• Which specific human rights issue, campaign, or activist would you like to address?
• Which format of visual art are you choosing (e.g., a protest poster, a sign for a protest, a campaign ad, etc.)?
• What will your piece of art depict?

• Which specific human rights issue, campaign, or activist would you like to campaign for?
• Which one social media platform will you use (e.g., Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
• Why is this platform appropriate for your campaign?
• Which messages will your Social Media Advocacy Campaign be communicating?

• Which specific human rights issue, campaign, or activist would you like to campaign for?
• Which two social media platforms will you use (e.g., Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
• Why are these two platforms appropriate for your campaign?
• Which messages are your Social Media Advocacy Campaign communicating?

Why universities must defend democracy

Introduction to the article "Governments should inoculate citizens to prevent the spread of fake new"

Governments should inoculate citizens to prevent the spread of fake new

Quiz

Viral video, gone bad: Kony 2012 and the perils of social media

Quiz

Maria Ressa: Nobel prize-winner risks life and liberty to hold Philippines government to account

Quiz

Doomsaying about new technology helps make it better

Quiz

Overview: 1. Introduction to Law

• Write a short post that introduces you as well as your interest in human rights.

Overview: 2. Democracy/Tech

Learning Objectives:

• Recall the origins of democracy and authoritarianism
• Compare and contrast the concepts of democracy and authoritarianism
• Explain the technical, communicative, and societal benefits of the internet

• Write a short essay that describes the issue, campaign, or activist you introduced in Assignment 1 in more detail.

• Write a short post that defines/contrasts information with disinformation.

• Create a rough draft of either an Artistic Project or Social Media Campaign that advocates for your issue, campaign, or activist.

Overview: 5. Art/Social Media

Learning Objectives:

• Demonstrate historical uses of art for advocacy (e.g,. political advocacy, human rights advocacy, etc.)

• Identify examples of social media use as a tool against oppression

• Write a short post that describes and analyzes your favorite piece of Political Art or favorite Online Advocacy campaign.

Overview: 6. Predictions-Into the Future

Learning Objectives:

• Discover thoughts on the future of human rights, social media, and their evolving role in the fight against global oppression

• Create either an Artistic Project or a Social Media Advocacy Campaign as a final project

• Based on your Assignment 4 (either your Artistic Project or Social Media Advocacy Campaign Draft Midterm Project) create either an Artistic Project or Social Media Campaign Final Project that advocates for your issue, campaign, or activist.

Rights for nature: How granting a river ‘personhood’ could help protect it

Quiz

• Water
• Rivers
• Whanganui River
• Quebec
• Personhood
• environmental protection
• Environmental rights

Fresh insights on how to create civic spaces in authoritarian settings: small steps matter

Quiz

• Climate change
• Democracy
• Governance
• Pandemic
• Human rights
• Free speech
• Transparency
• Authoritarianism
• Patriarchy
• Democratic reform
• Mozambique
• repression
• Military rule
• Moral outrage
• Public accountability
• Women and girls
• COP26
• COVID-19

Disinformation is spreading beyond the realm of spycraft to become a shady industry – lessons from South Korea

Quiz

• South Korea
• Cold War
• Public perception
• Public opinion
• anti-communism
• Moon Jae-in
• Bots
• Disinformation
• Political campaigns
• Social media disinformation
• Disinformation campaigns

Protest has helped define the first two decades of the 21st century – here’s what’s next

• Protest
• Democracy
• WTO
• Neoliberalism
• Representation
• Hong Kong protests
• Global protests 2019

Bringing art into public spaces can improve the social fabric of a city

Quiz

• Toronto
• Art
• Galleries
• Coronavirus
• Indigenous art
• public art
• COVID-19

To boldly go toward new frontiers, we first need to learn from our colonial past

Quiz

• Exoplanets
• Oceans
• Anthropocene
• Millennium Project
• Digital divide
• Panspermia
• Spacecraft
• Space exploration
• Colonisation
• Decolonisation
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Carl Sagan
• Arthur C. Clarke
• Virtual communities
• Proxima b
• Peace and Security
• Global perspectives

Could an artificial intelligence be considered a person under the law?

Quiz

Autocracies that look like democracies are a threat across the globe

Quiz

• Media
• Sovereign debt
• Democracy
• Capitalism
• Singapore
• Sovereign wealth fund
• Authoritarian rule
• Malaysia
• Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
• Vladimir Putin
• Authoritarianism
• Dissent
• Fethullah Gulen
• Authoritarian regimes
• Political repression
• Coups

Defending science: How the art of rhetoric can help

Quiz

Black Lives Matter: How far has the movement come?

Quiz

• Racism
• Activism
• Civil rights
• Black Lives Matter
• Grassroots protest
• #BlackLivesMatter
• Black Power
• Social movements
• Centralisation
• Anti-racism
• Movement for Black Lives
• Black Lives Matter protests
• #BLM

How Alexei Navalny revolutionized opposition politics in Russia, before his apparent poisoning

Quiz

• Russia
• Vladimir Putin
• Kremlin
• Alexei Navalny
• Dmitry Medvedev
• United Russia
• Russian opposition

Planned social media regulations set a dangerous precedent

Quiz

• Facebook
• Social media
• Pakistan
• Twitter
• Hungary
• Poland
• WhatsApp
• Social media regulation
• TikTok

Why Indian farmers’ protests are being called a ‘satyagraha’ – which means ‘embracing the truth’

Quiz

• Protest
• Farmers
• Gandhi
• Civil disobedience
• Non violence
• Short reads
• Religion and society
• Indian farmers

• Description: how law emerged to structure society; history of the person in law and human rights
• Rationale: provide a broad context on law, human rights, and technology for students who may be new to these topics; demonstrate how law broadened to include new rights for more diverse groups

• Description: the origins of democracy and authoritarianism; contrast democracy versus authoritarianism; the technical, communicative, and societal benefits of the internet
• Rationale: provide a broad political/governance context for human rights, technology, democracy, and authoritarianism; resurface the idea of the internet as a promising tool for communicating information; set the stage for a later discussion of social media as a problematic tool for disinformation

• Description: introduce knowledge and epistemology; chronicle the emergence of disinformation and fake news; contrast data, information, disinformation, and fake news; introduce rhetoric as a means of persuasion
• Rationale: define information terms; provide historical context for current online informational challenges

• Description: review human rights mobilization before the mass penetration of the internet; analyze social media’s emergence and impact on North American human rights
• Rationale: demonstrate different human rights efforts before the internet; extend a historical discussion of human rights mobilization from the past as well as into the present and future

• Description: examine historical uses of art for advocacy (e.g., politics, rights); provide examples of social media as a tool against oppression
• Rationale: provide examples of social media use for advocacy; provide students with examples for their own prospective artistic or advocacy classwork

• Description: summarize thoughts on the future of human rights, social media, and their intersection in the fight against oppression; students complete their final Artistic Project or Social Media Advocacy Campaign
• Rationale: speculate on future trends in human rights, social media, and governance

1.1 Introduction to Law and Types of Legal Systems

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Understand the nature and sources of law.
2. Know the types of modern legal systems in the world.
3. Understand the various functions of a legal system.
4. Learn the primary sources of law in the United States.

It is important for business people to understand the legal environment in which they are operating. To be successful, businesses must understand how law and economic principles influence each other. Businesses want to be successful, which usually means they want to be pro7table. While a basic economic principle is that businesses act in their own self-interest, they must do so within the parameters of the law. Sometimes businesses weigh the penalties of violating the law against the chances of getting caught to determine how they should behave. In both instances, the law is a restraint on behavior.

Most people want to conduct their business legally. Following the rules saves money, time, and frustration, and it preserves individual and professional reputations. So, if businesses have

Introduction to Law & Legal Systems | 4

an incentive to operate legally, why are do so many legal disputes occur? There are many reasons for this, including that many of our laws are poorly written, and reasonable people may disagree about what is “right.” Legal injuries happen even under the best of circumstances, and parties need a method to be compensated for their damages.

A common theme in the study of law is responsibility. Law seeks to answer the questions:

1. Who is responsible, and what is their liability? and
2. How does a business limit exposure to liability in the first place?

A solid understanding of business law minimizes the risk of liability and avoids legal disputes. The law provides a reasonable expectation of how things will be in the future based on how they have been in the past. It provides predictability and stability.

This book does not teach how to practice law or conduct legal research. The goals of this book are practical. Think about studying business law as a map by which to navigate business dealings. We want to help you minimize the risk of legal liability and avoid serious legal disputes. This book serves as an introduction to legal topics that affect businesses. By understanding the legal landscape, you will have a better opportunity for business success.

5 | Introduction to Law & Legal Systems

1.2 What Is Law and What Functions Does It Serve?

Law is the system of rules which a particular nation or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties. In a nation, the law can serve to (1) keep the peace, (2) maintain the status quo, (3) preserve individual rights, (4) protect minorities, (5) promote social justice, and (6) provide for orderly social change. Some legal systems serve these purposes better than others.

Although a nation ruled by an authoritarian government may keep the peace and maintain the status quo, it may also oppress minorities or political opponents (e.g., China, Zimbabwe, or Syria). Under colonialism, European nations often imposed peace in nations whose borders were created by those same European nations. With regard to the functions of the law, the empires may have kept the peace—largely with

Introduction to Law & Legal Systems | 6

force—but they changed the status quo and seldom promoted the native peoples’ rights or social justice.

In nations with various ethnic and tribal groups, it is often difficult for a single, united government to rule effectively. In Rwanda, for example, power struggles between Hutus and Tutsis resulted in the genocide of the Tutsi minority. In nations of the former Soviet Union, the withdrawal of a central power created power vacuums that were exploited by local leaders. When Yugoslavia broke up, the different ethnic groups—Croats, Bosniaks, and Serbs—fought bitterly rather than share power. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the blending of different groups of families, tribes, sects, and ethnic groups into an effective national governing body continues to be a challenge.

These situations highlight the struggle of a nation to implement and maintain the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law is a system in which laws are public knowledge, are clear in meaning, and apply equally to everyone. These systems uphold national political and civil liberties. Rule of law systems establish authority, create expectations for behavior, and establish redress for grievances and penalties for deviance. Governance of conflict and the attainment of peace among the governed are its primary goals. One of the greatest benefits of the Rule of Law is that it allows people to understand what is expected of them.

The United States is a Rule of Law System. The US Constitution is based on the principle that people have rights that cannot be taken away by the government. Instead, the role of the government is to protect the individual rights of its citizens. The US Constitution’s preamble states, “We the People…in Order to…insure domestic Tranquility.” This is just one example of how the US legal system was established to address the functions of a legal system.

7 | Introduction to Law & Legal Systems

1.3 Modern Legal Systems of the World

There are four main legal systems in the modern world:

1. Common law;
2. Civil law;
3. Religious law; and
4. Customary law/monarchy.

As the world becomes more interdependent, a fifth category of legal systems has developed — the hybrid legal system, which is a legal system that is a combination of two or more legal systems.

Introduction to Law & Legal Systems | 8

Common Law Systems

The legal system in the United States comes from the English common law tradition and the US Constitution. English

9 | Introduction to Law & Legal Systems

common law is a system that gives written judicial decisions the force of law. As a result, the US legal system recognizes an appellate court’s ability to interpret and apply the law to future litigants through precedent. Precedent is a judicial opinion that is considered legal authority for future cases involving the same or similar questions of law. The benefit of this system is consistency and resolution of disputes without requiring the parties to take legal matters to court.

A famous example of how precedent works is the US Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In this landmark 1954 case, the Justices unanimously ruled that racial segregation of children in public schools is unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education is one of the cornerstones of the Civil Rights Movement and helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all. The case required all racially segregated public schools to integrate, not just in Topeka, Kansas. In addition, Brown has been cited as legal precedent in thousands of cases nationwide involving racial equality.

