Hybrid Media Activism: Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms

Description

This book is an extensive investigation of the complexities, ambiguities and shortcomings of contemporary digital activism. The author deconstructs the reductionism of the literature on social movements and communication, proposing a new conceptual vocabulary based on practices, ecologies, imaginaries and algorithms to account for the communicative complexity of protest movements. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on social movements, collectives and political parties in Spain, Italy and Mexico, this book disentangles the hybrid nature of contemporary activism. It shows how activists operate merging the physical and the digital, the human and the non-human, the old and the new, the internal and the external, the corporate and the alternative. The author illustrates the ambivalent character of contemporary digital activism, demonstrating that media imaginaries can be either used to conceal authoritarianism, or to reimagine democracy. The book looks at both side of algorithmic power, shedding light on strategies of repression and propaganda, and scrutinizing manifestations of algorithms as appropriation and resistance. The author analyses the way in which digital activism is not an immediate solution to intricate political problems, and argues that it can only be effective when a set of favourable social, political, and cultural conditions align. Assessing whether digital activism can generate and sustain long-term processes of social and political change, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching radical politics, social movements, digital activism, political participation and current affairs more generally. Cover......Page 1 Half Title......Page 4 Series Page......Page 5 Title Page......Page 6 Copyright Page......Page 7 Dedication......Page 8 Contents......Page 10 List of tables......Page 12 Acknowledgements......Page 14 Introduction: The quest for communicative complexity within social movements......Page 16 PART I: Ecologies......Page 46 1 Media ecologies and the media/movement dynamic......Page 48 2 An ecological exploration of the ‘Anomalous Wave’ movement......Page 70 3 An ecological exploration of the #YoSoy132 movement......Page 93 PART II: Imaginaries......Page 118 4 Media imaginaries and the media/movement dynamic......Page 120 5 The authoritarian sublime of the Five Star Movement......Page 139 6 The technopolitical sublime of the Spanish Indignados......Page 156 PART III: Algorithms......Page 178 7 The mutual shaping of algorithms and social movements......Page 180 8 Algorithm as propaganda, repression, and paranoia......Page 194 9 Algorithm as knowledge, appropriation, and resistance......Page 207 Conclusions: hybrid media activism......Page 218 Index......Page 230