With Italian media being largely compromised by political parties, cooperative companies, media and business magnates and financial strongholds, Italians have remained with only two real outlets for their frustration and disillusionment with contemporary politics and society, the Internet and satire. Blunders, scandals and a wide array of political issues that leak out into the public sphere instantly reach the web, where people vent their anger or have a (bitter) laugh at the guilty party by leaving comments on Twitter or circulating satirical cartoons on Facebook. And then there is satire, a particularly popular means of political criticism and contestation in Italy. Of course it is not new, and has been applied for a long time in the democratic world. Yet, with the various political scandals of the past year, as well as Monti’s harsh austerity policies and rigid attitude, seemingly unconcerned with the disastrous effects of these measures on the lives of many Italians, political satire in Italy is increasingly putting the finger on the sore spots, serving as a sort of mediatized vox populi.

And political satire is increasingly becoming a site of contestation. In mid-February, for example, Maurizio Crozza – best known for the satirical impersonations of politicians during his ten minute sketch on the weekly current affairs program, Ballarò, aired on the most left-centered of the three state-run RAI channels – was attacked by members of the audience at the yearly musical festival of San Remo. At the end of an unflattering imitation of a Silvio Berlusconi trying to buy the Italians’ votes, with which Crozza started his performance, people shouted that he should leave the stage, and that there should be no politics that night, making it apparently impossible for the comedian to continue. Although Crozza seemed affected and offended by the attack, and nearly walked off the stage, necessitating the intervention of host Fabio Fazio, it is likely that the entire scene was set up so as to boost audience ratings. Nevertheless, it shows how important satire has become in debates about politics, and in society as a whole.

Satire mostly surfs the web, though. One comedian in particular has drawn advantages from this, creating his own, grassroots political movement which communicates and organizes itself primarily on the web, completely knocking over traditional politics: Beppe Grillo. After a career in commercial television and (initially) without any apparent political conviction, in the early 2000s, Grillo began traveling across Italy, performing in theaters and out on the street where he unloaded his anger over ecological issues, warfare and Berlusconi. In 2005, he created, along with Gianroberto Casaleggio, an Internet entrepreneur who eventually became the guru behind Grillo’s “5 star Movement”, the Beppegrillo.it blog. In 2007 and 2008 the duo organized the so-called V-day (where the ‘V’ stands for ‘vaffanculo’, the Italian F-word), an unofficial protest day against traditional politics – from left to right – that took place across Italy. Grillo indeed claims to promote neither left-wing nor right-wing ideologies. (Hence, his recent opening up to the neo-fascist Casa Pound movement in the name of non-partisanship.)

It is mostly on the web that Grillo’s anti-politics take shape. Journalist Giuliano Santoro – author of an interesting study of the Grillo phenomenon (Un grillo qualunque. Il movimento 5 stelle e il populismo digitale nella crisi dei partiti italiani, 2012) – claims that Facebook in particular favors Grillo in that it creates “a bond between the Comedian and the People which makes possible keeping together […] both the propagandist strength of the “logo” that is so typical of the classical relation of consumerism, and the emotive and intimate power of ‘friendship,’ typical of social networks such as Facebook.” Put simply, Facebook allows Grillo to provide people with a sense of identity and belonging to community, a “product” which he can sell without having to gain the consumer’s confidence, considering his notoriety and Facebook’s capacity to create online – and subsequently also real – communities. And what Grillo has to sell, sells well, particularly since the political scandals of 2012. Recent opinion polls indicated that the “5 star Movement” is gaining support and may do well in the upcoming elections, due also to Grillo’s so-called “Tsunami tour” across the peninsula, these past few weeks. Grillo’s returning to old-fashioned street politics and online democracy seems to be paying off.

Yet, there is a big downside to the “5 star Movement,” and to Grillo’s character. His blog, for example, is not really a blog, as Grillo himself admitted: it is mostly a site of communication and propaganda, with no interaction between Grillo and his followers. Nor did the two highly successful V-days originate “from below.” Rather, they were programmed and effectively “sold” by the Casaleggio-Grillo duo. Similarly, Grillo’s political rallies – which are often filmed and put online –are more a one-man show, which, again, do not promote interaction but simply reproduce the stand-up comedian format of television. Accordingly, the people who attend these meetings are spectators rather than demonstrators. His activities, therefore, represent no more than a shift from television to new media. Things apparently change, but are essentially the same.

The obsession with new media reached a climax when it was decided that people could present themselves as candidates for the 5 star Movement primaries in 2012 by uploading videos of themselves to the Internet, where they would receive votes, a form of democracy from below. But this failed horribly as only a very small number of Italians voted, which was to be expected, with Italy still lagging behind in Internet usage.

Grillo’s hierarchical and undemocratic nature, finally, was revealed when he expelled a regional and a communal councilor of the “5 star Movement” in the city of Bologna. One of them had participated in the abovementioned TV program Ballarò, a decision which clashed with Grillo’s number one rule of complete absence from the mainstream media, although he does not always apply that rule to himself. In October 2012, he pulled off a publicity stunt as he swam the Straits of Messina for the launch of his local election campaign in Sicily, where the “5 star Movement” would be very successful.

Clearly, Grillo is afraid of losing control. Or maybe he just doesn’t like it when someone draws attention away from him, as also became clear after a member of the “5 star Movement” was elected mayor of Parma during local elections in 2012, leading to polemics with Grillo who tried to dictate his next moves. The Movement does indeed come across very much as an army of little soldiers, who are dismissed as soon as they step out of line.

So how would they govern Italy, should they win the elections? Of course, they won’t, but if they would, Grillo-Casaleggio would probably dissolve the movement. It is indeed likely that Grillo has no intention to govern, but simply wants to obstruct other parties and bring about some kind of revolution. At a local level, though, the Movement is doing well, which illustrates an increasing call for local activism and participant democracy, due not in the least to a discontent with European politics in these times of crisis and austerity.

Grillo’s success also shows how traditional politics are being affected ever more by the power of satire and democracy via the web. In a way, this is not very surprising, Italy having been run for nearly 20 years by a man many consider a clown, and who has indeed built much of his popularity on the Italians’ (bad) sense of humor.

Yet, to a certain degree, Grillo’s assault on the political caste is a good thing. In a country where traditional political parties have exploited ordinary citizens for far too long, distracting them with semi-nude ballerinas or simply brainwashing them through television, it is time people wake up and smell the coffee. But I’m afraid Grillo is not our man. Although many of the things he says are true, they do no more than feed grudges. Grillo does not offer any real alternative, so that voting for him is not a vote for something but against, and that is never really productive.

On 17 September 2012, Occupy Wall Street celebrated its first anniversary. In spite of the usual problems facing bottom-up political activism in the long term, on which Pamela Brown reported a few months ago, OWS is still alive and kicking. Protest is clearly ‘in’, as the global protests on 14 November 2012 also demonstrated. But social movements and political protest have also made it to the screen, as memories of protest and rebellion reverberated both at the 69^th Venice Film Festival and at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, with Olivier Assayas’ movie about the French 1968 protests (Après mai), Robert Redford’s interpretation of a former Weather Underground member in The company you keep, and Shola Lynch’s documentary about the black civil rights activist Angela Davis, Free Angela & All Political Prisoners.

Characteristic of OWS as well as other recent protests across the world, notably the Arab Spring, is the role of social media and the subsequent global reach of the protests. In Why it’s Kicking off Everywhere. The New Global Revolutions (Verso, 2012), BBC Newsnight economics editor and journalist Paul Mason narrates the course of events in both the Arab world and in a number of European countries since the start of the financial crisis, and analyzes the role and impact of social media in these protests. Starting with the Tahrir Square uprisings, “a revolution planned on Facebook, organized on Twitter and broadcast to the world via YouTube,” Mason takes us back to the 2008 clashes in Greece and Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ in 2009, when the images of a dying Neda Agha-Soltan – discussed recently on this blog by Lisa Lipscomb – made it across the globe in a matter of minutes. Through citizen journalism, Neda became a “global icon” and a martyr, provoking a “thread of solidarity and collective mourning” both online and in the streets (see also Aleida and Corinna Assmann’s chapter in Memory in a Global Age).