The common law legal system is adversarial. This means that the parties bring their cases to the court for resolution. The judge or jury hears the parties’ evidence and arguments before making a final decision. It is the parties’ burden to investigate the facts, argue the law, and present their best case. Judges and juries do not do independent investigations nor are they responsible for helping parties argue their cases. It is a party’s responsibility to raise all legal issues.

Another characteristic of common law systems is that cases are often decided by juries of the parties’ peers. In both civil and criminal matters, the parties usually have a right to have a jury pulled from local citizens to resolve the dispute. When a jury determines the outcome of a case, the judge acts as a “gatekeeper,” who decides what evidence and legal arguments

Introduction to Law & Legal Systems | 10

the jury can properly consider. The judge ensures the parties receive a fair trial while the jury decides the outcome of the trial.

The common law tradition is unique to England, the United States, and former British colonies. Although there are differences among common law systems (e.g., whether judiciaries may declare legislative acts unconstitutional and how frequently juries may be used), all of them recognize the use of precedent, and none of them relies solely on the comprehensive, legislative codes that are prevalent in civil law systems.

Civil Law Systems

Civil law systems were developed in Europe and are based on Roman and Napoleonic law. Civil law systems are also called code systems because all the legal rules are in one or more comprehensive legislative enactments. During Napoleon’s reign, a comprehensive book of laws—a code—was developed for all of France. The code covered criminal law and procedure, non-criminal law and procedure, and commercial law. The code is used to resolve only cases brought to the courts, which are usually decided by judges without a jury.

Civil law systems are inquisitorial systems in which judges actively investigate cases. Judges have the authority to request documents and testimony, as well as to shape the parties’ legal claims. In addition, judges are not required to follow the decisions of other courts in similar cases. The law is in the code, not in the cases. The legislature, not the courts, is the primary place to enact and modify laws.

Civil law systems are used throughout Europe, Central and South America, Asia and Africa. France, Germany, Holland,

11 | Introduction to Law & Legal Systems

Spain, and Portugal had colonies outside of Europe, and many of these colonies adopted the legal practices that were imposed on them by colonial rule.

There are also communist and socialist legal systems that differ significantly from traditional civil law systems. Legal scholars debate whether this is a separate type of legal system or a subset of modern civil law systems. In a communist or socialist legal system, the nation has a code but most property is owned by the government or agricultural cooperatives. In addition, the judiciary is subservient to the Communist party and is not an independent branch of government.

Religious Law Systems

Religious law systems arise from the sacred texts of religious traditions and usually apply to all aspects of life, including social and business relations. In religious legal systems, a religious document is used as a primary legal source. All major world religions–Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism–have a religious legal system. The Islamic legal system (Sharia) with Islamic jurisprudence (Fiqh) is the most widely used religious legal system in the world. Most nations that have religious legal systems use them to supplement their secular national system. Only Saudi Arabia (Islamic) and the Vatican (Christian) are pure theocracies that have only a religious legal system in their nations.

Customary Law Systems

Customary legal systems are becoming increasingly less common. A customary system is used by a monarchy and grants specific legal powers to the kings, queens, sultans or

Introduction to Law & Legal Systems | 12

tribal leaders as heads of state. A challenge of a customary system is that the ruler is seen to be “above the law” because the laws do not apply equally to the ruler and subjects. There are only a handful of monarchies remaining in the world, and most of them have evolved into hybrid legal systems or have adopted a different type of legal system.

Hybrid Law Systems

Hybrid legal systems are a combination of two or more legal systems within a nation. India is a classic example of a nation with a hybrid legal system. As a former British colony, India has a common law legal system, which recognizes the power of the Supreme Court and High Courts to make binding judicial decisions as a form of precedent. However, most of its laws are integrated codes found in a Napoleonic code system. In addition, India has separate personal codes that apply to Muslims, Christians, and Hindus. As a result, India has a hybrid system made up of common law, civil law and religious law systems.

Figure 1.1 Legal Systems of the World Map

13 | Introduction to Law & Legal Systems

1.4 Sources of Law

Where does law come from? How do individuals and businesses know right from wrong? Not all actions that are considered “wrong” or inappropriate are violations of the law. They simply may represent social norms. So what is the difference? There are two types of rules in our society—social norms and laws.

Social norms are the informal rules that govern behavior in groups and societies. Social norms and cultural expectations may be violated with negative social or professional consequences for doing so. However, no legal repercussions follow violating social norms alone.

Violations of law are different. Violating the law carries penalties, such as civil liability, fines, or loss of liberty. While it is optional to conform to social customs, people are compelled to obey the law under threat of penalty.

Laws are generally classified as public law or private law. Public law applies to everyone. It is law that has been created by a legitimate authority with the power to create law, and it applies to the people within its jurisdiction. In the United States, the lawmaking authority itself is also subject to those laws, because no one is “above” the law. If the law is violated, penalties may be levied against violators. Examples of public law include constitutions, criminal laws, and administrative laws. For example, if someone steals items from a store, the thief is violating public law. He committed the crime of theft which affects the community as a whole (not just the store owners), and the crime is defined in public legislation.

Private law is law that is binding on specific parties. For instance, parties to a contract are involved in a private law agreement. The terms of the contract apply to the parties of

Introduction to Law & Legal Systems | 14

the contract but not anyone else. If the parties have a contract dispute, the terms of the contract and the remedy for breach will apply only to the parties of the contract. In addition to contracts, other examples of private law include tort and property laws. For example, if someone installs an industrial smoker on his property and the smoke creates a dense haze in the neighbor’s yard, there may be a violation of private law because the smoke is interfering with the neighbor’s right to peacefully enjoy one’s property.

Laws are also classified as civil or criminal. Civil law is usually brought by a private party against another private party. For example, one company decides to sue another for breach of contract. Or a customer sues a business when injured by the company’s product. Most laws affecting businesses are civil.

Criminal law involves a governmental decision to prosecute someone for violating a criminal statute. If someone breaks a criminal law, he or she could lose their freedom (i.e. be sent to prison) or lose their life (i.e. if convicted of a capital offense). In a civil action, no one is sent to prison. Usually, liability results in the loss of property such as money or assets.

Additionally, some law is procedural and some law is substantive. Procedural law describes the legal process and

15 | Introduction to Law & Legal Systems

rules that are required and must be followed. For instance, parties who are sued in court must receive notice of the lawsuit before the court can impose judgment against them. Substantive law refers to the actual substance of the law or the merits of the claim, case, or action. Substantive law embodies the ideas of legal rights and duties and is captured by different sources of law, including the Constitution, statutes, and common law.

For example, if someone drives fifty-five miles per hour in a forty mile-per-hour zone, she has broken the substantive rule of law of the speed limit. However, how and what gets decided in court related to the speeding ticket is a matter of procedural law. For example, whether the driver is entitled to a hearing before a judge, whether she has a right to be represented by legal counsel, whether the hearing takes place within a certain amount of time after the ticket was issued, and what type of evidence can be presented are procedural law issues.

Sources of Law

In the United States, our laws come primarily from:

• Federal and state constitutions;
• Statutory law from Congress, the state legislatures, and local legislative bodies;
• Common law from federal and state appellate courts;
• Administrative rules and regulations;
• Treaties and conventions; and
• Executive orders.

Introduction to Law & Legal Systems | 16

Constitutions

The most fundamental law in the United States is the US Constitution, which is the supreme law of the nation. Any law that conflicts with it is void. The Constitution serves three important functions. First, it establishes the structure of our national government and identifies the powers of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Second, it defines the boundaries of each branch’s authority and creates “checks” on each branch by the other branches. For example, the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but does not have the power to declare war. That duty falls to Congress. And, third, the Constitution guarantees civil liberties and individual rights.

The power granted to the federal government by the Constitution is limited. Any powers not expressly granted to the federal government by the Constitution are reserved to the states. This means that if the Constitution does not give the federal government power over a particular area, then the states regulate it.

The first ten amendments to the Constitution are known as the Bill of Rights. Despite the limited power granted to the federal government by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights protects certain individual civil rights and liberties from governmental interference. These rights include the freedom of speech and religion, the right to bear arms, and the rights of individuals who are suspected and accused of crimes.

Figure 1.2 Separation of Powers of the Federal Government

17 | Introduction to Law & Legal Systems

Each state also has its own constitution, which serves essentially the same function for the state government as the US Constitution serves for the federal government. Specifically, they establish limits of state government power, establish the organization and duties of the different branches of government at the state level, and protect fundamental rights of state citizens. This dual system of government in the United States is called federalism, which is a governance structure whereby the federal government and the state governments coexist through a shared power scheme.

Figure 1.3 Separation of Powers of the State Governments

Introduction to Law & Legal Systems | 18

Statutes

Statutes are laws created by a legislative body. Congress is the federal legislative body, and each state also has its own legislative body. Almost all statutes are created by the same method. An idea for a new law is proposed in the legislature. This proposal is called a bill. The House of Representatives and Senate independently vote on a bill. If the majority of both chambers approves it, the bill is sent to the president or governor for approval. If the president or governor signs the bill, then it becomes a statute.

Local governments, such as counties, cities, and townships, may be authorized under a state constitution to create or adopt ordinances. An ordinance is a legislative act of a local

19 | Introduction to Law & Legal Systems

government entity. Examples of ordinances include building codes, zoning laws, and misdemeanors such as jaywalking.

Common Law

Binding legal principles also come from the courts. When appellate courts decide a case, they may interpret and apply legal principles in a way that are binding on lower courts in the future. The process of applying a prior appellate decision to a case is called precedent. Simply put, precedent is when judges use past decisions to guide them. The benefit of precedent is that it makes the law predictable and furthers the rule of law by applying legal principles to the greater community, not just the parties to a lawsuit. Businesses value common law systems because they reduce the cost of business. For example, if a business is unsure of how its contract rights will be applied by the court, it can understand its rights by learning how courts interpreted similar contract provisions in past lawsuits. This allows businesses to assess their risks, determine their liability, and make rational business decisions without the expense of litigation.

Administrative Rules and Regulations

Administrative law is the collection of rules and decisions made by agencies to 7ll in particular details missing from constitutions and statutes. For example, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the federal agency responsible for collecting national taxes and administering the Internal Revenue Code enacted by Congress. All businesses and individuals must follow the IRS rules and regulations about how to report, file, and pay applicable taxes that Congress levies. Congress passes

Introduction to Law & Legal Systems | 20

statute defining “what” taxes need to be paid. The IRS adopts the rules about “how” those taxes are paid.

In the United States, many of the day-to-day regulation of businesses is done by administrative agencies. These agencies are created by the legislature to implement and enforce a particular statute. Agencies often report to the executive branch, but some are run by independent commissions. Legislative bodies give agencies the power to create rules and regulations that individuals and businesses must follow to comply with the statute. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created to implement and enforce the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

Treaties and Conventions

A treaty is a binding agreement between two nations. A convention is a binding agreement among a group of nations. In the US, a treaty or convention is generally negotiated by the executive branch. To be binding, the US Constitution requires the Senate to ratify treaties by a two-thirds vote. Once ratified, a treaty becomes part of federal law with the same weight and effect as a statute passed by the entire Congress. Therefore, treaties and conventions have equal standing as statutes in US law.

Executive Orders

Article II, Section 1 of the US Constitution gives the president the power to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Under this power, the president may issue executive orders requiring officials in the executive branch to perform their duties in a particular manner. State governors have the same

21 | Introduction to Law & Legal Systems

authority under state constitutions. Although they are not laws that apply directly to individuals and businesses, executive orders are important legal documents because they direct the government’s enforcement efforts.

Hierarchy of Sources of Law

1.5 Concluding Thoughts

Understanding business law is essential to successfully running any type of business because a solid understanding of laws and regulations helps avoid liability and minimizes risk. In business, it is not enough to conduct business ethically. Knowledge of business law is essential to successful business practices. Ultimately, business people should be able to recognize legal issues, minimize liability exposure, and know when to consult an attorney.

