Mediating Activism: Insights on new media and the culture of protest (Part 2 of 2)

Visible but isolated
Trying to change the world from behind your computer is nowadays not a crazy idea anymore. It even has a certain romantic notion to it as seen in many movies. But I do wonder if this electronic mediation of activism –- this fighting for change from a distance -- will indeed promote collective and interconnected action.

City-sociologist Richard Sennet somehow reinforces this thought of mine in his critique of man and modern life. He says that electronic media embodies the paradox of isolation and visibility—an empty public domain. The more we are connected in our homes and offices, the more we are actually isolated from each other:

The mass media infinitely heighten the knowledge people have of what transpires in society, and they infinitely inhibit the capacity of people to convert that knowledge into political action. You cannot talk back to your TV set; you can only turn it off. Unless you… immediately telephone your friends that you have turned out an obnoxious politician and urge them to turn off their TV sets, any gesture of or response you make is an invisible act. (Sennet 1974: 282-283)

Cyberactivism
But this pervasiveness and intrusiveness of media, and the need to convert responses into political action are exactly the reasons why media activists consider media a terrain of struggle. Verzola does recognize the politics (and even political-economic nature) of information. The struggle for shared information and technology is as political as you can get. The adage, “Information is power” speaks volumes about information’s political nature: if someone who possesses information has power, then those who don’t possess information are without power. The struggle between the powerful and the powerless: politics. In the Philippines, the rich families who used to be landlords are now ‘cyberlords’, according to Verzola. They are the “…owners of a body of information, or the material infrastructures for creating, distributing or using information”. The supposedly decentralized nature of new media is, in a way, being subverted by these cyberlords. Information and access are still concentrated in the hands of the elite. Despite the fact that an information product is produced at little cost (marginal unit approaches zero) in comparison to agricultural or industrial products (which are material and energy intensive), these cyberlords have commodified information to make them richer and even more powerful. Given that new media is used by cyberlords to further their interests, the activist can also use new media as another terrain for protest. But never on its own. This is Verzola’s point: it’s just one way to protest and subvert the actions of the dominant sectors. It will always be a part of a greater whole. To portray cyber activism as the major means to change society is flawed logic, because the issues addressed by activists are still deeply rooted in the socio-political and economic spheres, especially in underdeveloped lands. Protesting, whether via weblogs or demonstrations is the easy part. The actual rebuilding of a just and free society – which is the goal of activism – is the harder one. How to lower the price of eggs so that more people can buy it and be fed: that’s the challenge.

However, recognizing cyber activism as part of a greater whole does not mean trivializing the main issues it tries to confront. The crucial issue of “the commons” is a pressing matter that all activists should address. The digital commons – the shared means of producing, utilizing and developing knowledge and information among communities; the struggle for open and democratic knowledge and information space – affects both the ‘on- and offline’ peoples of the world. Intellectual property rights and monopoly control of information and knowledge has impacted both the ‘connected’ and the ‘disconnected’.

Public interfaces as venue for activism
I believe that the challenge now for activists, both in developed and underdeveloped countries, is how to design and develop public interfaces for interactive media that will engage people in socio-political processes. How can we, for example, subvert the symbols used by corporations and governments and transform these into metaphors of change? How would these metaphors of change move people and hopefully raise their awareness of the world? Think of the Twin Towers which has now been brilliantly metamorphosized by America into symbols of American freedom, patriotism and righteousness; and how the conservative government weaved stories (and spun a war) to give birth to a new breed of politics: the politics of fear. This power of metaphors should be harnessed and utilized by interactive media and transformed into concrete action. Take for example the project BeamMobile that was conceived by the Dutch design collective DEPT. Using a strong beamer, political images and messages were projected around Amsterdam (Kluitenberg 2004). I can imagine this also being used in other urban environments, like Manila. Billboards have sprung up like mushrooms and people are bombarded everyday with this form of advertising. One way of subverting this mind-numbing advertising would be a campaign ala-BeamMobile. It’s cheaper than renting an advertising space where you can make your own political statement, and more importantly, it’s mobile and unique. I think this is a creative way of posing questions and inversing perceptions in the public sphere.