In fact, globalization processes and technological developments have changed our experience and sensibility of time and space, giving rise to a “memory boom” where – in the attempt to regain a sense of community belonging – we turn to memory. Both individual and collective memories are, however, increasingly structured within national and global frames and shaped by new media technologies. As Lipscomb demonstrates in her article, these allow people not only to witness and share (global) events in a more direct and personal manner, but also to produce memory themselves, e.g. by shooting home videos. In other words, new media empower people by ‘arming them with advanced means to construct collective identities’ (José van Dijck, Mediated Memory in the Digital Age, Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 172).

These bottom-up, horizontal forms of communication offer an interactive relation to the past, present and future, which emerges at the interface of individual/local and collective/global experience, and in the mutual shaping of media and memory. The ‘mediated memories’ that are thus produced travel across borders and circulate beyond nation-states to be reconfigured – transnationally and digitally – in a global and digital memory field, as with the mobile witnessing of Neda’s death, but we may also think of the 2005 London bombings, where mobile camera phones provided personal, communicative memory of the incidents by survivors and witnesses (see Anna Reading’s article in a special issue of Memory Studies).

The strength of social media lies not only in its capacity to create mediated memories, though: they have also moved what Mason calls ‘the collective mental arena’ (p. 137) out into the real world. Put differently, mass audiences are constituted through connectivity rather than “collectivity,” so that remembering becomes “a matter of navigation in and through emergent and shifting complexities of connections in and through media” (Andrew Hoskins in his introduction to the above mentioned special issue, p. 272). Indeed, the role of Facebook and Twitter in political and social life is ever more important, both in terms of expressing solidarity and forging (online) bonds, and in terms of denouncing violence or injustice, for example by reporting or shooting it with a (video) camera or a mobile phone. I was, for example, stunned to see pictures on Facebook of wounded Palestinian citizens in a hospital in Gaza, after Israeli air raids in early November 2012, including the shocking photograph of a man carrying away a small boy whose leg had just been blown off. Public opinion is also often measured according to what people say on Twitter, a modern ‘vox populi’ where citizens can finally vent their emotions or attack politicians and policy makers.

Has the web then substituted more traditional forms of protest, such as demonstration marches, occupations, sit-ins? If the answer is yes, this may not necessarily be a bad thing, in my opinion. After all, events are ever more ‘media events’ and ‘digital events’, and experiences are no longer exclusively local or global.

As Sandy hit the east coast, many of us were watching the situation closely. This meant watching not only big media but also Facebook and Twitter, where storm-related activity was plentiful. The social media news was personal, reporting on the storm not as a large-scale atmospheric system but as the weather outside the living room window. We know whose power was out, whose wasn’t; we know who saw flooding and who just saw rain; we know who was drinking wine and who was drinking beer. We even know approximately when many went to bed. Stories in big media and even in blogspace, on the other hand, tended toward the documentary: ConEdison transformer explosion on the lower east side; flooding up to 14th Street; partial building collapse on 8th Avenue.

While the latter group may have been much more informative in the conventional sense, the former group was much more illuminating. True, the “news” version of Sandy was formally conventional, but even in the details it was macroscopic and opaque. Each detail in big media was merely a data point supporting the larger context, the bigger story. Eighth Avenue, for example, was just another dot in New York City and, more generally, the Atlantic coast, while on social media, Eighth Avenue belonged to the people living there; it became a geography all its own, rather than a mathematical point in a much larger geography. In the news, Sandy was a national meteorological event. In social media, Sandy was the particular experience of an unusual afternoon and evening by a particular community.

As someone experiencing the event from afar, the difference was stark. It was difficult to emotionally reconcile the two accounts, to see them as treating one and the same reality. It still feels as though the connective tissue linking macronews to microblogging is missing. Where is the ontological middle ground? Does our cultural metaphysics allow for it?

Of particular interest, in any case, were the Sandy photos, which comprised three genres of reporting.

News media images. The news coverage of the event provided the predictable series of disaster shots—cars floating in a parking-garage-turned-bathtub, video of a transformer explosion, a building missing a facade, and so on. These are ruthlessly documentary, but also highly selective. They didn’t show the limits of the disaster, only the disaster itself, excluding any of the terrain of non-disaster or non-damage from coverage. These lacked context. They covered the territory, but only its physical geography—completely excluded were its emotional, political, and cultural geography and context. The house without a facade becomes, at best, our own house without a facade. Whether the resulting cognitive image is just the house in question or our own house, the view is impoverished in either case in relation to the totality that is Sandy and its place in our world.

Personal social media images. On social media the expected cell-phone-out-window shots were plentiful, indirectly showing Sandy from the perspective of individual nighttime routines. These were intimate and visceral, giving a deep sense of the experience of the storm, of what the massive weather system is and feels like at the level of personal experience. There was some damage, but also a great deal of non-damage, and perhaps more importantly, much that fell in between these extremes.

Meme-style social media images. There were also, however, images on social media that operated in an entirely different way from either of the other two groups. One such image gave the satellite view of Sandy superimposed over a to-scale map of Europe, rather than the Atlantic coast. Another showed a massive storm overtaking the Statue of Liberty with help from, thanks to some Photoshop work, Godzilla, invading alien flying saucers, and monsters of various stripes from Hollywood films.

At first glance, the meme-style images are more guilty than the other two of showing Sandy out of context. But I suspect that this first glance is misleading.

Every moment is marked by a particular set of crises, and the moment of Sandy’s arrival is no different in this regard. Sandy arrives after the beginning of a new millenium beset with wars following terrorist attacks, a recent history of natural disasters and calamities with political importance, worries about and analysis of the accelerating effects of globalization, a growing worldwide public consciousness about climate change, a global economic collapse, and the resurgence of worlwide sectarian, student, and populist movements of various (and at times novel) stripes.

Other Sandy juxtapositions are to a U.S. national election with large implications for the future of many of the issues above, to ongoing handwringing about the viability of the E.U. along various axes, and ongoing instability and violence of various forms in the Middle East.

While both the highly personal social media form of reporting and the more conventional mass media news reporting of Sandy drew the circle of knowledge and understanding around the storm in geographically local ways—micro-local (“my living room”) in the case of the personal images and macro-local (“the U.S. Atlantic coast”) in the case of mainstream mass media, the meme-style images drew the circle globally.

The image of the storm over Europe pulled the two geographies into dialogue with one another and into dialogue with a global discussion on climate change and its impacts. It drew metaphorical parallels between the storms (meteorological and otherwise) currently affecting the United States and the storms of various stripes that have overtaken the E.U. and its member states. Just as importantly, it brought commenters from from around the world into policy conversation that placed Sandy properly in larger geopolitical and environmental contexts. Neither of the other genres of representation or reporting on Sandy did this. In this particular monadic image, Sandy was transformed—from a meterological event affecting the American northeast into a global event directly related to public issues, concerns, and choices shared across continents.

The image Sandy overtaking the Statue of Liberty accompanied by various monsters of film, not all of them American, situated Sandy within the global cultural imaginary, referring not just to a metaphorical understanding, but also to what Sandy portends. Once again, the event was internationalized. Here, however, it was also fictionalized (and yet, as process, nominally realized at the same time). The image drew attention to the narrativity, indeed even the restlessness of events; it laid bare the fictive, evolving, interpretive, and power-entangled natures of memory and experience. It recast Sandy as part of story that is being collectively written by humanity right now, rising action in a contested plot that begins with the industrial revolution and whose articulation and end remain unavoidably open—but always with the clear potential for—and claims about—historical, climactic, and indeed various forms of monstrous catastrophe.