Legal systems vary widely in their aims and in the way they

Introduction to Law & Legal Systems | 22

resolve disputes. Common law systems are adversarial, use juries and adhere to precedent. Civil law systems are inquisatorial, do not use juries and do not recognize precedent. All major world religions have a legal system, although only two nations have a purely national religious system. Many nations have hybrid legal systems that combine two or more legal systems.

The legal system in the United States is composed of multiple jurisdictions at the local, state and federal levels. Local and state laws may not conflict with federal laws. Primary sources of law in the United States include constitutional law, statutory law, common law, administrative law, treaties, and executive orders.

23 | Introduction to Law & Legal Systems

Quiz on " 1. Introduction to Law and Types of Legal Systems":

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.” — Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman of Alphabet Inc.

Origin in Anarchy

Until the end of 2017, Eric Schmidt was the executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. Alphabet emerged out of Google to become a large holding company that would manage Google and several related properties including YouTube and Calico (a biotech company). Schmidt has a Ph.D. in computer science from Berkeley. He serves on advisory boards for Khan Academy, an education company with strong ties to YouTube, and The Economist, a global news magazine with both digital and print products. Schmidt’s résumé suggests he is intellectually outstanding and that he cares about technology, education and the mass media. If one of the biggest brains of our time, and the former leader of one of the few corporations with direct influence on the way the internet is shaped, describes the internet as “anarchy,” it’s a good indication that things are in flux in the digital world.

Of course, we should analyze critically any statements coming from someone whose primary purpose it is to maximize profits for their company. At the time he made these statements, Schmidt was running Google. The loyalties of executive-level leaders presumably rest with the corporation that signs their checks and provides their stock options. Google has an interest in making you feel that the internet is a confusing place since their search engine is one solution to the confusion. (However, if you rely on autocomplete, Google’s suggestions may not only be confusing; they may even be morally reprehensible.)

Still, Schmidt’s characterization of the internet as a place of anarchy is accurate. And as we seek to define digital culture and to discuss the cultural relevance of social media in this chapter, we must recognize that there is no grand plan. The only constant in digital culture is change, which may sound cliché, but the underlying ICT structures shift so often that it can be difficult for cultural trends to take hold.

Digital Culture and Social Media | 13

Chapter 1 of this text defined society and culture in the context of the field of mass communication. It covered the distinction between interpersonal communication, organizational communication and mass communication, and then it delved deeper into concepts relating to mass communication. The purpose of the first chapter was to start a discussion about how evolving information and communication technologies (ICTs) can influence the mass media and contribute to social and cultural change in the process.

A Brief Overview

If you are anticipating a roadmap of neat, organized plans for how the evolution of culture on digital platforms will unfurl, you’re gonna have a bad time. Instead, this chapter offers a brief, lively discussion of how we define digital culture and what we might expect from it as it emerges in online spaces, mobile apps and platforms.

Additionally, this chapter includes a breakdown of the roles social media platforms may play in influencing culture.

If you acknowledge that cultures have always been in [ux, then perhaps the concept of a digital culture emerging online amidst anarchy will look less like disruption and more like evolution (Spoiler Alert: Reveals the plot of The Last Jedi). However you classify it, the cultural impact of the merger of the mass media and digital networks is vast, and that is the topic of this chapter.

This chapter begins with a definition of “digital culture” that comes from the media studies portion of mass communication literature. Media studies refers to the broad category of academic inquiry analyzing and critiquing the mass media, its products, possible effects of messages and campaigns, and even media history. Chapter 2 then continues with a deeper discussion of identity in the digital age and covers privacy and surveillance as well as the praxis of digital culture as defined by scholars. The term “praxis” here refers to how a theory plays out in actual practice.

This chapter also identifies different levels of culture (a concept borrowed from anthropology) as they relate to cultural products reaching audiences through digital mass communication channels. In other words, we ultimately answer this question: If we take existing theory for describing the levels of culture and apply it to digital culture, what are some immediately recognizable traits?

Finally, social media are defined from a scholarly point of view with particular attention given to the cultural potential of digitally networked social platforms.

Digital Culture Defined

Scholars argue whether we can understand what the spread of digital networks will mean for relatively well-established cultures in the tangible world, or predict with any certainty how cultures will evolve on digital platforms. There are two basic schools of thought. The first argues that existing cultures might find themselves essentially recreated in digital form as more and more life experiences, from the exciting to the mundane, play out in digital spaces. The second school of thought posits that the dominant digital culture emerging now is a separate culture unto itself.

Digital Culture and Social Media | 14

Before we delve in with prognostications about where digital culture is headed, let us first define our terms. Digital culture refers to the knowledge, beliefs, and practices of people interacting on digital networks that may recreate tangible-world cultures or create new strains of cultural thought and practice native to digital networks.

For example, an online fandom and a real-world fan club are both made up of people who are geographically separated but share a common interest. If a fan club were to “go online,” networked communication platforms might make the experience better than it was in the physical world. Before the advent of the internet, most fan clubs produced a newsletter, offered connections with pen pals, and provided early opportunities to buy tickets and merchandise. Online, fans can create deeper relationships with one another. They can connect and communicate on official channels or make their own unofficial groups where they need not communicate through a central authority or gatekeeper. Fan and star interactions can be direct, one-on-one interactions on multiple social media channels. There may be an official, organized fan group, but many other avenues can appear on relatively open platforms with few rules.

The cultural product at the core of a fandom might still be a “legacy media” product. Legacy media are any media platforms that existed prior to the development of massive digital networks. Yes, there are people who are “Instagram famous” or “YouTube” famous, but the biggest stars in our cultural world still have many ties to legacy media. Musicians, film stars and comic book heroes come to mind. What other types of “legacy media” stars have huge online fandoms?

Online fandoms may simultaneously expect less centralized authority over the fan experience and more direct access to their heroes. They often expect to see transparency during the creative process, such as Instagram or Twitter posts with “secret” messages for longtime followers or behind-the-scenes videos as albums and movies are made. Fandoms might demand to hear key information first or to have special access via social media.

Similar things could be said of fan clubs in the age of snail mail. Essential elements of the culture of fandom — gaining access to artists and finding friends in a community — have not changed as much in kind as they have in degree.

Is this an example of the transition of an existing cultural form (the fan club) to digital environments,

Digital Culture and Social Media | 15

It is worth noting that there are also niche fandoms that probably would not exist without the aid of digital networks. With virtually unlimited communication space, there is room for incredibly rarified fan groups to form on platforms such as Tumblr, and they are not always socially positive communities. In many cases of hyper-specific fandoms, it is difficult to argue that these cultures existed in the physical world and simply “moved online.” Being digitally networked is what makes it possible to find people with particularly narrow shared interests, for better and for worse.

Digital Dynamic

Even with the presence of niche online groups, digital culture cannot currently be separated from the influence of physical-world cultures. We can say two things about the relationship between online and physical-world cultures at this time. First, the growth of interaction on digital networks influences “traditional” cultures. Second, longstanding cultural traditions are influencing digital culture as it takes shape. The ethics and norms established in the physical world shape our views about behavior and values in digital networks. The term norm refers to a behavioral standard. Mutual influences of what is considered “normal” in online behavior and well established physical world norms are emerging in a dynamic fashion. Sometimes they clash.

One example is online dating. Dating in real life (IRL) is changing as more and more people use dating apps and websites. Previously, dating was limited to the people you were likely to meet. You could meet friends of friends. You could meet people at school, at parties, at bars or on blind dates. Your options were limited geographically and by how outgoing you were, how much time you wanted to spend looking, and who you trusted to set you up. The personal ads in newspapers were often considered sad places for losers. Using a mass medium to find your true love was often considered a risky last resort.

When online dating first became available, it was often compared to posting and perusing digital personal ads. This was a cultural perception based on previous experiences, behavior and expectations from a pre-Internet culture.

Over the course of approximately ten years (1998-2008), what once was considered odd, creepy or desperate in many parts of the Western world came to be considered commonplace. Apps and sites like OkCupid, Tinder, Match.com and eHarmony have millions of users. Culturally, many of us have accepted this new digital form of dating. It’s not for everyone, but online dating does not carry the stigma it once did.

Digital Culture and Social Media | 16

Whatever it may be in a given culture, sexual morality still exists, even if new technologies make hooking up easier and new capabilities challenge old norms of what dating should be.

This is the dynamic at the heart of this chapter. Digital technology can influence knowledge, beliefs and especially practices around dating. This can, in turn, shape the way people think about dating in general, not just in digital environments. The “old” cultural norms and morals can still be applied to judge those who use digital apps for casual hookups, but the new culture can push back, so to speak, and change how people think about dating even if they never use dating apps themselves.

We have discussed how the digital culture and physical world culture dynamic functions, but we have not yet defined digital culture. For that, we must look to scholars who have spent years trying to pinpoint what emergent digital culture seems to be.

Individualization, Post-nationalism, and Globalization

We turn to Mark Deuze, a scholar from the University of Amsterdam, for a complete definition. He seeks to provide a preliminary definition of “digital culture” in his 2006 article, “Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture.”

In his analysis of academic literature, Deuze finds that scholars often make assumptions when trying to explain how digital culture works. The main he identifies is the idea that culture moves to digital networks more or less intact. There was, a decade ago, a lack of explanation about what happens to culture in digital environments.

How much might culture change when certain practices move online? How often can existing cultural beliefs and expectations be transferred intact? Deuze does not think digital culture is merely a recreation of physical world culture in online spaces, but he does not have a good answer for what has been emerging. He analyzes independent media sites, blogs and radical online media outlets to see what these new forms of communication demonstrate about digital culture.

That these forms are not meant to represent all culture but rather a cultural vanguard. They are (or were) the tip of the spear of newly evolving digital cultures. These sites are often progressive politically, so this is not as much a prediction of what will happen with all digital culture as it is a discussion of what is possible. Deuze maintains that the real practice of digital culture is “an expression of individualization, post-nationalism, and globalization.”

Individualization

Deuze finds individualization in blogs most frequently written by one person and focused on a specific topic or small geographical region. Individualism, as it is used here, refers not only to an individual’s ability to act as their own publisher online but also to a social condition in which individuals are free from government control. It means that even in authoritarian nations such as North Korea, Russia,

Digital Culture and Social Media | 17

Beyond Deuze’s observations, evidence of individualism online comes from partisan news sites such as The Drudge Report and HuffPost. Both are named for individual founders. They are digital mass media outlets that started largely as personal points of view.

The importance of individualized expression on social media is clear. We appear as individuals on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr. This increases our reach. Each of us can potentially connect with every other individual on a given social media platform, but these platforms also raise questions about surveillance and privacy.

Digital Individualism vs. Privacy

Eric Schmidt once said about online privacy and Google, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” While this might make sense in a free society, there are many places in the world — North Korea for example — where government surveillance can utilize corporate invasions of privacy to crack down on dissent and severely limit freedom.

Suppose someone living in North Korea would like to use a social media channel such as Twitter to connect with like-minded people without government officials finding out. Should Twitter protect those users? What if a state threatens legal action or violence against Twitter employees? Would social media channels give up their users?

There is a difference between government surveillance (that is, state-sanctioned data gathering and analysis on massive scales) and corporate data aggregation for targeted marketing purposes. Usually, by accepting the Terms and Conditions of apps and web services, you opt in to having your data stored, crunched and analyzed by corporations. Legally, you are responsible for that decision. Technically, the data gathering platform is not supposed to identify you as an individual, but so-called “safe harbor” laws can be ineffectual.

Should Google protect your searches and refuse to divulge information about your habits to governments, even if they share that data with other companies for marketing purposes? Should Google give you a way to hide your online activity? Is there a way for the liberty-loving Southeast Asian to have his privacy protected while still enabling Western governments to watch out for terrorists? These questions relate to larger issues of freedom and individualism in digital culture.

Throughout its history, the United States of America has taken pride in its First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights as guarantees of liberty. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, many Americans accepted new levels of scrutiny, particularly in digital environments. Support for strong leaders increased until very recently. Concerns about the global rise of authoritarianism have people questioning government surveillance and corporate surveillance as they may limit our ability to engage as individuals in digital culture.