A change in activist strategy is thus needed. The notion of a disembodied cyberspace and the lone cyber activist should be discarded; and at the same time, the radical potential of new media should be appreciated. Creating a better world, after all, does not only come from changing the unjust political and economic structures. Culture and consciousness are also charged terrains of struggle, wherein new media can make an important contribution. Changing leaders and governments, fighting against unfair economic trade, protecting human rights, and nurturing the environment: all these go hand-in-hand with media activism. By trying to make media a venue for dialogue; promoting the use and protection of the commons; and engaging people in socially meaningful interactive processes, cyber activism can share common ground with the greater movement for change. Hopefully, through this process, media can empower people to imagine the world as how they would wish it to be.

References:

Kluitenberg, Erik
2004 Connection in Visibility: Reconnecting the Space of Flows Unplugged. Paper presented at Art + Communication 2004 – Transcultural Mapping. Riga, Latvia.

Mulder, Arjen
2004 Over Mediatheorie: taal, beeld geluid, gedrag. V2_Nai Uitgevers. Rotterdam

Sennet, Richard
1974 The Fall of Public Man. W.W. Norton & company. New York/London.

Verzola, Robert
2004 Cyberlords: Rentier Class of the Information Sector. In Towards a Political Economy of Information. Quezon City, Philippines: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, Inc.

2005 Interview conducted in his office at the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement. Quezon City, Philippines.

Mediating Activism: insights on new media and the culture of protest (Part 1 of 2 )

“What has that got to do with the price of an egg?” was my father’s trademark question for politicians during symposia and lectures in the university where he taught. A political activist himself, words for him were only as important as the action they evoked and the effect they caused. Asking politicians how their theories can lower the price of eggs and feed more people was his way of shaking their theories off the clouds and testing them against reality. This question popped up again in my mind while watching a documentary on cyber activism and a few times more during the course of my Media and Cultural Studies class at The Institute for Interactive Media in Amsterdam.

I’m now living in a developed country where being online and mobile has been translated mostly to mean access and connection to society – and in a sense, power – and where, in school, I receive a weekly dosage of theoretical nourishment in media and culture. Here it’s easier to identify with the notion that connection and mobility is indeed power. Being disconnected from the Net or switching off your mobile phone or computer gives a sense of loss or detachment and even paralysis: as if you’re no longer at the center of things but at the margins. Everything has to be done manually and you have to wait until you’re connected again before you can actually do something. New media seems to have become so indispensable in both public and private spheres that it has now grown as an alternative and popular arena of protest in developed countries targeting corporate giants and governments. The image of the hacker (or what others would call ‘hacktivist’) single-handedly bringing a corporate giant to its knees seems to be more plausible in countries like the Netherlands. Launching an internet campaign on human rights issue or the environment seems to make more sense. Certain websites (which are in some ways subversive and as a whole definitely irreverent) like ‘Geen Stijl' and ‘Retecool’ (with its ‘Foto Fuck Vrijdag’) have displayed the enormous organizing and mobilizing power of the Net after landing in national news several times already.

New media, new protest?
Individuals within the comforts of their own homes did all of these. One can argue, of course, that hacking and internet campaigns are all about networking and thus not just the works of individuals. However, I think that what attracts people to participate in these actions is the fact that they can stay in their homes, behind the computer, and can log-out, stop or switch off whenever they want. Unlike in the traditional parliamentary form of struggle, laborers and peasants have to be politicized, organized and mobilized to go on strike to be able to deliver a damaging blow to the company’s profits, or hamper operations in the farms. In protests utilizing new media, one can choose to skip these steps and just go directly to defacing the corporate website or emailing their representatives to act on certain issues. These trends seem to point out that cyber activism may replace social and political activism as the dominant form of struggle for change. Will ‘networking with the masses’ then be the new activist jargon instead of ‘organizing the masses’? Has ‘digital man’ given birth to a new consciousness of protest? Or aren’t all these musings just intellectual masturbation? Because I really wonder: what do all of these have to do with the price of an egg?