The documentation of the event as I saw it inverted the conventional wisdom about news, reporting, and knowledge. The images and details in the mass media told us the least about Sandy; in them, the storm became another in a long line of archetypal storms, and the northeast of the U.S. was cast in a familiar and by now largely information-poor role: the dual-natured indomitable-American-community and community-of-victims. The storm, the locale, and the population might have been anywhere, at any time. The entirety lacked specificity, and thus historical purchase, despite itself.

The personal out-the-window photos on social media, though this genre often faces criticisms of facility and narcissism, were practically informative, giving details of the experience of this storm as separate from others, and of particular people who were not, as a result, demoted to the uninformative role of human statistics. As was not generally the case with news media coverage, using these it was possible to piece together an understanding of the specific nature and level of damage in various areas, of the degree of the emergency and the relative difficulty of recovering, as well as the general mood of this population in this storm.

But the whimsical and unashamedly constructed meme-like images of the storm told us perhaps the most, in their composition, by their circulation, and in the comments that followed them. These drew the storm into the dialogue on policy and the policy difficulties that we increasingly face as simultaneously local and global publics. They revealed as much or more about the consciousnesses and moods of these in New York, in New Jersey, but also in the U.K., in Finland, and on the Pacific Rim, than did the montage of camera phone photos. They drew our attention to the historicity of this storm, and the contingency of this historicity, placed public policy in juxtaposition to these, and reflected on the experiences and natures of present publics and constituencies that have also, after all, experienced Sandy in various ways—in fact—around the world.

The conclusion of my presentation will highlight the counter trend, the “no” side of my answer to our question, doing so by linking two of my major projects, the study of the politics of small things and of reinventing political culture. I will suggest, further, the need to carefully consider Daniel Dayan’s ideas of monstration. In my conclusion, I will make a sort of book proposal for Dayan and me to work on, so that the weaknesses of my approach can be addressed. I will move toward the conclusion first by examining what I take to be the way a cable television network contributes to the sickness of democracy, specifically in the United States – the yes side of my answer to our question. I will then make my second move, to the no side, considering how social media and other new forms of electronic media open the opportunity for a counter trend, supporting the politics of small things. I analyze both tendencies as they are tied to significant social movements that define and redefine political culture, for better and for worse: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. I want to be clear that I don’t see the problems and potentials I identify here as being primarily the consequence of media form, cable news, bad, online media, good. Rather I maintain that media forms shape, support and undermine the formation of social and political movements and institutions.  The social and the political are my message, not the media.

Yes

Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s spectacularly successful cable news network in the United States, is not just biased. It is a political mobilization machine, shaping the political landscape. Consider the criticism of a well-known social thinker.

In September, 2010, Barack Obama offered a critique of Fox in an interview published in Rolling Stone magazine. This absolutely shocked and appalled Fox shock jocks Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, the following evenings. They, the most popular in house celebrities on Fox TV, were shocked by any suggestion that they were anything but “fair and balanced,” the newspeak slogan of the tendentious network. In their self-presentation, they provide the alternative to the kowtowing liberals of the mainstream media. They were appalled by Obama’s criticism.

Yet, their response is cynical. They pretend to be what they are not, news commentators on a news network. Obama’s critique on the other hand is on firmer ground, even if it is not clear that it was wise. Isn’t it below the President’s dignity to engage in polemics with partisan press criticism? Doesn’t it enlarge them and belittle him?  These are the questions of the talking heads on cable and on the Sunday morning shows, in the television and radio discussions that followed the publication of the President’s interview.

Yet, actually in the interview Obama was quite careful, offering a measured serious answer to a provocative question:

Rolling Stone: “What do you think of Fox News? Do you think it’s a good institution for America and for democracy?”

President Obama: “[Laughs] Look, as president, I swore to uphold the Constitution, and part of that Constitution is a free press. We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated. The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you ask Mr. Murdoch what his number-one concern is, it’s that Fox is very successful.”

Obama placed Fox in a tradition of opinionated American journalism, and noted he disagreed with the Fox opinions and doesn’t think they are good for America. While I don’t see how a reasonable person, either pro or anti-Obama, can find fault with his response, I also don’t think that Obama went far enough. Serious media innovation is occurring at Fox, with potentially deep political effects. It is probably the reason why Obama feels compelled to criticize it from time to time.

Fox News is a truly innovative media form, particularly for television.  It purports to present news, but actually it is in the business of political mobilization. I think this is a specific American case, but it may be indicative of a general trend, the substitution of media for political parties.

In the important case of the Tea Party protests, this was most clear. Glenn Beck, a particularly flamboyant Fox News commentator who later lost his job, announced a mass demonstration, the “9/12 Rally.” On the Fox News programs and discussion shows, the developments leading up to the demonstration were reported, and their significance was discussed. Together with Beck’s agitation for the event, these reports and discussions brought the planned event to the attention of a large audience. Even if the event was initially the result of grassroots organization, as were the Tea Party Protests called for “tax day,” April 15, 2009, the attention of the public to the event went well beyond its original planners and their capacity to mobilize the population.

Dayan highlights the importance of this showing in his work on “monstration.” In his research, he is particularly interested in how the experience and expressions of a particular social circle move beyond a delimited public, and is brought to the attention of broader publics, an insight that can be found both in the work of the French classical sociologist, Gabrielle Tarde and the American pragmatist, John Dewey. This act is of primary political significance in media politics, something Fox has done very well, helping the previously marginal to become part of the mainstream. What is intriguing about Fox News is how they systematically work on the act of monstration and actually connect it to the work of social mobilization. I wonder sometimes whether the Republican Party has become the Fox Party, with many, perhaps most, of the potential Republican Party candidates for president for the 2012 election to President having worked as paid employees of the television news service.

In the case of the 9/12 rally, the Fox produced media event happened. Fox was there giving it full coverage. It was the major event of the day, the story that was given wall to wall coverage, while the other news sources tended to report it as one story among many. It was a kind of sacred presentation while other news services viewed it as part of the mundane daily events. The fact that only Fox “properly” reported on the event was said to reveal the bias of the “lame stream media,” to use the language of the American media critic and Fox commentator, Sarah Palin. This format applies to major happenings, but also to the trivial, from the Islamic bias of textbooks in Texas, to the booing of Palin’s daughter Bristol on “Dancing with the Stars,” a popular entertainment show, to the networks annual campaign against “the war on Christmas.” (a particularly surreal campaign, in which the fact that public actors say happy holidays rather than Merry Christmas is said to reveal the anti – Christian bias of the liberal elites in government and the corporate sector)

Contrary to Obama, Fox is not just biased as it reports the news. It produces the news from beginning to end, conflating news reporting with the political action that is the story. Murdock’s number one concern may be to be successful, as President Obama maintained in Rolling Stone, but it is notable that the success is political as well as monetary.  Rupert Murdock and News Corp make money, while America is given a strong coordinated push to the right.

Note here: there is a way in which Beck’s rally could be understood from the perspective of Daniel Boorstein, in his classical critique of broadcast news, as a pseudo event. It was produced for television, was news only as it appeared on television. Generally, I have been convinced, along with most media analysts, that Boorstein’s work doesn’t really confront the new realities of the televisual age. Because in politics appearances are realities (Arendt), and because in the age of television, public attention to things political occurs through TV, there does not seem to be anything pseudo about such events. To play a little with the old theorem of W.I. Thomas, (i.e. “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”) if political actions appear as real on television, they are real in their consequences.

I think no study better demonstrates this, no book more forcefully reveals the weakness of Boorstein’s position, than Dayan and Katz’s classic Media Events. I think that theirs is a modern classic. Yet, nonetheless, I also think we must take into account that there is something pseudo about Fox and company. As in the case of the 9/12 March, they specialize not simply in broadcasting news from a point of view. They specialize in the self-conscious production of political reality, and they do this with a thoroughness that I believe is unprecedented in the U.S. They turn fiction into facts and facts into fictions, from Obama’s citizenship to non-existent death panels in healthcare legislation, to non-existent mosques that threaten America at ground zero, to the importance of political candidates.