Digital Culture and Social Media | 18

Our experience with the anarchy of online mass communication platforms is quite limited. As we learn what government surveillance and corporate invasions of privacy are capable of, it may continue to deeply affect our physical world behavior.

Many would agree with the sentiment, “If you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about,” but even advocates for a more open digital society want their privacy. Zuckerberg bought several properties around his house to keep his physical location secure. Eric Schmidt does not want people to know where he lives. He generally does not invite the public into his private life, and, one might  assume, does not want people to examine why his former wife said she felt like a “piece of luggage” when married to him. Such information about Schmidt’s personal life is easy to find online and could be used against him, but should we care? Does it matter in the broader cultural sense?

This text argues that privacy does matter. The vast majority of us are not using digital platforms to break laws or to interact in negative ways with others and yet we still have aspects of ourselves that we would like to remain private. Has a parent or guardian ever snooped on your Facebook account or followed your Instagram? We have incredible freedoms and amazing digital communication capabilities as individuals living our lives in the new digital culture. It comes with a price we have yet to grasp.

Terms and Conditions

The film Terms and Conditions May Apply details the ways our private information, such as our emails and texts, can easily be related to our public information on social networks.

The filmmakers note that the knowledge and hardware needed to snoop on people are bought and sold all over the world and are often unregulated.

Are we becoming more open because of the ways social media function? Is there anything wrong with that? Are we surrendering our privacy in ways that cannot be undone?

Digital Culture and Social Media | 19

One of the major cultural challenges of the network society will be to deal with people in power who would like to use our information against us as a means of control. It has already happened in some of the countries where the Arab Spring revolutions took place (Egypt, for one).

You never know what you might need to protest in the future, but we’re beginning to see tools deployed to pre-empt protest and other acts of dissent. What this means for our efforts to define digital culture is that digital culture can free us as individuals, but it can also imprison us.

We can use the internet and smartphones to help us to get questions answered and to draw attention to ourselves in good ways. We can coordinate with others for fundraisers and to have parties. Digital communication networks are amazingly sophisticated tools that can help us connect as individuals to form groups to celebrate all sorts of interests, political and otherwise.

On the other hand, if individuals believe they have no privacy, digital networks could become virtual wastelands where innovative collaboration is hindered and where corporate commercial speech and government surveillance dominate.

Capitalism depends on risk-taking, and if you kill risk-taking online, you have hindered the entrepreneurialism that the network society offers. We scholars will study for decades to come how individual behavior changes and how relationships morph in a digital culture that discourages behavior we want to keep private while simultaneously encouraging levels of sharing that border on exhibitionism. How can we maintain privacy and gain attention, which is so often the currency of the open Internet? This is an interesting dilemma that arises in an individualistic digital culture.

Post-nationalism

Post-nationalism is another aspect of digital culture that Deuze notes in his article. It may seem unrelated to our previous discussion of individualism and privacy in digital culture, but in fact, it is an analysis of the ways individuals represent themselves online.

Most simply, “post-nationalism” in digital culture means that one’s country appears to matter less as an influence on behavior and values online than it does in the tangible world, perhaps because we can be free of our national identities when engaging in digital networks with people from around the globe.

This does not mean that we should expect to see an end to nationalism in the tangible world. Quite the opposite seems to be true: As post-nationalism appears in digital spaces, nationalism is on the rise in

Digital Culture and Social Media | 20

global politics. It might seem odd that people drop their nationalism online but demand it in physical spaces, but if you look at the way culture is expressed online, it is clear that for many people their nationality has little to do with their online identities.

For example, your country may be important to you, but it may not be one of the ways you define yourself in social media environments. You can love America without talking about it all of the time on Facebook or Twitter. Remember as well that national boundaries may be felt more readily in the daily lives of Africans, Asians, Europeans and others living in nations that are geographically smaller, more tightly packed and culturally distinct. In digital spaces, these cultural differences can evaporate. Although war and immigration are highly influential on the current cultural climate in the physical world, the perception of evaporating culture in networked spaces may help drive the sense that physical world cultures are being threatened.

Recent political developments, however, make it somewhat more difficult to think of digital culture as post-nationalistic given the rise of online nationalism — particularly white nationalism in Europe and the United States. White nationalism is a brand of nationalism related to white supremacy, but it is an identity connected to the nation-state nonetheless. A nationalist’s primary modus operandi in digital culture may not reflect what nation states ultimately become in the 21st century, but rather what they wish it were. Even so, there is evidence that some factions will use digital spaces to promote a return to nationalism.

Does this mean that post-nationalism in digital culture is a false notion conceived in the early 2000s that has no bearing on culture today? Perhaps, but it is more likely that we are seeing a backlash against the rise of a global post-nationalist space online.

Globalization

Digital culture, Deuze posits, reflects a globalized or globalizing world. Behaviors, interests, and relationships cross international boundaries. The economic structure of digital networks, including the mass media system, is global. For example, multinational conglomerate corporations tend to dominate the media industry, not just in the United States but around the world. Books, academic articles and simple infographics show that most mass media companies fall under the ownership of large corporate firms. It is not accurate to say this represents all media or that “the media” are being controlled, but it is accurate to say a significant level of influence can be attributed to a handful of media corporations in most developed parts of the world.

Mass media consumers should be aware of the environment in which media products are produced, but this is not to say that the globalization of mass media is always a negative thing. When it comes to culture, globalization has its supporters. Here is a site in English about K-pop music. The music comes from Korea, but the fanbase is spread worldwide, and the site can reach a global audience only because of the global nature of digital networks. It works only because computer servers are connected by wires all over the globe to make this bit of culture, like many others, available to the entire globe.

Digital Culture and Social Media | 21

There exists a global point of view in both the physical world and in digital culture which is open to all kinds of cultural production as long as it is interesting, funny and shows great talent. There are videos that go viral globally, although it is not always clear why. (If we had the formula, we’d include it here.) All we can say at this time is that you can reach the world with any online message and, for whatever reason, some things are globally likable and “shareable.”

A Place Called Gangnam

Humanity’s recently developed ability to develop a globalized point of view and to establish a common digital culture is the reason you have heard (and likely tired) of “Gangnam Style.” Ironically, PSY, who performs the song, is kind of an anti-pop star within Korea. The song makes fun of the country’s higher class, a conspicuously wealthy subculture from a place called the Gangnam District. But PSY is a global success. He is popular, many argue, because he is quite funny and because he is not the prototypical K-pop hero. He comes from a particular national cultural tradition, but he also transcends it by being absurd. Thus, as a distinctly individual performer, he personifies a type of post-nationalism and the globalization of digital culture.

Individualism, post-nationalism and globalization go a long way toward defining the emergent “digital culture.” For more information, consult Deuze’s original article.

Digital Culture in Practice

Deuze makes one more observation not about what digital culture is but rather how it works. Deuze argues that the production of digital culture will be carried out through participation, remediation and bricolage.

Participation means that every individual will have the ability to contribute to online media. Professionals and amateurs will work together much more often than they did on “legacy media” products and projects.

Because people do not want to work for free, they will not flock to an online platform simply because it has been opened up for contributions. If anyone could build a Facebook, there would be hundreds or even thousands of competing platforms. As it stands, there are perhaps ten major social media platforms worldwide, if “major” means they are home to more than 200 million members.

It is also clear from social networking sites, Reddit, and similar social news sharing sites that people will contribute to a platform even if it is not necessarily well-policed or easy to use. In digital culture, it helps to be the first to be big. Success breeds success in an economy based on attention, and what dominates tends to be emotional issues, as satirized here.

Consistency also seems to help, but what matters most is the ability to consistently draw an audience. Think of a person trying to become a YouTube influencer. They must publish interesting content regularly for months or even years before they develop a following that they might be able to sell to

Digital Culture and Social Media | 22

advertisers. Once the YouTube star does begin to peddle products, they run the risk of alienating a portion of their audience.

Participation is an essential part of digital culture. It can be easy and fun to do it for free. If you want to make a career out of it, it takes professional-level commitment, and the resulting content often favors what is popular and emotionally gripping rather than what is informative or socially beneficial.

Remediation means that old media are made new again in digital spaces. Television becomes YouTube. Radio becomes podcasting, Spotify and Pandora. Newspapers become … online newspapers! The new media take elements of the old media and repurpose them, while “legacy” media firms copycat digital media trends, buy out media startups, or try to forge new paths at significant expense.

In the practice of digital culture, media are remade in digital environments in a process that combines the appealing parts of existing forms of media with additional functionalities made possible by new ICTs and digital networking capabilities. The author’s own research argues that attempts by legacy media organizations to create new businesses online face many institutional hurdles. Remediation is constantly happening, but that does not mean existing media companies can determine how to monetize the practice in a sustainable way. We should expect considerable remediation innovation to come from startup companies and individual tech entrepreneurs with few ties to legacy media.

A good example of remediation is taking classic movies or video games and showing them to young people to record their reactions for YouTube. Reaction videos of all kinds take media products people are familiar with and show them to the unfamiliar so that viewers can judge their reactions. This new media product repurposes old content with an added element designed to pique our interest; however, remediation does not always add much value.

Bricolage is a French term not easy to translate literally to English. A translation offering deep context might be: Do it yourself by combining elements found elsewhere. Much of digital culture is an amalgamation of existing content and new cultural work being done at home by people with amateur skills and affordable but capable tools, such as smartphones and tablet computers. Even basic tools are quite powerful. Smartphones come with front- and back-facing cameras as well as HD-quality video. The computing power of a smartphone is more powerful than a mainframe computer was 70 years ago. Independent producers have video and audio editing software options and can create professional looking, popular media products on their own with little formal training.

Professionalism

What is formal training for, then? It prepares you to transition from making professional looking and sounding media products once in a while to consistently making professional quality media. Formal training prepares you to think strategically about where industries are going so that you know not only how to make mass media products but where to place them and how to use and possibly develop your own communication platforms.

Digital Culture and Social Media | 23

Formal training includes an education in history and ethics. Amateur producers are skilled at chasing trends and gaining popularity, but they often ride cultural waves that last from a few months to a couple of years. Planning for multiple media shifts and seeing digital cultural trends as or before they emerge requires an education in more than the tools and tricks of the trade.

Deuze in Sum

Deuze’s analysis suggests that barriers between professionals and amateurs are breaking down. Old media are made new again in digital culture, through a process of making digital media collages, so to speak. (The word “bricolage” is related to “collage.”)

Thus, in practice, digital culture is democratizing (though not fully democratic, of course). Amateurs can create media products that challenge the popularity of cultural production made by corporate conglomerates valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. What emerges in terms of popularity, though, is not necessarily high in quality or accuracy. Quality and accuracy are the hallmarks of professional communication (although not all professionals behave as they should).

Levels of Culture in Digital Media

Let’s take a step back and look at the definition of culture again. In the first chapter, this text defined culture as being made up of the knowledge, beliefs and practices of a group of people. We need to tweak that definition a little. It is more accurate to say that the knowledge, beliefs and practices of a massive group of people at a certain time and place defines common culture.

Three levels of culture exist in anthropology literature, and they apply to the ways culture is expressed in the mass media. The three levels of culture are personal culture, group culture and common culture (similar to pop culture).

Any kind of culture, whether it is personal, group or common culture, relies on shared knowledge. There must be shared experiences and shared stories about those experiences for us to have a common culture. If we did not have shared experiences, cultural references would not make sense. Thus common culture can be arrived at when individuals and groups tell the same stories, or when mass media reach mass audiences with the same messages at the same (or about the same) time.

The more people who know about a song, film, work of art or event with cultural significance, and the more information that they know about it, the more likely it is that event will become part of the common culture. The mass media influence common culture, although it is not correct to say that they directly shape it. There are many other institutional influences on common culture such as governments, churches, families and educational systems.

In fact, messages in the mass media may not be as influential now as they were in the mid-20th century when millions of people watched the same TV shows each week at the same time and read the same major metropolitan daily newspapers and national magazines. Demassification has affected the ways common culture is established and fed.