Media and consciousness
Looking into a definition of media might present some answers. The Dutch media theoretician, Arjen Mulder described it as technical resources that can expand the range of our senses, making it the body’s extension in both time and space. This shows the ability of media to intervene in the process of how people construct the world through registration and imagination. In other words, media has the potential to affect consciousness-formation as well as be reformed by consciousness. This is evident in its history where the spoken, written and printed word had all consequent effects on human consciousness. In an oral culture, for example, poetry or stories were shared and made by the community. In a lettered society, only those who learned to read and write can claim to be poets and storytellers. In today’s digital society, knowledge has even become legal properties of corporations and has totally disconnected itself with the culture of sharing that was dominant in the early communities. Technological advancements also influenced consciousness as seen by the modernization of society through the invention of the mechanical clock. The mechanization of time brought forth, among others, the notion of hours as units of the day whereby labor is measured and assigned the corresponding wages.

Continuing along this line of thought, today’s digital advancements shape, in part, the modern human. ‘Digital humans’ possess therefore a consciousness different from their predecessors. Not only has the way they view and interpret the world been changed, but also the way they criticize, protest and try to rethink and change the world. Does this mean that new media will occupy a prominent if not the dominant place in protest politics? Is activism now relegated to the realm of symbols and images? Will political movements be passé and transformed into virtual movements with the growing interconnectedness in the world? Will individual-based actions now occupy the center of activism instead of the collective?

Built-in ideologies of digital media
Roberto Verzola says no to the questions above. Not in the Philippines, at least. Certainly not now. Verzola, an information technology expert and media and social activist, would probably regard the above-mentioned notion of new activism in the same way that my father would: too much nestled in the clouds. During an interview with him in Manila, Verzola presented several examples of what he calls the built-in system and ideologies brought about by new media. One of these is the techno-fix mentality. This mentality regards technology as the panacea to the world’s problems. Everything can be fixed and improved by technological or digital interventions, even loneliness, depression, poverty, apathy, etc. Placing cyber activism on a pedestal reflects this sort of mentality. Activism addresses socio-political, economic and cultural issues in need of socio-political, economic and cultural solutions. Cyber activism cannot replace the actual efforts and impact of actually going out there to personally educate, organize and mobilize people on real issues. Any form of activism has to work within the concrete conditions of a country. Verzola points out that the Philippines, unlike Western Europe or America, does not have an information economy, only an information sector. And it’s not even the dominant sector in society. This is not surprising given that the majority does not own computers nor has access to the internet. Traditional media still occupies the dominant space. Trying to change the Philippines from behind your computer is not likely to produce the needed effect. I even wonder if this electronic mediation of activism – this fighting for change from a distance -- will indeed promote collective and interconnected action.
-- end part 1--

*A complete list of references will be published in part two of this article.

The many faces of games

Many of my friends know how much of a game (and films) junkie I am. I must admit, however, that lately I haven't been junkie-ing to the max due to an overflow of deadlines at work and school. That's also the reason why I haven't been blogging as much. Plan to graduate in less than 2 months so it's Panic Time, Hell Week and Obsessive Mode all in one. Pretty soon I will lock myself in quarantaine mode for 10 days or so just to feel in control again (and finish all deliverables of course!).

But I just can't deny my nature if I don't play so now my solution is to play short, fun games. Classics like pinball and minesweeper ;-p and all those cool and creative games from www.orisinal.com

Simple, creative, fun and totally addictive. Check out Bugs and that shooting game (forgot the name)... These are my temporary replacement for RPG's and my way of comforting myself because I haven't gotten round yet to buying Oblivion! ;-( Oh well, that will definitely be something for after graduation...school gets in the way of gamng y'know ;-p Besides, this latest game from Elder Scrolls requires total devotion and commitment ;-)

On another note: I am curious as to how game themes and narratives will be influenced by religion and spirituality. Seems that this particular theme is gaining more ground everyday. From godcasting to real-time strategy games, religion, spirituality and philosophy are starting to inhabit the gaming world. Not surprising given the fertile ground of games for conflicts, morality and world views. Besides, these themes are already part of the stories weaved around different games. I wonder, however, if these will truly be alternatives to games typically marked by 'violence' and sex. Check out this MSNBC article for more info:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12597157/?GT1=8199