This sickens democracy. Facts have become partisan, e.g. global warming. Science has become a matter of political debate, e.g. evolution. Republican politicians now have to explain why they would give priority to the latter in schools and why they may have once taken seriously the former before they became more enlightened, e.g. the position of the once front runner in the race for the Republican nomination to be President of the United States, Newt Gingrich.  In one of the Republican presidential primary debates, the Republican candidates for president faced a panel of right wing state attorney generals, grand conservative inquisitors, who sought to unmask any and all liberal tendencies in the candidates’ pasts, seeking reassurance of their ideological purity. This media event was produced and broadcasted by Fox.

These developments are encouraged by a media form that is extremely popular and clearly partisan, but calls itself “fair and balanced” (the networks slogan). It has helped to create a deeply polarized public, with mutually exclusive perceptions of reality.

Let me state forthrightly what I take to be the major problem and why I think it is particularly serious. In the present media environment, facts have become indistinguishable from political fictions for a large segment of the American public. The distinction between public and private concerns is disappearing. News and entertainment have become the same coin. In the case of Murdoch’s Fox News, tabloid sensation and ideological politics have been fused. I also see this creeping into other media forms: more and more another cable news network, MSNBC, has become the mirror image, on the left, of Fox. Though I often agree with the partisan stance of its reporters and commentators, they are increasingly trying to produce a counter reality to the world according to Fox, rather than a way to understand the world or to develop a particular partisan position. And even in what I think to be the best source of news in the United States, The New York Times, the present format of the week in review section, published every Sunday, makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish reporting, analysis and opinion.

Thus, I think democracy is indeed sick of its own media, and for good reasons. Yet, this trend, “the Foxification of American democracy,” and its media, centered by the intimate connection between Fox and right wing politics, is far from the whole story. There are, of course, many in the traditional media who work to maintain conventional standards, difficult, but not impossible in the print and broadcast journalism. But new electronic media now play a special role. Take an amusing illustration of a counter trend, as a movement towards my grounds for answering our question in the negative.

No

I was enchanted by the idea of the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in October of 2010, produced by America’s two star television satirists.  I have enjoyed the programs of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as an antidote for the political madness of our times, produced for another cable news network, Comedy Central. Especially during the worst years of the Iraq war, I watched them to maintain my own sanity. In their rally, they accurately highlighted the strength of their satire, looking for sanity in insane times, using the form of the day, the great Washington Rally organized by cable television, mimicking the production of Glenn Beck on Fox. As you have seen, I have principled problems with this new form of “Media Events,” but such is the world we now live in.  Stewart and Colbert claimed that theirs wasn’t a response to the Glenn Beck organized event, but it clearly was.  There is irony in their satire, which challenges political clarity, but for good cultural reasons.

I was pleased by the turn out.  It seems that more people attended the Stewart Colbert satirical event, than attended Beck’s earnest rally to restore honor. I appreciated that “we” saw ourselves as outnumbering “them,” and it felt good.  But was there any more to it than that?

There indeed was concern in this regard. The ambiguity of the event’s meaning led to significant criticism after the fact, most vividly expressed by another political satirist, Bill Maher, in his response.

The left and the right are not equally insane, Maher and other critics pointed out.  The problem is not in the media portrayal of our politics, something that Colbert and especially Stewart seem to focus on, but the politics itself. The event energized a part of the public, but didn’t lead to specific political action. This was just before the midterm elections, which promised to lead to broad Democratic Party losses and Tea Party gains, which proved to be the case. The only person to even allude to the elections was Tony Bennett in his closing performance, calling out to people “Vote!” after singing “America the Beautiful.” It was a political event about nothing according to Maher, echoes of Seinfeld here.

Stewart in his nightly show defended himself in amusing ways,which suggests to me how democracy is being healed by its media. His main point: the rally was about something, just not about what his critics wanted. Stewart is mostly concerned not with the partisan disagreements, but that we have lost our ability to disagree civilly and constructively. His critics in turn wonder whether it is possible to constructively disagree when one side of the disagreement is acting in a fundamentally dishonest way. The confusion of fact with fictions does indeed seem to be particularly a Republican ailment. Assertions about death panels, the illegitimacy of the Obama Presidency because of his non – citizenship, wild claims about the dangers of Sharia law in Oklahoma, and the crime wave and voting fraud being perpetuated by illegal aliens, all come from Republicans in engaging important debates of the day without any notable use of facts. They do not have Democratic equivalents.  How then can Stewart claim to be non-partisan?   We have to watch Colbert and Stewart’s tongues as they go into their cheeks.

This debate on the left, and the ambiguity of the event, I think, underscores a fundamental problem in American political culture. There is too clear a correlation between commitments to facts and party identification. One party is associated with facts, while the other seems to be more committed to its own fictions. Indeed, more disturbing than the disagreements about how to address the problems of climate change is that the scientific finding of global warming has somehow become a partisan issue. More unsettling than the disagreements about the details of the stimulus package is the fact that there are those who seem to deny that there really were dangers of the collapse of the financial system and a global depression on the order of the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  And though I have to accept that some are not as thrilled as I am by the fact that America has matured to the point that it has elected an extremely intelligent African American President, bi-racial, with Muslims in his family tree, it is deeply unsettling that there are those who live with the falsehood that he is somehow not really American, and that elected representatives of the Republican Party actually perpetrate this lie or do little to criticize them. One party has become the party of facts, the other of fictions. Truth shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but it has become one, in many different instances.

Stewart and Colbert and their critics disagree about how to voice objection to this situation, and about their perceived roles. But they are responding to the same political cultural dilemma. How to fight against the fictions that Republican partisans are using to mobilize their constituencies so effectively?

Enter Occupy Wall Street: Social Media and the politics of small things

The Rally was of those who oppose such politics and such media, which lightly substitute such fictions for facts. The participants and their supporters, and their liberal critics, became visible in large numbers. The next step was a more forthright organization that addresses both the distortion of media fictoids, working against the policies they justify. The need for this step was apparent at the Rally and in the discussion about it. The need has been filled with a social movement that uses irony in its rather nebulous political claims, demonstrating for the 99%, symbolically occupying the seat of American and indeed global finance capitalism. And as I tried above, they need to organize to act not only against policies they disagree with, but also against lies. As the Republicans obstructed responsible governance, I had hoped against a sense of hopelessness, to see an alternative cast against the Tea Party mobilization. And now Occupy Wall Street has appeared. A key to this will be a commitment to truth, something to which the Colbert Stewart Rally, its participants and organizers contributed.

This is where we move from the television, albeit cable, to newer electronic media. Clearly a new kind of politics is upon us. Many observers have highlighted the technological characteristics of this politics. Cell phones, and Facebook and other social media, blogs and the like, are the heroes in these accounts of the Arab Spring, the Israeli summer, and now of not only the Tea Party but also Occupy Wall Street. Yet, these accounts are often unsatisfying, when they don’t focus on the human agency of the new politics, the specific type of political action that is ascendant. We should recognize the importance of the new media, but it seems to me that what is extraordinary is the way a type of power, political power as Hannah Arendt understood it, is becoming increasingly important. People are meeting each other, now virtually and not only face to face, freely speaking and acting in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert. Arendt maintained that this type of activity defined politics, as the opposite of coercion. I think that she exaggerates her position. But I do think that this kind of politics is ascendant in what Vaclav Havel named “the power of the powerless,” the power of what I call “the politics of small things.”