Digital Culture and Social Media | 24

The mass media influence may have less power to influence common culture directly, but it is still relevant. Think about any major global news event of the past few months. When an event is big enough that it is shared across all media platforms, especially cable television, broadcast television and social media channels, it can form a piece of common culture. If several events occur or if an event has a broad enough global impact, it can enter the global collective memory, the shared cultural memory of a group of people.

Group culture is what we used to refer to as a “subculture.” It is the knowledge, beliefs and practices of a subset of people considered to be part of a larger culture. Group culture is distinct in some ways from the shared, broader common culture. Group culture might center on religious beliefs and practices, ethnic norms and interests, or food, music and other forms of material production. Groups can be as large as all Chinese-Americans and as small as the remaining St. Louis NFL fan culture.

You have a say in defining your personal culture — the knowledge, beliefs and practices held most dear to the individual. You may find yourself identifying with many group cultures or taking most of your interests from the dominant common culture. Do you take your cultural cues about what to think about and talk about from television, social media or small group cultures with which you identify? This much is your prerogative. You can choose your personal culture. It is based both on what you believe in and what cultural products you consume.

America, ‘Merica, Los Estados Unidos, Etc.

There is a common culture in America, but there is no single, dominant, common culture across global digital networks. There may be a tendency for people to believe that the group cultures they interact with most often online constitute the “real” digital culture, but as yet there is no clear consensus about what our shared digital culture is or even if we will develop one.

Algorithms in search engines and social media platforms determine much of what we find when we search the internet and what we see when we look at news and information feeds from our friends. Do algorithms constitute common culture? They may shape it, and they may be influenced by user preferences, but they are not always designed for truth, accuracy or information literacy. They are most often designed to give consumers whatever makes them consume more of what the platform wants them to consume. Google usually wants you to spend money with its advertisers. Facebook wants your time and your data so it can sell your information to third party advertisers.

What shapes digital culture is often in a “black box”: It is the proprietary information of very large corporations, and the public may or may not have access to the code. Even if we did have it, it would be di\cult to explain exactly how algorithms work. There are times when the corporations that deploy algorithms seem surprised by how they function in the hands of massive numbers of users.

Major events that cut across algorithms and show up on almost everyone’s news feed and in almost everyone’s search results are still likely to have an impact on common culture. Major events are likely

Digital Culture and Social Media | 25

to shape personal, group, and common culture if they are significant enough. What kind of cultural impact does a given event have? It depends.

The impact of a school shooting near Miami might be felt differently in Florida than in California because of proximity and because the gun laws in each state are quite different. In other words, something can enter the common culture but still be perceived quite differently by individual members of the public.

Norms

By now you should understand that the cultural impact of messages in the mass media at each level — personal, group and common culture — is related to the shared knowledge that existed before the event.

Events are often going to be perceived differently by people identifying with different small group cultures within a larger common culture. Events will usually be interpreted differently by individuals within a small group culture, depending on an individual’s beliefs about and personal experiences with the issue at hand.

A person’s response to current events as they appear in the mass media is also related to the existence and strength of shared beliefs about the way they think things ought to be. We call those beliefs cultural norms.

There is no single, agreed-upon set of norms that everyone in a given group culture adheres to. If you have lived your whole life as part of the dominant culture, and you do not recognize the existence and struggle of various cultural groups, it can be di\cult to recognize reactions in digital media spaces that do not relate much to what you see in your physical world. Conversely, if you have grown up being oppressed as part of a small group, you may find it hard to understand how others identifying with the dominant portion of a common culture can miss the cruelty present in some cultural norms they don’t think twice about.

Exposure to other groups’ cultures in a network society can bring about both greater understanding and greater anxiety. This is something that will be worked out, for better or for worse, over the next several decades as digital culture evolves. Figuring out how groups with different cultural interests, norms, and values can get along while being constantly exposed to one another’s views in the free-for-all of network society is the challenge of emergent digital culture.

One response is to run to echo chambers, to partisan spaces that feel safe for certain group cultures and

Digital Culture and Social Media | 26

for our personal cultural beliefs and priorities, but this practice can only deepen the divide between cultural groups.

In the early years of working to establish a common culture in the network society, we have managed to inundate ourselves with information from all manner of cultural groups and to isolate ourselves from views that contradict our own group cultural norms. This is anarchy. This is culture without a strong social structure to hold it together.

The question facing mass communication scholars that members of our common culture also face is whether the institutions of the physical world can or should try to control how digital culture is shaped. You have the power to decide if digital culture should be regulated and how. This may be the most important civic responsibility you have, but it is also a matter of cultural power.

Social Media and Social Capital

What do you think it means for society that networked communication platforms can make anybody a mass communicator? One answer is that there is great potential for social change because society, as Dewey said in Chapter 1, is not just transmitted by communication, it exists in it.

That means every individual with a computer or a smartphone has the potential to disseminate messages that influence broader society. Think of the Arab Spring revolutions of 2010-2012. Think of #Ferguson protests in the summer and fall of 2014. Think of the way candidate Donald Trump bypassed mass media outlets to reach voters and to set a separate news agenda in 2015 and 2016. Individuals and small groups are now able to coordinate and to lead social movements using networked communication technologies.

You have probably heard the term “social movement.” In a sense, a social movement is a change in society brought on by communication. What is different about the world of networked communication is how interpersonal messages and message campaigns can shift in an instant to being mass messages or massive campaigns. This makes digital networks battlegrounds because networked public communication platforms are centers of power now more than ever.

Just as they can influence and even disrupt social structures, individuals and small groups can shape culture using social media channels. This makes our communication system as ripe for abuse by outside forces as it is for use by legitimate citizens. Governments, corporations and rogue dictators all have an interest in learning our secrets, and they could potentially hold them against us.

We cannot underestimate how important this is will be in the mass communication field. Individual,

Digital Culture and Social Media | 27

group and broader social secrets — including consumer behavior, political behavior and even personal thoughts and interests — are easier to discern and possibly manipulate than ever before because of the vast amounts of data collected about us from our social media and other internet habits. This can have a profound effect on our behavior and on our society, and we are not prepared as a society to defend ourselves against attacks.

Before you get discouraged about digital culture and privacy, and before you get inundated with all of the possibilities and implications of digital culture, consider Clay Shirky’s Ted talk, “How social media can make history.”

Shirky outlines the power of social connectivity and applies the concept of social capital. The basic definition of social capital is the potential to get help, not just financial assistance, from the people around you when needed. Social media platforms can be great places to build social capital. Thus, they have the potential to be constructive or disruptive. It depends on how you use them. Watch the video for a complete definition.

Interpersonal communication, organizational communication and mass communication are separate areas of academic interest, as stated in the first chapter, but our ability as consumers and as producers to alternate from one to the other is as powerful as it has ever been. Being connected to each other almost at all times by digital networks creates the capacity for relatively quick mass social action. People are beginning to use this power to pull society in different directions. Large numbers of people can be organized and we could see social shifts and rifts develop more quickly than they can be put back together. It will be up to individual users and groups of users to decide how to respond to such social and cultural changes.

Participatory Media

A major shaper of culture and society is the news media. There will be separate sections on the evolution of news in later chapters, but in the context of digital culture, it bears noting that the role of news media within broader media landscapes is also shifting.

Apart from the ability of social movements and cultural movements to arise and take shape on social media platforms, there is also the potential for public opinion to be influenced quickly and deeply when mass media outlets operated in the same digital networks as influential individuals and groups.

You may contribute to news information by volunteering. One of the biggest stories to gain national attention in 2014 that was filmed and posted by a citizen journalist was the story of Eric Garner, who was seen being put into a chokehold by NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo. Reports said that Garner had asthma and that he died of a heart attack.

Here the term “citizen journalist” refers to a person

Digital Culture and Social Media | 28

who is not a paid professional but who delivers news to audiences nonetheless.

It is doubtful that the story would have received national attention had it not been for the video bystander Taisha Allen took with her mobile phone. When she shared that video, and it went viral on social media channels, she made the mass media story possible.

Allen probably had several reasons for sharing the video of Garner, and she was probably aware of the potential social and cultural impact of the video. You do not have to be a media literacy expert to know that such a video would receive broad attention and generate controversy. Allen chose to share the video because she thought people needed to see what had happened.

Further solidifying the cultural significance of the video, within days of the story breaking, Spike Lee had re-cut a scene from his groundbreaking film Do the Right Thing where the character Radio Raheem is choked to death by an NYPD officer. He interspersed his original film clip with bystander video of Eric Garner’s death. This almost instant connection between a post made by a citizen using social media and a bit of modern classic film speaks to the rising power and cultural influence of amateur media. Individuals can affect major producers in a mutual effort to shape social norms and structures as well as cultural influences.

We should expect more and more professionals to make these kinds of connections with amateurs and bystanders in the future. Mashups of professionally made mass media messages and citizen-generated messages are likely to proliferate. Can you think of video footage from individuals present during major news events that shaped the news and public opinion?

The events in Ferguson, Missouri followed a similar path as the Eric Garner story: Social media accounts of the killing of Michael Brown were shared virally almost immediately after the incident. Social media activity on YouTube, Twitter and other channels helped shape the way events unfolded. This drove the way the story was covered in the national media in the early reporting, but backlash inevitably followed.

Much of the work done by citizen journalists will be controversial. Media professionals working in news and other fields will have to use discernment in deciding which views to share because in a sense sharing is promoting, even if one disagrees with the sentiment of the tweet, video, or post.

No piece of media that is meaningful on a cultural level is going to be captured and disseminated with universal agreement about its importance or its meaning, but for society to function and for culture to serve its purposes we need to agree in a general sense on what’s real and what is not. The real danger in the rise of the power of individuals and small groups in digital culture is that they can pull larger groups away from looking for fact-based discourse.

Digital Culture and Social Media | 29

Quiz on "2. Digital Culture and Social Media":

In the age of social media, the notions of truth, information, and knowledge are all changing. These notions were once amorphous and invisible – the kinds of airy, invisible topics only philosophers and a few scientists studied. But today truth, information, and knowledge are all represented, constructed, and battled about online. Page views, shares, and reactions clue individuals and companies in to what spreads from machine to machine and mind to mind. Content editable by users online is negotiated and changed in real time. In this chapter we’ll look at the problems and opportunities aFForded by social media in relationship with truths and knowledge.

Information | 222

Knowledge is always based on multiple pieces of information, and usually involves ending coherence across them when they conflict.

“FAKE NEWS” AND “POST-TRUTH”

Much has been made in recent years of “fake news.” This is a term, favored by the President of the United States among others, that circulates ubiquitously through social as well as traditional media. In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries presented “post-truth” as its “word of the year.” But what do these terms mean, and what do they have to do with social media?

To understand these terms, we have to look closely at what we expect with the word “news” and notions of truth and “fake”-ness. These conversations start with the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity.

Information | 223

THE SPREAD OF FAKE NEWS IN POLITICS DUE TO MISINFORMATION AND DISINFORMATION

Student Content

Reflection

For the election-related online public, I choose settle for Biden. Settle for Biden is a Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook account as well as a hashtag. While I have lived in the United States for the past eve years and am up to date with politics, I am not a United States citizen and can not vote in any of the elections. Therefore, I am not apart of this public and instead am just an observer of this public.

Settle for Biden is a grassroots group of former Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders followers who understand Joe Biden’s flaws but believe that the United States will not last four more years with Donald Trump as president.

When exploring this public on Twitter, I found that one of the main goals of the Twitter account was to stop fake news about Biden. Fake news, as defined by Diana Daly is “a term recently popularized by politicians to refer to stories they do not agree with”. On Twitter, the settle for Biden page has retweeted and commented on several tweets from news stations and famous people and correcting them on their information. In the era of technology and how fast information can spread online, it is easy to spread fake news without the general public realizing that it is fake news.

