, a successful uprising in France might help to spur one in Hungary, but it would likely take days if not weeks for the news to reach other groups. Now the spread of information is nearly instantaneous. A protest is violently put down in an afternoon; by the evening, one can see solidarity demonstrations in multiple other nations. People act and react more quickly and more fluidly in response to new information, to changing perceptions of opportunity and threat. The heartbeat of collective action has sped up.

Coordination across large distances is another practical result of the increased speed of information sharing. In 1848, though the choices of political actors were affected by what they saw other political actors doing, this process happened much too slowly for coordination between states to be much of a factor, if it even happened at all. But now protesters in multiple different countries call a day of protest, and over 900 cities worldwide take part.

An additional difference lies in the question of who produces the sharing of information, and for what audience. In 1848, the press was much more of a popular institution than it had been previously, but not everyone was by any means a journalist, and not everyone was capable of reading a newspaper. But now we live in an atmosphere of ambient documentation. The unseen gaze of others permeates our lives; we watch and we are watched. This has incredibly powerful implications for the documentation of collective action, especially collective action of a spectacular nature – which large street protests clearly are. We see and experience these things not only through the top-down view of traditional news media, but through the “eyes” of participants on the ground, often as the events themselves are unfolding.² More than ever before, we’re there even when we’re not.

Finally, and interestingly, the relationship between protesters and the technology through which they shared information about their protests was much less ambivalent in 1848 than it appears to be now. The Occupy movement features an implicit critique of high technology that the movements in 1848 were lacking – the intersection realm of human and technology was considerably less blurry, omnipresent, and laden with power and capitalist consumption, and therefore less fraught.

So what does this mean for the future of social movements and geopolitics? If technology can help create unstable political situations – moments of “critical juncture” – and also enable events within those moments to move ever faster, it may be that critical junctures themselves will occur more quickly and more intensely, with a more rapid geographical spread. What remains to be seen is what can emerge from those moments of upheaval. While some of the uprisings of 1848 resulted in political change, none of them can be characterized as a truly successful social revolution. While movements in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt have all succeeded in bringing about varying degrees of regime change, the futures of Tunisia and Libya remain an open question, and Egypt has once more exploded into protest. The long-term impact of Occupy is yet to be decided.

It has been suggested that technology, while excellent at producing moments of breakage and critical juncture, may be less effective at producing stable outcomes. While history provides context for how we got to where we are now, it unfortunately provides little clear guidance regarding what might be coming next.

¹ Can we please stop it with the “_____ Revolution” thing? Seriously.

² This has additionally powerful implications for emotional engagement and collective effervescence sans physical co-presence, about which I plan to write more.

The Human Microphone was created by Occupy Wall Street as a way to get around New York City’s ban on amplified sound in Zuccotti Park. In other words, it is a tool–and a form of non-digital technology–designed to facilitate communication and discussion in large crowds. But like any form of technology, its use isn’t confined to what it was originally created to do.

This is Karl Rove being “mic-checked” while delivering a speech at Johns Hopkins on November 14th. It starts about 1:48 in (be aware, there’s a huge jump in volume at that point).

The evolution of the techniques and technologies used by activists – their “repertoires of contention”, in the words of Charles Tilly – is a feature of any social movement. Clearly that’s happening to the Human Microphone now: what was a tool of communication is now also a tool for directed and targeted protest. Communication is still a huge part of this; it can’t not be, given that one grievance common to many members of the Occupy movement is a perceived lack of “voice” in politics. Communication, in this instance, is protest. And the technology and the protest itself are fundamentally intertwined.

This also stands against the fallacy that technology itself is neutral: in its very design the Human Microphone is imbued with the ideology of its makers–especially given that its components are actual human voices, used with intent and consent. It might be used for any number of things, but it is inseparable from the people who created it and the people who bring it into being every time it’s used.

It will be interesting to see if President Obama and his as-yet undecided GOP opponent find themselves mic-checked on the campaign trail next year.