I analyzed the way this power works in our world in my book, The Politics of Small Things. It points to the way the power of “the politics of small things” was common to both Solidarność in opposition to the previously existing socialist order in Poland of the 80s, and to the anti-war movement and the Dean campaign during the Bush years in America. Now, I think the power of the politics of small things is becoming a significant force throughout the world in many different contexts, and that it is important to take notice in places far and near, in North Africa and the Middle East, in South Korea, in the candle movement, which I have analyzed a bit with the help of Jaeho Kang, and in the Tea Party in the US, and in what has become the worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement. Here I will examine Occupy Wall Street and consider how media in supporting this and similar social movements contribute to the health of democracy, how these media present an antidote to the illness caused by other media.It is important to remember how small Occupy Wall Street was in the beginning and how small it remained. To begin with, it was just a couple of dozen people who met each other and planned the action in lower Manhattan. The first occupiers were in the hundreds, reaching the thousands only when the police acted out and stimulated greater support and focused broad media and public interest (pepper spraying became a particularly favored devise for this, first in New York and then beyond). Among themselves, the activists in OWP created something unusual. They developed rules of conduct and decision-making that were radically inclusive and democratic. They found common ground with simple ideas, the most compelling focusing on gross inequality in America, contrasting a power elite, i.e. “Wall Street,” with everyone else, i.e. “The 99%.” I observe in this case, what I observed studying Solidarność and the anti war movement and the Dean campaign, how consequential power can be generated when people interact with each other, committed to shared ends and how their interactions were important ends in themselves, of significance beyond the immediate group involved.

As with previous instances of the politics of small things, the form of Occupy Wall Street expresses its content. But, there are some telling special qualities of the latest developments.

First is the way social media contributes to the OWS form. Jenny Davis, in a recent contribution to my on line magazine, Deliberately Considered, makes cogent points about the role of social media in recent social movements in general and in Occupy Wall Street in particular. Digital activism in recent years, she argues, is not only a means to the end of embodied social action. It also is an end in itself, a new type of politics that can make the previously hidden visible and can contribute to what she calls “the zeitgeist,” what I would prefer calling the prevailing common sense. She is pointing to the difference between the politics of small things just a few years ago, in the anti war movement and the Obama campaign, and now. The new media can now constitute a space for free action, a public, a point made by Judith Butler in a recent lecture.

This is especially telling because the occupation doesn’t have a simple meaning or political end. The act of posting, along with the act of protesting, makes the world look differently, and looking at the world with fresh eyes, beyond the sorts of ideological clichés found at Fox and its liberal rival MSNBC, is something that is most needed at this time. It is interesting how the way this happens is structured by social media actions, no longer a monopoly of the mass media.

Another way that OWS is noteworthy has to do with the location of the occupation, intensively linked as it is with democratic culture and its enemies. The location of the practices of OWS contributed significantly to its successful monstration, in Dayan’s terms.

The actions of a relatively small number of protestors in OWS quickly became visible not only to the people involved, but quite rapidly gained global attention. This is because of the very special nature of the starting point of occupation movement. Situated in lower Manhattan, the New York Stock Market and the World Trade Center have been symbols of advanced capitalism and American economic power in the global order and have been actual centers of the order. And, thus, Occupy Wall Street is the ground zero social movement. Monstration came almost automatically.

I first saw this as a “pedestrian observation,” based on a very particular experience walking around New York. In recent months, I walked around the area on the tenth anniversary of the attack with my friend, Steve Assael, who survived the 9/11 attack.

And in more recent weeks, I walked and observed the very same area when I went to take a look and to support the occupation at Zuccotti Park, passing by the site of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque as well.

It is because the occupation is at such an intense symbolic center, the media paid attention to OWS. A relatively small social demonstration captured global attention, exciting political imagination. In the U.S., apparently the Tea Party has met its match. Reports indicate that Occupy Wall Street is more popular than the Tea Party. Occupations of public spaces spread around the country, and, as the old slogan goes: the whole world was watching, and responding. Occupations went global, emanating from ground zero to London, to Seoul, back to Los Angeles and Washington D.C., and many points in between.

They watched in Gdansk. I had a peculiar experience in Gdansk in October, giving the annual Solidarność Lecture, reporting on a recent visit to Zuccotti Park, surprised by the interest in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration when I lectured there. I was also surprised and pleased to read that an important figure from that city, indeed the city’s most important historic figure, Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity Trade Union, was planning on going to NY to support the occupation.

As reported in an unlikely source, The New York Daily News:

Walesa has warned of a ‘worldwide revolt against capitalism’ if the Wall St. protests are ignored.

They are protesting the ‘unfairness’ of an economy that enriches a few and ‘throws the people to the curb,’ he said in a recent interview.

‘That’s why union leaders and capitalists need to figure out what to do, because otherwise they will have to contend with a worldwide revolt against capitalism.’

In the end, Walesa did not go to support Occupy Wall Street. But what intrigued me about this experience of mine and this report is how media of all sorts spread the news and the insights of the new social movement. This is a mediated development perhaps stronger than Fox and the great trend it exemplifies.

The news spread through mainstream media and publications. But I think it is also important how social media spread the word. I don’t read the Daily News. It’s the American classic tabloid, similar to Murdoch’s NY Post, though not as bad. I got wind of the report through a friend’s (Elzbieta Matynia’s) Facebook page. The world is watching the world as mediated by our friends and our interpretation of things. As Davis observes:

This sharing, of course, is rarely (if ever) done in a neutral manner. Rather, Tweeters and Facebookers accompany shared news stories and web links with commentary that reveals a particular bent, or interpretation of the content. The content is therefore not just made visible, but impregnated with meaning in a web of social relations.

I was amused learning about Walesa’s visit through a Polish friend in New York when I was in the city where my exploration of the politics of small things first began, but there is a serious point being revealed here. The power of showing, the power of monstration, has been radically democratized in the new media age. My experience exemplifies something that is becoming quite common.

The Ground Zero occupation is leading to a global response. An articulate critique of the global order of things is being expressed in simple bodily presence and demonstrating electronic expressions, capturing the attention of the world that is watching and acting upon what it sees, with the potential of changing the terms of public deliberations. Those who are concerned about jobs, inequality, global warming and neo-liberalism have found their voices and are making visible their very real concerns. Indeed, I believe, in the U.S., the Tea Party has been directly engaged.

Both OWS and the Tea Party reveal the power of the politics of small things. In this sense, they are quite similar, but there is a major difference. OWS is grounded in the reality based community constituted through interactions and debates on social media, while much of the Tea Party concerns are based on Fox created little fictions, fictoids, as I have been reporting in my online magazine, Deliberately Considered over the last year.

As an unreconstructed enlightenment partisan, I think this suggests the long-term power of the newest development on the global stage.

Conclusions

My yes and no answer to the question of whether democracy is sick of its own media points to the perils and promise of the media in democratic life. On the one hand, some media formats, such as that of Fox News, threaten democracy (specifically in America, but it’s not an insignificant place), with an intensification of ideological politics, conflating news with propaganda, presenting facts as opinion and opinion as facts. On the other hand, new media expanded the power of what I call the politics of small things, presenting the capacity to resist the Fox trend. This is a new kind of media culture war. Political culture, the relationship between the power and culture, is at issue. It can be reinvented in a democratic direction or democracy can be undermined, another sort of reinvention. As I put it in my subtitle of my book, at issue is the culture of power and the power of culture.

I would like to study the dynamic outlined here more systematically, if he is interested, with my friend and colleague Daniel Dayan. To do so, it clearly would be necessary to examine exactly how Fox (and other similar media outlets) and social media monstrate. I think a precise analysis of this would reveal how mediated monstration works in supporting and undermining democratic life. It would be an examination of the forms of democratic and anti-democratic monstration. I hope he is intrigued.