After diving deeper into exploring more about the spread of fake news, I came to the conclusion that there is a lot of misinformation and disinformation present in the tweets that are retweeted by the Twitter account Settle for Biden. Misinformation, as defined by Diana Daly, is “inaccurate information spread without the intention to deceive” and Disinformation, as defined by Diana Daly as “information intended to deceive those who receive it”. There are a lot of retweeted quotes from famous people and news stations that are using their platform to disinform others. A lot of citizens of the United States will read these tweets and instantly believe that they are true due to it being from a famous person or a news station. Just seeing who the tweet is tweeted from can make others

Information | 224

believe that whatever they say is true just because of their standing in society. As well as disinformation there are also a lot of retweets from settle for Biden from citizens of the United States that are tweeting information that they may believe is true but is actually incorrect or are making their own assumptions up about Biden and his policies and are essentially misinforming society. Disinformation and misinformation are the main two reasons why the settle for Biden Twitter account retweets these tweets so that they can prove them wrong and inform society on the correct information.

These behaviors and strategies used on the settle for Biden Twitter page show the era we live in. Every part of the election can be found online and shows how easy it is to spread fake news and be misinformed and disinformed. It is important to check the reliability of the source and compare sources to see if those sources have similar or different information to understand what the truth really is.

About the Author

Issy Brooker was born and raised in Kent, England and moved to the United States in 2012. Issy Brooker is currently 19 years old and a Xrst year student at the University of Arizona.

OBJECTIVITY AND SUBJECTIVITY

To be objective is to present a truth in a way that would also be true for anyone anywhere; so that truth exists regardless of anyone’s perspective. The popular notion of what is true is often based on this expectation of objective truth.

The expectation of objective truth makes sense in some situations – related to physics and mathematics, for example. However, humans’ presentations of both current and historic events have always been subjective – that is, one or more subjects with a point of view have presented the events as they see or remember them. When subjective accounts disagree, journalists and historians face a tricky process of figuring out why the accounts

Information | 225

disagree, and piecing together what the evidence is beneath subjective accounts, to learn what is true.

MULTIPLE TRUTHS = KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

In US society, we have not historically thought about knowledge as being a negotiation among multiple truths. Even at the beginning of the 21st century, the production of knowledge was considered the domain of those privileged with the highest education – usually from the most powerful sectors of society. For example, when I was growing up, the Encyclopedia Britannica was the authority I looked to for general information about everything. I did not know who the authors were, but I trusted they were experts.

Enter Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and everything changed.

Information | 226

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=77

The first version of Wikipedia was founded on a more similar model to the Encyclopedia Britannica than it is now. It was called Nupedia, and only experts were invited to contribute. But then one of the co-founders, Jimmy Wales, decided to try a new model of knowledge production based on the concept of collective intelligence, written about by Pierre Lévy. The belief underpinning collective intelligence, and Wikipedia, is that no one knows

Information | 227

everything, but everyone knows something. Everyone was invited to contribute to Wikipedia. And everyone still is.

When many different perspectives are involved, there can be multiple and even conflicting truths around the same topic. And there can be intense competition to put forth some preferred version of events. But the more perspectives you see, the more knowledge you have about the topic in general. And the results of negotiation between multiple truths can be surprisingly accurate when compared with known truths. A 2005 study in the prominent journal Nature comparing the accuracy of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia found they had around the same numbers of errors and levels of accuracy.

Information | 228

WHAT ARE TRUTHS?

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=77

So what qualifies as “a truth?” Well, truths are created and sustained from three ingredients. The first two ingredients are evidence and sincerity. That is, truths must involve evidence – pieces of information that could or can be seen

Information | 229

or otherwise experienced in the world. And truths must involve sincerity – the intention of their creator to be honest.

And the third ingredient of a truth? That is you, the human reader. As an interpreter, and sometimes sharer/spreader of online information and “news”, you must keep an active mind. You are catching up with that truth in real-time. Is it true, based on evidence available to you from your perspective? Even if it once seemed true, has evidence recently emerged that reveals it to not be true? Many truths are not true forever; as we learn more, what once seemed true is often revealed to not be true.

Truths are not always profitable, so they compete with a lot of other types of content online. As a steward of the world of online information, you have to work to keep truths in circulation.

ACCESS OF INFORMATION AT A CONCERT

Student Content

Rolling Loud Miami 2019 Experience

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=77#h5p-93

Last summer, three of my best friends and I few to Florida for the erst time to celebrate

Information | 230

a birthday. We traveled from Phoenix, Santa Barbra, and Colorado to all meet in the tropical, yet the very humid, city of Miami. The erst night was Ariana’s birthday, she has been my best friend for over 15 years. She wanted to go to Ayesha Curry’s (wife of Steph Curry, Golden State Warriors point guard) restaurant, which was barbeque style and so delicious, I can still remember our meal. Exploring Miami was so much fun, but it wasn’t the only reason we were there. For three days, we went to the Rolling Loud Festival. It had many of our favorite rap artists, it was a concert we all couldn’t miss. Social media benefited our experience in several, life-changing ways. It was recommended by the festival to download their app and follow their Twitter to stay updated with stage times and weather delays. One day, there was a lightning storm and everyone at the concert had to shelter under the Hard Rock Stadium or wait at home until it cleared for the show to go on. In my interview with Ariana, she noted that she found the app very informative, especially to people like us who were not familiar with the area. On the other nights, it was very traumatic when there was a potential active shooter. I remember hearing a gunshot, people screaming, and seeing thousands run toward us in a stampede. If you didn’t run with the crowd, you would get crushed by the crowd. The lack of civil inattention was apparent as people ran in terror. It happened multiple times and we were extremely scared each time we ran for our lives. The audience as a whole seemed to not care about anyone, just ensuring individual safety. The main concern in my mind was to stay with my friends and remain calm. I can still vividly picture these standout moments of being pushed through a charging crowd. In that situation, it is easy to forget about common curiosity when there is a threat nearby. The Rolling Loud Twitter account posted there was a potential threat of an active shooter or stabber at the stadium. The news spread rapidly to the networked publics. The audience was constantly checked their phones and verbally announced any updates. It was reassuring that we all were connected online to stay informed and safe. Ariana mentioned in our interview that even her brothers in California were apart of this networked public. Their attention was drawn to the Rolling Loud Twitter because the potential shooter or stabber was trending. Her brothers immediately contacted us and wanted to make sure we were okay. I am very thankful that no one was hurt and that I had social media to stay informed. Without Twitter and the app, I would have been confused and even more scared in that situation. I chose to interview Ariana because we both shared the experience with similar and different emotions. We laughed about reliving those crazy memories in Miami. I picked this topic

Information | 231

after brainstorming in class with a peer and we talked about social media and the Fyre Festival incident, which reminded me of Rolling Loud. When editing the interview, I had fun picking sounds that described how we felt. Although it was terrifying, we used our resources to be socially aware of our new surroundings.

About the Author

Nicole Cortopassi is a senior at the University of Arizona, who will be graduating in May 2021. She enjoys the beach and going on walks with her sister and their golden retriever.

Information | 232

Information | 233

Infographic by Diana Daly based on the article by Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146-1151.

WHY PEOPLE SPREAD “FAKE NEWS” AND BAD INFORMATION

“Fake news” has multiple meanings in our culture today. When politicians and online discussants refer to stories as fake news, they are often referring to news that does not match their perspective. But there are news stories generated today that are better described as “fake” – based on no evidence.

So why is “fake news” more of an issue today than it was at some points in the past?

Well, historically “news” has long been the presentation of information on current events in our world. In past eras of traditional media, a much smaller number of people published news content. There were codes of ethics associated with journalism, such as the Journalist’s Creed written by Walter Williams in 1914. Not all journalists followed this or any other code of ethics, but in the past, those who behaved unethically were often called out by their colleagues and unemployable with trusted news organizations.

Today, thanks to Web 2.0 and social media sites, nearly anyone can create and widely circulate stories branded as news; the case study of a story by Eric Tucker in this New York Times lesson plan is a good example. And the huge mass of “news” stories that results involves stories created based on a variety of motivations. This is why Oxford Dictionaries made the term post-truth their word of the year for 2016.

People or agencies may spread stories as news online to:

• spread truth
• influence others

Information | 234

• generate profit

Multiple motivations may drive someone to create or spread a story not based on evidence. But when spreading truth is not one of the story creators’ concerns, you could justifiably call that story “fake news.” I try not to use that term these days though; it’s too loaded with politics. I prefer to call “news” unconcerned with truth by its more scientific name…

BULLSHIT!

Bullshit is a scientific term for information spread without concern for truth.

Think I’m bullshitting you when I say bullshit  is the scientific name for fake news? Well, I’m not. There are information scientists and philosophers who study different types of bad information, and here are some of basic overviews of their classifications for bad information:

• misinformation = inaccurate information; often spread

Information | 235

without intention to deceive

• disinformation = information intended to deceive
• bullshit = information spread without concern for whether or not it’s true

Professors Kay Mathiesen and Don Fallis at the University of Arizona have written that much of the “fake news” generated in the recent election season was bullshit, because producers were concerned with winning influence or profit or both, but were unconcerned with whether it was true.

Information | 236

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=77

Bullshit and other deceptive “news” stories were particularly prevalent around the 2016 Presidential election, when tensions were high and influence on the minds of US voters held great value.

It is not always possible to know the motivation(s) behind a story’s creation. Indeed, it can be difficult to determine the source of information on social media. But there have been some cases where identified sources were clearly trying to deceive, or were bullshitting – creating content that would spread fast without caring whether it was true.

Cases of bad information spread reveal different intentions, including destabilization of the US government, and profit. There have been multiple cases of “news” story “factories,” in which people work together informally or are even employed to create news stories. The New York Times investigated one factory in Russia, a nation whose government’s interference in the US election was the subject of a federal investigation. And Wired Magazine reported on a factory in Macedonia in which teens created election-related news stories for profit.

There is evidence that the systematic creation of election-related stories had a considerable eject on the 2016 US Presidential election. Donald Trump’s victory was considered a victory by self-proclaimed “trolls” (see Chapter 3 for a longer discussion of this

Information | 237

phenomenon) and others who collaborated in publishing online content to defeat Hillary Clinton. Some of these content creators celebrated their campaign, including its disregard for truths, in an event they called the Deplora-Ball.

Mark Zuckerberg initially denied responsibility for Facebook’s spread of deceptive stories. Now Facebook moderators are beginning to fag “disputed news.” But it is likely “news” factories will continue to produce stories not based in truth as long as there are readers who continue to spread them.

Information | 238

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=77

THE ALT-RIGHT: FROM FAKE NEWS TO DOMESTIC TERRORISM

2016 saw the fast growth online of a right-leaning political aggregate in the US known as the Alt-Right (erst mentioned in Chapter 5). The Alt-Right and related “white nationalist” groups have framed themselves in response to movements based on identity politics – groups that rally or identify around a race, ethnicity, upbringing, or religion rather than a political party. But many refute the notion that these groups are formed around identity , particularly when white supremacy – which centers on oppressing other races – has been so closely associated with Alt-Right media and demonstrations.

What seems to have brought the Alt-Right together more than identity politics is their approach to news – which they often discount as biased – and truth or “reality” – which in their culture it has been acceptable to manufacture for political use. Karl Rove of the second Bush administration was an early purveyor of Alt-Right ideology, who insisted that people in power create their own reality (and therefore truths.) The Alt-Right movement has followed this philosophy, recruiting followers through memes that imagine situations that et with their politics. One Alt-Right blogger professed clear political intentions behind disinformation he spread in a profile by the New Yorker Magazine – disinformation which spread widely prior to the 2016 election.

Information | 239

BULLSHIT THAT REALLY TOOK OFF

According to PolitiFact, some big headlines from 2016 of stories not based in truth included these:

• Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop.
• Democrats want to impose Islamic law in Florida.
• Thousands of people at a Donald Trump rally in Manhattan chanted, “We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back.”