Actually, I trust that Dayan is interested, primarily because we have been talking about doing such work together (specifically after the Sofia conference), but also because in recent years a fascinating new way of resisting the powers, and new way of reinventing political culture, has been developing, related to his ideas about monstration and my ideas about the politics of small things and reinventing political culture. I have analyzed here media politics of cable television and of emerging social movements. Dayan and I will need to get into the formation of those movements and how they compare and contrast with movements past. Social movements have been key to such resistance and reinvention in the past and they are again, but something new is happening with promise closely connected to the topic of media and publics. In some places, in the Arab world for example, it has become pretty clear that it is through new “new social movements” and the media forms that support them that there is a democratic prospect. Far from being sick of their media, as posed in our opening question, democracy is radically dependent upon (especially new) media. This is both as a support of new movements and as ends of these movements. Constituting democratic publics is what is new in new movements, I believe, and I hope Dayan and I will study this.

I will close with a brief turn to the promise of such study. Social movements have generally been understood in two ways. They have been seen as non-institutional means of a group of people to pursue their common interests and achieve their shared goals. The traditional archetype for this is the labor movement. Alternatively, social movements have been seen as not only interest focused, but as well, and perhaps more importantly, as non-institutional means for the formation of a group with common identities, concerned with supporting the identities and acting upon them. Civil rights movements, the women, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender movements, environmental movements and the like, are understood as being newer kinds of movements, “new social movements.” To tell the truth, I never quite understood why the new social movements were considered new. They, like labor movements, emerged in the nineteenth century. They, like the traditional movements, pursue interests. And the traditional movements, like the new ones, are about identity. Yet, I know this is not central. Rather the crucial point is to note that new and old movements are not only about the pursuit of interests. Movements are important ends in themselves for the people who create and are active in them. Movements, old and new, have sought to achieve specific goals, the right to organize and strike, a fair wage, decent working conditions, equal pay for equal work, voting rights, ending racism, sexism and environmental degradation and the like. And movements have been about asserting identity and its dignity, for workers, women, gays and lesbians and many others. Clearly, this is still the case. Social activists in Tahrir Square in Cairo and in Zuccotti Park in New York have specific ends, and the demonstrations in these places also create identities that are as significant as the ends the demonstrators are seeking.

But something else is important, quite apparent in these and other such places around the globe today, as I have been suggesting here.  The coming together based on some shared concerns with different identities and even different goals has been a common feature of the movements in our most recent past. The demonstrators occupy a space and the way they do so, the way they interact with each other is an important end of the movement. The form of interaction, as well as the identity and interest content, is central. The new media facilitate the form, an independent alternative public, but it is not completely defined by them.

Coptic Christians and Muslims protect each other with mutual respect in Egyptian demonstrations in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt. They came together with the help of Facebook and the like, but what was crucial was what they did once they were together. Radical anarchists and conventional trade unionists hung out at Zuccotti Park last fall and in Union Square on May Day.

Their political ends may be different, radical critics of “the American Dream,” along with those who want to keep the Dream alive, but they have figured out ways to find common purpose and joint actions. The new “new social movements” are first about that commonality, the creation of independent public space, in New York and beyond, people with differences working together in the name of the 99%, creating an alternative free public space.

Communicating from this space to the dominant media and mainstream publics is a fundamental challenge, the challenge of monstration, now evident for the Tahrir democratic activists and OWS. The quality of their public character, its social media constitution that facilitated the formation of the movement, also presents problems for moving beyond the newly constituted public space. Leading spokespersons are not evident, a strength but also a weakness, nor are clear ends and demands forthcoming.

Thus the Dayan – Goldfarb project of new social and political movement: 1. Understand the new form the politics of small things is taking. 2. Appreciate how this new form is facilitated and frustrated by new media, 3. Consider how these developments are affecting the relationship between power and culture, reinventing the political culture of our times. And 4, analyze how 1, 2, and 3, all are about the constitution of free and expanding publics related to other publics, which depend on monstation: showing, revealing, appearing to others, through available media, as a primary challenge.

But it’s not only the younger generations of protesters who increasingly have recourse to digital and mobile media in their activism. Old-timers are discovering new media technologies as well. This was exemplified in the recent publication of a series of photo albums on Facebook, containing hundreds of snapshots of Italian activists from a 1970s student movement, the so-called “Movement of ’77.” This was not the first attempt to reunite the 1977 generation, and yet, it has never been so successful. What makes Facebook different? Are we dealing with plain nostalgia here? I would rather argue that these digital photo albums, which open up a whole new perspective on the 1970s, as they turn attention away from dominant memories of terrorism and violence, have potentials in that they contribute to a more inclusive, alternative “history from below.”

In 2011, Time Magazine elected global activists “person of the year”. That same year, Italian student protests which had occurred 35 years ago revived on the web as photographer Enrico Scuro – class of ’77 – uploaded his photographic collection to Facebook. In doing so, he unchained enthusiastic reactions from former protesters, who tagged themselves into the photographs and left comments of all sorts. People also sent Scuro their own photographs, thus contributing to what has become something of an online family album, currently containing over 3,000 photographs. As they narrated personal anecdotes, complemented by other people’s recollections, the former protesters collectively reconstructed the (hi)story of a generation, a history not tainted by traumatic memories of terrorism and political violence – typical of the official and public version of the Italian 1970s. Furthermore, the Facebook rage led to a series of reunions outside the virtual world and, a few months ago, to the publication of a selection of the photographs in book form. So what made Facebook different from previous attempts to gather the 1977 generation?

Facebook helps individuals develop a sense of belonging to a wider community, for example by joining or “liking” groups. The online sharing of photographs reinforces this sense of belonging. It prompts acts of recollection in an interactive and public context, turning the photographs into an occasion for a collective and oral “show and tell,” like the real-life viewing of, say, holiday snapshots or family albums among family members and friends.

Indeed, Facebook reproduces orality in a very similar way as when you’re going through a photo album. The tags and comments, which read very much like spontaneous, real-life or telephone conversations, substitute the pointing out of people or places in an album. This effect is amplified by the use of a wide range of special characters, text symbols and emoticons.

Facebook also changes concepts of private and public, as personal stories and identities are shared in a collective setting. Some of the most intimate photographs in Scuro’s albums, for example, include snapshots of women during or shortly before/after child labour. But then private photographs are always also public and social, in that they depend on shared understandings and conventions.

Nostalgia inevitably plays an important role here. Unlike other European countries, the 1968 protests in Italy were not a one-off event, but extended well into the 1970s, culminating in 1977. In some locations, such as the popular university town of Bologna, the student movement of 1977 had a highly creative and fun-loving character. Things changed, though, after the violent death of a student during riots in March: terrorism and heroin rapidly disarmed the ’77 generation, leaving the former protesters with little more than beautiful memories and bitter critiques of Berlusconian politics.

But the albums don’t simply reply to the generation’s yearning for what is no longer attainable: nostalgia can also provide empowerment. The 1977 photo albums on Facebook then offer a positive and progressive sense of memory retrieval, as people or events that have been left out of official history are now re-inserted into a collective and alternative history from below, thus allowing for a more inclusive history of the 1970s.

It’s obvious, though, that these digital archives don’t fix memories in time, eventually. The options within Facebook to remove tags, comments and photographs, as well as to add tags without control, allow people to manipulate the past. This may explain why Scuro decided to publish a selection of the photographs in book form, thus bringing the digitized photographs back into the analogue sphere. This underscores the unstable character of social networks while demonstrating how people, in the end, prefer the material and tangible photograph to its digital counterpart.

I think that the form of Occupy Wall Street expresses its content, as Scott Beck showed in his earlier post on the occupation. I observe, further, that the way people use social media contributes to this form, as does the setting of the occupation. And I believe deliberating about the movement and connecting the debate to other political, social and cultural activities are keys to the democratic contribution of the movement to broader politics in America and beyond.