Buzzfeed tracked the rates at which election stories spread on Facebook in 2016, and found these false stories out-performed true election stories:

• “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President”
• “WikiLeaks CONFIRMS Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS”
• “IT’S OVER: Hillary’s ISIS Email Just Leaked and It’s Worse Than Anyone Could Have Imagined”

None of the listed stories was based in truth, but readers spread them wildly across their social networks and other online spaces. And many readers believed them. Take “pizzagate”: In response to the pizza shop story, one man showed up with a gun at the pizza shop at the center of the story and fired shots, attempting to break up what he believed was a massive pedophilia operation.

Information | 240

Which leads to a new question. We now understand some of the reasons bullshit and other bad information spreads online. But why are readers and social media users so ready to believe it?

BUGS IN THE HUMAN BELIEF SYSTEM

Fake news and bad information are more likely to be believed when they confirm what we already believe.

We believe bullshit, fake news, and other types of deceptive information based on numerous interconnected human behaviors. Forbes recently presented an article, Why Your Brain May Be Wired To Believe Fake News, which broke down a few of these with the help of the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin. Levitin cited two well-researched human tendencies that draw us to swallow certain types of information while ignoring others.

• One tendency is belief perseverance: You want to keep believing what you already believe, treasuring a preexisting belief like Gollum treasures the ring in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series.

• The other tendency is confirmation bias: the brain runs through the text of something to select the pieces of it

Information | 241

that confirm what you think is already true, while knocking away and ignoring the pieces that don’t confirm what you believe.

These tendencies to believe what we want to hear and see are exacerbated by social network-enabled filter bubbles (described in Chapter 4 of this book.) When we get our news through social media, we are less likely to see opposing points of view, which social networking sites filter out, and which we are unlikely to see on our own.

There is concern that youth and students are particularly vulnerable to believing deceptive online content. But I believe that with some training, youth are going to be better at “reading” than those older than them. Youth are accustomed to online content layered with pictures, links, and insider conversations and connections. The trick to “reading” in the age of social media is to read all of these layers, not just the text.

Information | 242

DR. DALY’S STEPS TO “READING” SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS STORIES IN 2020:

Information | 243

Information | 244

Reading today means ingesting multiple levels of a source simultaneously.

1. Put aside your biases. Recognize and put aside your belief perseverance and your confirmation bias. You may want a story to be true or untrue, but you probably don’t want to be fooled by it.

2. Read the story’s words AND its pictures. What are they saying? What are they NOT saying?

3. Read the story’s history AND its sources. Who / where is this coming from? What else has come from there and from them?

4. Read the story’s audience AND its conversations. Who is this source speaking to, and who is sharing and speaking back? How might they be doing so in coded ways? (Here‘s an example to make you think about images and audience, whether or not you agree to Filipovic’s interpretation.)

5. Before you share, consider fact-checking. Reliable fact-checking sites at the time of this writing include:

• politifact.com
• snopes.com
• factcheck.org

That said – no one fact-checking site is perfect.; neither is any one news site. All are subjective and liable to be taken over by partisan

interests or trolls.

Core Concepts

Information | 245

fake news

a term recently popularized by politicians to refer to stories they do not agree with

misinformation

inaccurate information spread without the intention to deceive

disinformation

information intended to deceive those who receive it

bullshit

information spread without concern for whether or not it’s true

knowledge construction

the negotiation of multiple truths as a way of understanding or “knowing” something

confirmation bias

the human tendency for the brain to run through the text of something to select the

pieces of it that conerm what you think is already true, while knocking away and ignoring

the pieces that don’t conerm what you believe

belief perseverance

the human tendency to want to continue believing what you already believe

Information | 246

Core Questions

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:

https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=77#h5p-32

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:

https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=77#h5p-33

RELATED CONTENT

Information | 247

Quiz on "Information":

Before the internet was an ejective product marketing tool, it was a tool of activism – and social media has extended and complicated the ways activists can use it (in other words, its activist affordances). This chapter takes a few key movements as examples – from 1994 when Mexico’s Zapatista movement forced the Mexican government into a ceasefire, to 2017 when Black Lives Matter hashtags now quickly activate publics in the US and beyond. I refer to these movements under the umbrella of creative online activism. What ties these movements together is their creativity in using the affordances of the internet to promote activist agendas and avoid the pitfalls of oversimplification and appropriation.

Note: This chapter focuses on movements that have coalesced (formed) around racial and ethnic identity groups, as well as income inequality and political decisions.

Activism | 155

The Zapatistas

In early 1994, only a tiny percentage of the world was online, and the term “social media” did not exist. The internet was very young and very Web 1.0, with static pages that did not allow visitors to contribute. (You can review Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 in Chapter 2). Yet our first example of creative online activism begins here, with Mexico’s Zapatistas.

Creative deployment of the affordances of a young, sparse internet both saved indigenous protesters in Chiapas, Mexico from slaughter and allowed them to influence the new global economy.

NAFTA signing by leaders of Mexico, Canada, and the US The beginning of the story was the end of life as many in rural Mexico knew it. Governments of the US, Canada, and Mexico began negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the early 1990s, forging interdependence between their economies. Among other deals, this trade agreement would subsidize corporations taking over Mexican land to grow cheap crops. Many Mexicans – particularly the native, or indigenous, people – foresaw that this would lead to drastic

Activism | 156

alteration of the land and to farming by genetic crop modification and spraying of chemical pesticides.

As their political leaders worked toward NAFTA, Mexican farmers fought it using traditional methods. In the early 1990s, protestors staged in-person demonstrations at the zocalo (town square) in Mexico City. And they organized and wrote impassioned statements in print media about the devastating consequences NAFTA would have on farming and many other aspects of life in their country. But North American governments ignored these offline pleas and signed NAFTA into eject in 1992 and 1993.

On January 1st, 1994, NAFTA became the law of the land in the US, Mexico, and Canada – and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) rose up against the Mexican Government under the leadership of a masked man known as Subcomandante (Subcommander) Marcos. This army of “Zapatistas” – an army of mostly poor, rural, indigenous people inspired by the historic Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata – peacefully occupied the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the state of Chiapas, to demand that their protests against NAFTA be seen and heard. Rising up against the Mexican government seemed like a catastrophic move by the EZLN occupiers, many of whom were poor indigenous farmers from the Chiapas area.

Activism | 157

The Mexican government was enthusiastic about NAFTA, as they would benefit financially from corporate NAFTA investment even if their farmers suffered. So it seemed certain the formidable Mexican army would covertly slaughter the small EZLN forces before their protest could make Mexico look bad as corporate investment. But ironically, in this case the internet was what Martinez-Torres describes as Janus faced, helping governments repress people while helping those people protest that repression at the same time. While young, online global networks made it possible for economies to globalize and to crush poor people in the process, they also made it possible to mobilize networks of popular protest and fight back.

Enter information warfare

When on-the-ground resistance alone got the Zapatistas little traction in their resistance to NAFTA, they turned to the internet and began a campaign of information warfare – the strategic use of information and its anticipated ejects on receivers to influence the power dynamics in a conflict. Thanks to the affordances of the early internet to connect people in similar struggles in different places, international peace activists were already networked online in the mid-1990s; the Internet Archive has lists and snapshots of pages describing some of these organizations. Some of these activist organizations were witnessing or supporting similar struggles in other countries, as poor people battled transnational trade agreements that would destroy their ways of life.

Activism | 158

The EZLN Army got the international word out about their cause with remarkable speed, thanks to these online peace networks. With the charismatic masked leader Subcommandante Marcos as a spokesperson, the EZLN Zapatistas created a dramatic campaign online. Their vivid imagery of the EZLN’s masked army of farmers spread rapidly across international online networks.

At the height of their online visibility, twelve days after declaring war on the Mexican Government, the Zapatistas publicly called for a ceasefire. The Mexican government still had the physical power to annihilate EZLN – but now the world was watching. Once EZLN called for peace, any action against their forces including women and children would make Mexico look evil – and risky as a corporate investment destination. As a result, the Mexican government was forced to accept the EZLN ceasefire. They could not reverse NAFTA; it would take more than an awareness campaign to reverse such a powerfully backed agreement. But the EZLN protesters lived and continued their demands for social change.

The EZLN’s Information War has inspired many civil society movements visible today. These include current movements against genetically modified food and for “fair trade” compensation of farmers. In terms of online strategies, the Zapatistas’ activist campaign was an early example for activists of how media can be used sociopolitically to demand civil rights – and to recognize how, Janus-faced, those same media can also work against those rights.

In the next sections I demonstrate now the Zapatistas’ strategies

Activism | 159

fall under the umbrella of creative online activism and why such strategies remain powerful.

CREATIVE ONLINE ACTIVISM IN RECENT TIMES

POLITICAL CAMPAIGNING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Student Contribution, Fall 2020

Activism | 160

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=67

Music: Automaton en Avant by Scanglobe, CC-BY -NC.

Activism | 161

The Accessibility of Politics on Social Media

One of the main features I enjoy about social media is the level of accessibility it provides. In one tap, you can connect with an old friend, end entertainment, get news and so much more. One “old school’ medium that has found new life on social media is politics. The accessibility of politics via social media has made politicians and issues easily available to the general public thanks to their integration of the new media into campaigns.

Tana Mongeau is a twenty-two year old influencer who gained a lot of followers from her Youtube “storytime” videos. She tries to be as transparent as possible with her audience, and is not afraid to be herself. Mongeau has over 5 million Youtube subscribers which means that a lot of people value her opinions. I have watched Tana Mongeau’s Youtube videos before and I always admired how authentic she was with her audience. Tana usually tries to stay out of controversial situations because she has gotten herself into trouble in the past on social media leading to her almost being cancelled. This is why I was a little surprised to see her actually campaigning which usually means half the people in your audience will disagree with you. I do not look into politics on social media because I never know if there is misinformation from an unreliable source. I will also see a lot of disinformation where people will intentionally spread fake news to make one politician look better than the other.

Because social media allows for everyone to have a voice, there is a lot of that gets spread around by people who do not actually care about politics, but rather the attention. When I first saw “Booty For Biden”, I thought that it was probably just a meme trying to get Biden’s name out. However, Tana was very passionate about campaigning for Biden and said that it was true. This campaign strategy has proven to be successful with “naked philanthropists” such as Kaylen Ward who fundraised over 1 million dollars for Australia during their ere crisis. They tend to reward people who donate, or in this case vote, with a naked picture of themselves.

However, once again, Tana got a lot of backlash about her Biden endorsement campaign. Lots of people noticed that what she is doing can be considered “vote buying” which is an electoral crime. Vote buying is defined as, “when offering an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote or to vote for or against a candidate”. Punishments can include fines and up to two years in prison. It is also illegal to take a

Activism | 162

picture of your ballot in sixteen states and unclear in thirteen. In light of this knowledge, Tana decided to change her requirements. Instead of sending her a photo of your ballot, you could just send her a video saying that you voted for Biden. With these lower demands, it is hard to account for how many people truthfully sent her proof, but Mongeau claims that she got “tens of thousands” of people to say they are voting for Biden.

Tana’s campaign ended up costing her some Youtube subscribers. She lost twenty thousand subscribers in September, which was around the start of her “Booty For Biden” campaign. Even though her channel took a hit, I believe her passionate dedication to the Biden campaign is admirable even if she may have lost some followers. In the end, she was able to use her platform to shine a light on a topic she was passionate about, which may have even swung some votes and led to Biden’s victory. Having her political view accessible to social media allowed for her to be even more transparent with her audience as well as earn herself some credibility by addressing a newsworthy national topic. “Booty For Biden” generated a lot of attention for the Biden campaign. Whether someone was pro-Biden or not, they were engaged in the political process albeit in a somewhat roundabout way. Perhaps that led to people ending more information on politics, even though it may have simply stemmed from wanting to see a nude pic.

About the Author

Jessica Nickerson is a sophomore at the University of Arizona studying Pre-Business. She enjoys spending time with her hedgehog and going on long drives. Jessica has been active on social media ever since 2011.