Jenny Davis in her post last week makes cogent points about the role of social media in social movements in general and in Occupy Wall Street in particular. Her key observation is very important. Digital activism is not only a means to the end of embodied social action. It also is an end in itself, a new type of politics that can make the previously hidden visible and can contribute to what she calls “the zeitgeist,” what I would prefer calling the prevailing common sense. I would add that it can constitute a space for free action, a public, a point made by Judith Butler in a recent lecture. This is especially telling as David Peppas and Barbara note in the two comments to Davis’s post, because the occupation doesn’t have a simple meaning or political end. The act of protesting, as well as the act of posting, makes the world look differently, and looking at the world differently is what is most needed at this time, to face up to stark social realities that have been ignored and develop the capacity to act on this. It is interesting how the way this happens is structured by social media actions, no longer a monopoly of the mass media, while the power of the movement, is quite material. It’s embedded in a specific geography and its link to political culture.

The place of the occupation in an important way contributes to its power. Situated in lower Manhattan, the New York Stock Market and the World Trade Center have been symbols of advanced capitalism and American economic power in the global order and have been actual centers of the order. And, thus, to my mind, Occupy Wall Street is the ground zero social movement.

Ironically, mine is first of all a “pedestrian observation,” based on very particular experience. In recent weeks, I walked around the area on the tenth anniversary of the attack with my friend, Steve Assael, who survived the 9/11 attack, including a stroll on Wall Street. And last week, I walked and observed the very same area when I went to take a look and to support the occupation at Zuccotti Park, passing by the site of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque as well.

Because it is at the symbolic center, the media are paying attention to OWS. A relatively small social demonstration is capturing global attention, exciting political imagination. In the U.S., apparently the Tea Party has met its match. A report yesterday indicates that Occupy Wall Street is more popular than the Tea Party. Occupations of public spaces are spreading around the country, and, as the old slogan goes: the whole world is watching. Occupations are going global, eminating from ground zero to London, Seoul back to Los Angeles and Washington D.C. and many points in between.

They have been watching in Gdansk. I was surprised by the interest in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration when I lectured there, and surprised and pleased to read that an important figure from that city, indeed the city’s most important historic figure, Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity Trade Union, is planning on coming to NY to support the occupation.

As reported in an unlikely source, The New York Daily News:

“Walesa has warned of a ‘worldwide revolt against capitalism’ if the Wall St. protests are ignored.
They are protesting the ‘unfairness’ of an economy that enriches a few and ‘throws the people to the curb,’ he said in a recent interview.

‘That’s why union leaders and capitalists need to figure out what to do, because otherwise they will have to contend with a worldwide revolt against capitalism.’ ”

The news is spreading through mainstream media and publications. But I think it is also important how social media are spreading the word. I don’t read the Daily News. It’s the American classic tabloid, similar to Murdoch’s NY Post, though not as bad. I got wind of the report through a friend’s (Elzbieta Matynia’s) Facebook page. The world is watching the world as mediated by our friends and our interpretation of things. As Davis observes:

“This sharing, of course, is rarely (if ever) done in a neutral manner. Rather, Tweeters and Facebookers accompany shared news stories and web links with commentary that reveals a particular bent, or interpretation of the content. The content is therefore not just made visible, but impregnated with meaning in a web of social relations.”

The Ground Zero occupation is leading to a global response. An articulate critique of the global order of things is being expressed in simple bodily presence and demonstrating expressions, capturing the attention of the world that is watching and acting upon what it sees, with the potential of changing the terms of public deliberations. Those who are concerned about jobs, inequality, global warming and much more have found their voices and are making visible their very real concerns. Indeed, I believe, in the U.S., the Tea Party has been directly engaged. Both OWS and the Tea Party reveal the power of the politics of small things. In this sense, they are quite similar, but there is a major difference. OWS is grounded in the reality based community, while much of the Tea Party concerns are based on fictoids, as we have been observing here at Deliberately Considered over the last year. As an unreconstructed enlightenment partisan, I think this suggests the long term power of the newest development on the global stage. As I observed in concluding my comparison between OWS and a social movement in South Korea, the candle light movement, a candle is, indeed, being lit.

I found a post on Cyborgology of particular interest a number of days ago, posted a reply, which led to an interesting email exchange with Jenny Davis. We agreed to start a dialogue about the new media and the politics of small things, specifically about the case of Occupy Wall Street. Her post today, my reply in a bit when I finish my work at the European Solidarity Center in Gdansk. -Jeff

Two recent posts on Deliberately Considered, one by Scott Beck and the other by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, examine the role of social media in social movements. They demonstrate the way in which social media allow us to harness the power of the people, contest the interpretations of mainstream media, organize, and mobilize. They show how, through communications on digital networks, physical bodies have come together in physical spaces, protesting both ideological and material conditions.

The points made by Beck and Goldfarb are important ones, yet I believe they should be extended. In particular, we need to address not only  the ways in which these new media technologies work to bring together and document the physical bodies who occupy physical spaces. We also must examin the role of those whose activism never goes beyond the digital realm. We must look at how this latter group, colloquially referred to as slacktivists, matter.

Slacktivism matters in two interrelated ways: 1) increasing visibility and 2) generating a particular zeitgeist surrounding social movements.

Not everyone reads and/or watches the news, and in the age of the 24 hour news media, those who do read and/or watch the news must necessarily be selective in what they consume. What we share on Facebook or tweet on Twitter, therefore, works to increase the visibility of particular news items. Moreover, by linking a news item to a familiar other, to someone inside an actor’s personal network, is to imbue the news item with relevance. Status updates and tweets about Occupy Wall Street, for example, not only spread information about the protests, but also locate the protests in the digitally networked space(s) of everyday life, designating them as part of a relevant conversation.

This sharing, of course, is rarely (if ever) done in a neutral manner. Rather, Tweeters and Facebookers accompany shared news stories and web links with commentary that reveals a particular bent, or interpretation of the content. The content is therefore not just made visible, but impregnated with meaning in a web of social relations. When shared and interpreted on a larger scale, this meaning-laden content generates a “feel” or “zeitgeist” surrounding a historical moment and the related social movement. This is clearly seen in the vast international support for both the Arab Spring (and now Arab Fall) and the Occupy Wall Street protests. We understand these as movements by and for the people. We share a sense of anger towards oppression by the powerful few. We applaud those who strive to have their voices heard, and condemn those who wish to stifle the voices of the small and (individually) powerless.

Visibility and zeitgeist are not without material consequences. Theda Skocpol argues that social movements spread through visibility and modeling (see Sarah Wanenchak’s excellent discussion of this on Cyborgology). Just as the nations of the Arab world took cues from each other, the U.S. has now taken cues from the Arab world, resulting in feet on the ground, posters in the air, and bodies occupying lower Manhattan, L.A., Boston, Austin and numerous other cities. By spreading the word, making it relevant, and generating a zeitgeist of freedom and rebellion, slacktivists not only show support for the recent international social movements, but actively augment them in symbolic and tangible ways.

The streets of Tehran had turned into free public spaces days before the 2009 Presidential Elections. The vibrant scene of groups of people with antagonistic political ideals arguing and debating with one another was truly amazing and unique. After the elections, in a spontaneous concerted act, three million people walked in silence, protesting the results of the election. Those who walked up from Enghelab (Revolution) Square to Azadi Square experienced a sacred time and space. They experienced for a few hours a power that has been engrained forever in their minds. The actors involved created a story and have “started a chain of events,” as Arendt put it in The Human Condition. While they did not walk the path of revolution to freedom, they did experience freedom when they were debating in public corners.

On the days prior to and after the elections, Iranians experienced the extraordinary, because they challenged the “commonly accepted.” They “acted in concert” and owned the streets of Tehran from which they had always felt alienated. The streets of Tehran, ever since, have gained a different meaning. They are a reminder of a moment of “greatness” that will never lose its new acquired significance. It is “greatness” because it breaks through the commonly accepted and reaches into the extraordinary. Whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists in the extraordinary is unique. Following Arendt’s political thought and rejecting the tradition of means and ends, Iranians in those days were obsessively involved in the process of the “living deed” and the “spoken word,” the sheer act of performance. They did not knowingly organize and manage the events; rather they were spontaneously involved in actions and words. It is important to acknowledge the meaning of this experience, because it alludes to the “potentiality” of power that can be realized and in fact, was realized, however briefly, in actuality. For Arendt, the end is not the outcome or the result of political action, but the act itself, the coming together of men and women from all walks of life. The act of protests, as means to an end, which could have been protesting until the collapse of the state, would not be political action as Arendt defines it. For her, the men and women walking together is the end of politics and freedom, “because there is nothing higher to attain than this actuality itself.”

The pure moments of freedom and politics, if and should they occur again, are forever to be cherished in memory but cannot be sustained. This temporality could of course be due to the brute force that Iranians face. Perhaps the temporal can be permanent in another context, although I highly doubt it, as every place has its own brute forces and complexities. … In any case, what is at stake here is that the ideal public sphere that many Iranians experienced was only temporary. This temporality does not reduce from the significance of the phenomenon. Yet the bitter reality is that once their sphere of public was crushed they had to look elsewhere, other places where they had always performed politically. Facebook is one of those places. As people resort to this alternative sphere of publics with newly developed political consciousness as a result of their post elections experience, I think, potentially, there may be better days in the future.

Two Examples

Once word spread around Facebook and opposition news websites that Habibollah Latifi, a Kurdish student, allegedly affiliated with separatist and terrorist organizations in Iran’s Kurdistan, was going to be executed in three days, almost everyone in my social circles was sharing the news. Most news feeds on my Facebook page were related to him. Discussions on how to prevent his execution were going on everywhere. A Facebook campaign page called Save Habibollah Latifi- Do Not Execute Habibollah Latif was created; one hundred people became members of this group in an hour. Members shared updated news on his status, relayed his family members’ anecdotes through personal communication with them, and suggested ways to stop the execution. Members suggested calling the Iranian Department of Justice, Kurdish parliamentary representatives, the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and in general, any organization that could bring this local problem to the international public. It was hoped that international pressure would affect the state’s decision. Dozens of petitions were created and sent to the Supreme Leader (Ayatalloh Khamenei), the Head of the Judiciary (Ayatollah Larijani), the United Nations (Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon), and any so called “important person” that could have influence. The words and actions of the Facebookers spread ever wider. Iranians inside and outside the country were engaged in a single cause: stopping Habilollah Latifi’s execution.

A few hours before his execution, word spread out on Facebook that crowds of people, including Latifi’s extended family, had gathered in front of the Sanandaj prison calling for the execution to stop. While only a couple of hundred people at most demonstrated, it did have an effect. At five in the morning, the head of the prison came out and urged people to leave the scene, insisting that their presence would have no effect,  promising them that the execution will be carried out as planned. The crowd did not budge. Later, the sentence was postponed and Latifi was transferred to another location.

Facebookers were extremely excited; their intense efforts had worked. They could see themselves as part of a movement. It’s not clear that it were Facebook, news websites, news channels (BBC Farsi, VOA and so on), bloggers and the virtual world that had stayed the execution. It is also not clear that the family’s outspokenness had led to the Internet spiral. Yet a contrasting case is suggestive.

A day after the Habilollah Latifi affair, another Iranian citizen was sentenced to death. Ali Saremi was allegedly a member of Mujahedin, an organization infamous for their terrorist activities right after the 1979 revolution. Mujahedin is officially despised by the Islamic Republic. Although word spread and news was shared on Facebook, not much momentum was created. Perhaps it was too late, or maybe it would have had no effect anyway. In any case, Saremi was executed as planned and not much was done to save him.

Of course there is no way to know what would have happened if more action was taken to stop his execution. However, at the time these two stories were compared and many believed if there had been more action, Saremi could have been saved also.  Such action would have had meaning, as has been indicated by the actions preceding and following the last elections.

I am old enough to still be amazed by modern media; young and open enough to not be beguiled.

This morning I had an exchange with DC contributor Andras Bozoki. Yesterday, I had sent him, along with other DC contributors, an email message, asking for a brief bio and a photo for our enhanced and updated contributors’ page.  He responded to me from China, where, unbeknownst to me, he is giving a few lectures in Hong Kong, and visiting other major cities.  We took care of our mundane business.  He’ll get back to me with the bio and photo upon his return home to Budapest.  I invited him to write something about what he is seeing in China.  He told me that he is quite busy these days, and not sure he will have the time to write, but he will contribute to DC if he writes anything about the very interesting things he is seeing on his trip.  Let’s hope he finds the time.

Every Saturday or Sunday, my wife, Naomi, and I in New York have a Skype visit with our daughter, Brina, and her family, husband, Michel, and son, Ludovic, in Paris.  Two weeks ago, we saw Ludo taking his first hesitant steps.  Last week, walking had already become his primary means of locomotion, moving fluidly around their study, picking up his toys, now with two hands, finding more problematic materials (his daddy is an artist), more easily getting into trouble.   This Sunday we will celebrate Ludovic’s first birthday.  They will open the present we sent via snail mail.  We will sing Happy Birthday, knowing that next year he will actually understand and look forward to the festivities.  One of the great pleasures I had as a father was reading the good night book.  I figure around that next birthday that may become a regular ritual between Ludo and me, as it was between me and my children.

When I explain to people about DC, trying to recruit them to write for us, I have a number of ways of appealing to them.  One is rather academic, in Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society, I argue that the democratic role of intellectuals is to be talk provokers, to make it possible for citizens to discuss pressing problems of the day, by civilizing differences among opponents so that enemies become opponents, and opponents become collaborators, and by subverting commonsense that hides social problems, revealing those problems so that they may be discussed and acted upon.  DC is a website meant to provide intellectual space for such needed intellectual interventions.

Such spaces in the past were found in political pamphlets, small magazines and journals, and of course books.  DC provides a forum for the type of discussion that used to appear in the small magazines like The Partisan Review.  It is meant to be read by the general public, but it is informed discussion, not just polemical debate.  There are differences between what we are trying to create now and what the circumstances were then, but the similarities I think are notable and appealing.

I worked on such similarities and differences in my book The Politics of Small Things. There I noted how the basis of power generated in the democratic opposition in the former Soviet bloc was quite similar to the power of the anti-war movement against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Howard Dean’s primary campaign in 2004.  The democratic opposition used the mimeograph machine, the Dean campaign the internet and new social media.  Here at DC I also have underscored the similarities to the Obama campaign of 2008 and to the Tea Party movement.  The media used then and now were quite different, but the type of social power created was the same.

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All of this comes to mind as we try to understand the role of the new social media in the revolution in the countries of the Maghreb and Mashreq.  There has been a great deal of attention and speculation about these, the Facebook – Al Jazeera Revolutions.  I have no doubt that the social media have made it possible for people to meet each other, speak in each others’ presence and develop a capacity to act in concert, i.e. creating political power in the sense of Hannah Arendt.  But I am also certain that this kind of power existed and was consequential before the social media appeared, for example in the movements around the old Soviet bloc that contributed to the collapse of Communism and in the civil rights movement in the United States.   The rapidity of the development clearly is a consequence of social media, primarily Facebook, and satellite television, primarily Al Jazeera, but there is an important sociological basis of the movement, it is not just a manifestation of the technology.  There is something new, but it’s not all that new.

It is amazing that I can rapidly exchange notes  with my friend Andras, thinking he is in Hungary, learning that he is in China, at eight this morning for me, eight this evening for him.  (In fact as I am about to post this he sent a journalistic account of his presentation in Hong Kong, two in the afternoon here, two in the morning there).  It is indeed amazing that I see and regularly interact with my grandson in Paris, from my home in New York, and that in my study at home, I am developing this blog, which is global in its reach. The transformations of 2011 are incredible.  These manifestations of friendship, family, love, informed intellectual exchange and revolution are not created by the new media regime.  While they can be facilitated by it, friendship, love, deliberate thought and political ideals must be independently created. As the French say: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” the more things change, the more they stay the same.  By the way, that was one of my father’s favorite sayings.