Organizers have continued using the internet to mobilize, and their work has arguably been made easier with the development of

Activism | 163

mobile phone apps and social media. This timeline by Mashable gives a selective overview of noted online activist movements through 2011.

Creative online activism has developed in conjunction with social media apps since the mid-2000s. These apps are certainly not created equal when it comes to facilitating activism; in fact, some have been found to intentionally hinder the exposure of social injustice. For example, although they have had a huge user base for the last decade, Facebook algorithms have been found to hide or slow controversial and “negative” stories from its users’ feeds, making it a poor platform for activism.

But the platform is only a small part of the recipe for an activist movement. Human creativity has facilitated the use of technologies in activism in ways software developers never imagined. In a typical example of human shaping of technology, Twitter leadership didn’t build hashtags into the platform intentionally and even rejected the idea that they would be widely used; human users proved them wrong. Several years later, Twitter hashtags began playing important roles in online activism, including in the Arab Spring protests.

#SETTLEFORBIDEN

Student Content, Fall 2020

Activism | 164

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=67#h5p-90

About the Author

Lilly is a first year student at the University of Arizona who enjoys traveling and having a good time.

Social media platforms like Twitter are sometimes practically credited with creating movements, but this technological determinism fails to recognize how much complex human wrangling is required to run an online campaign and keep control of its message. Only a small percentage of protestors used Twitter to exchange key information and then disseminated that information through face-to-face communication and other media. All messages that spread widely online face the threat of oversimplification and appropriation; only the best-executed retain their depth and complexity. And, regardless of platform, the real

Activism | 165

work for social change still happens across various digital and analog (non-digital) platforms – and most crucially, on the ground.

THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT

One of the most well-known online movements to date is Black Lives Matter . The central phrase and hashtag of this movement came from Alicia Garza and Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac in July 2013 in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of 12-year-old Trayvon Martin. Armed with this concise phrase – and fueled by outrage over injustices against black citizens by American institutions including law enforcement today – Black Lives Matter  has built into a sophisticated movement online and offline with profound influence on government policy and popular consciousness.

Although its signature phrase began online, the Black Lives

Activism | 166

Matter movement gained traction over the next year as Twitter users deployed #blacklivesmatter to mobilize on the ground. Subsequent hashtags used in connection with #blacklivesmatter networked protestors and helped them assemble massive on-the-ground demonstrations very quickly after subsequent police killings. These included #ferguson to organize protests in Ferguson, Missouri after police were acquitted in the killing of Michael Brown there in November 2014.

SOCIALLY AWARE BRANDING

Student Contribution, Fall 2020

Activism | 167

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=67

Project 3

I chose the public of The Mayfair Group because it is an account that I am very familiar with and have been following for a long time. I think the content they create and post is

Activism | 168

incredibly inspiring and relatable to all. Their profile is very unique and full of creativity. It is a newly founded company and does a great job of reflecting some of the younger generations’ ideas. The Mayfair Group specializes in the sectors of public relations, social media, sales, graphic design, branding, events and creative content. Their Instagram account inspires me to think out of the box, reflect on my life, and to be more original.

The Mayfair Group’s Instagram account affords exposure because it draws matters society guards as private into the public sphere. For example, they post very honest quotes about deeper emotions and the sides of life people do not normally portray. They feature real-life issues such as climate change, mental health, politics, and female empowerment. The brand specifically focuses on gender equality. They provide very positive content, especially things that improve your mental health. It is evolving and revolutionizing as a company and has grown immensely. With a following of over 400k on Instagram, The Mayfair Group has a great deal of influence. Their posts receive a lot of comments from people sharing their own thoughts and beliefs about the topics being discussed. It goes beyond their platform as they plan collaborations, events, social and PR campaigns for specific brands to give them exposure.

The account brings a lot of people from many backgrounds together to fight for one cause. This is a great example of an organizational layer. Modern activist movements are often ignited through interactions between key personalities, and networked groups of people who respond together. On posts discussing activism topics, the comment section is flooded with users who all share the same belief.

The Mayfair group also is a fashion company and many of their products reflect these strong positive quotes and movements. This will bring a greater exposure because as the products and garments are worn, others who are not involved in the public will see it and possibly look into the brand. I am also especially interested in this brand and their public because it relates very well to my current major. I am majoring in marketing and i am extremely passionate about fashion, and the entertainment industry as a whole. The modern feel of this company is something I hold very high and hopefully will be able to work for a brand similar to The Mayfair Group. I pay close attention to the way they market their products and their choices of posts because everything is connected. I end it incredible that they have never paid for ads, followers, promotion. This a very successful marketing story and I can learn a lot from this brand. The CEO says, “It all comes down to hustle and building relationships – that’s how a business should be built”.

Activism | 169

About the Author

Created by student for iVoices Media Lab.

CREATIVE ONLINE ACTIVIST STRATEGIES IN BLACK LIVES MATTER AND BEYOND

A Black Lives Matter demonstration: broad, inclusive online activism for the 21st century

Black Lives Matter campaigns have deployed several strategies that were key to the EZLN campaign, as well as to other online activist movements. To make it easy to understand the strategies these movements deployed in common, I will list them and describe them in the next section.

Five strategies deployed by creative online activist movements:

• 1. Speed
• 2. Visuals
• 3. Performances
• 4. Inclusiveness
• 5. “Masked” leadership

Activism | 170

Speedy response has been key in the Black Lives Matter movement

1. Speed

Like the Zapatista online campaign, it was crucial in 2015 that Black Lives Matter protestors mobilize with speed. Responding fast to the actions of government or authorities allowed both movements to gather large publics when outrage over authorities’ decisions was high. In Black Lives Matter, an immediate response also sent the message that this public would not tolerate police violence any longer – ejective immediately.

Activism | 171

Hands up, don’t shoot is a powerful phrase: It became a hashtag, an easily recognized gesture, and an on-the-ground synced performance.

2. Visuals

In both the Zapatista and Black Lives Matter movements, campaign organizers gathered attention through effective use of  visual content. Images of the masked Zapatista army are still widely circulated online. This article in WIRED Magazine explores the spreadable content of the Black Lives Matter movement, especially the visuals – photographs easily shared online that evoked the in-person experience of being black, in protest.

3. Performances

We must also remember the  performances involved in each of these protests. The Zapatistas called a truce at a dramatic moment that would have cast the Mexican government as the villain if they continued to fight the small EZLN army. In Black Lives Matter, hashtags like #handsupdontshoot remind us that these protestors moved together in synced gestures that gave tremendous energy to their on-the-ground protests. Reenactment has also been an ejective performance strategy, exemplified in protestors using the

Activism | 172

#icantbreathe hashtag to reenact the video of Eric Garner dying

after police ignored his repeated pleas of “I can’t breathe.”

Online activism scholar Paulo Gerbaudo phrases it this way: Online media can be used for the “choreography of assembly ” in organizing on-the-ground demonstrations. That is, online organizers can choreograph individual acts of cultural repetition (memes, discussed more in Chapter 7), such as clothing or gestures protestors can repeat to recognize and reinforce one another’s work. And they can organize the meeting places, escape routes, and conduct of massive groups of people. Gerbaudo notes that these actions can influence public consciousness most powerfully when they occur in a symbolic center  – some meaningful public place that serves as a theatrical stage for activism to be seen and performed. A park at a city center, a football field, the Olympic medal ceremonies, a memorial statue: All of these have been symbolic centers for protest in the US and abroad.

4. Inclusiveness

Black Lives Matter’s strategy was also similar to the Zapatistas’ in the inclusiveness  of the campaign. It was understood and stated by those in the movement that women must have equal access to the rights being fought for, and that in-family violence was part of what they were fighting. In Black Lives Matter, rights around gender and sexuality were always part of the discussion, as exemplified in this movement “herstory .”

Today’s social media-fueled movements tend to use rhetoric that acknowledges differences in power among the people they fight for or represent. This sets modern rights campaigns apart from some rights movements in the past. Both the Civil Rights and Black Panther movements focused on black men more than other citizens. The 20th-century women’s rights movements focused more on white women than any others. The 20th-century gay rights movement centralized the identities of white gay men. “Not your grandfather’s civil rights movement,” is one way Black Lives Matter has been described, reminding us that today’s movements broaden

Activism | 173

the focus from fathers and grandfathers to the rest of the family, the organization, and the community.

Zapatistas

Powerful Zapatista Imagery

5. “Masked” organizers

In modern online activism, leaders wear masks – literally, and sometimes, figuratively. In the 20th-century, a much-remembered feature of social activism campaigns like the Civil Rights Movement was their visible leadership and culture of “heroes.” Dr. Martin Luther King is commonly remembered as the “father” of the Civil Rights Movement. Meanwhile, as this article by Jamil Cobb on Black Lives Matter reminds us, there were other strategies at work in the Civil Rights movement as well as leaders who shunned the spotlight, like Ella Baker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Today, the branding has shifted, with many declaring today’s online activist movements “leaderless.”

Activism | 174

Anonymous as masked activist

The Zapatista spokesman Subcomandante Marcos was a bridge between these two styles of organization, the 20th-century heroic leader versus the 21st-century decentralized campaign. Marcos was the Zapatistas’ most visible “hero.” But he wore a mask, hid his true identity, and chose the false title of “Subcommander” (subordinate Commander) rather than “Commander.” A decade later, the “hacktivist” group Anonymous began organizing actions on 4chan in which the identities of the organizers and participants were not known; Anonymous made significant appearances during protests against the World Trade Organization. More recently, there have been figurative masks on many popular online movements including Occupy Wall Street, with all insisting there are no leaders. The strategy of “masked” organizers makes a

Activism | 175

movement difficult to defeat, while also resisting the persistent surveillance that is a function of the internet, and that can get activists jailed or killed.

ADVANCING AND AND COMPLICATING SOCIAL ACTIVISM THROUGH ONLINE ENGAGEMENT

There are many critiques of online activism as inferior to more traditional forms of activism. For example, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufecki argues that by removing the hard work and shared risk of social organizing, social media technologies gather demonstrators too quickly for them to understand one another and think together. In another critique, scholar Evgeny Morozov uses the term “slacktivism ” to characterize certain low-risk levels of “activism” such as signing online petitions, which offer participants the illusion they are contributing significantly, at zero risk to themselves. While these critiques may overlook the subtle shifts in the public consciousness that online chatter can eject, they have merit. As illustrated by the Zapatistas in Chiapas and Black Lives Matter in Missouri, online activism is at its most powerful when on-the- ground action provides roots to online campaigns.

Activism | 176

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=67

However they are branded, successful online activism movements are never dependent only on leaders, and they are also never leaderless. Rather, modern activist movements in the US in particular are often ignited through interactions between key driving forces or personalities, and then mobilized networked groups of people who respond together. This idea, which author David Karpf has called an “organizational layer” of American political

Activism | 177

advocacy, may be the closest we can come to accurately describing the real ejects of the internet on how we do activism.

CORE CONCEPTS AND QUESTIONS

Core Concepts

creative online activism

activist movements that deploy creativity in using the affordances of the internet to promote activist agendas and avoid the pitfalls of oversimplification and appropriation

Zapatistas

an army of mostly poor, rural, indigenous people rose up against the Mexican government in 1994, and successfully used the early internet to reach out for witnesses and support

Janus Faced

a symbol, derived from ancient Roman mythology, of something that simultaneously works toward two opposing goals

information warfare

the strategic use of information and its anticipated ejects on receivers to influence the power dynamics in a conflict

Activism | 178

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

an agreement between the US, Mexico, and Canada in the early 1990s forging interdependence between their economies, including subsidies for corporations taking over Mexican land to grow cheap crops

Black Lives Matter

a sophisticated movement online and offline, fueled by outrage over injustices against black citizens by American institutions including law enforcement today

Five strategies deployed by creative online activist movements:

Speed, Visuals, Performances, Inclusiveness, Masked leadership

choreography of assembly

Paulo Gerbaudo’s term describing how successful online organizers preplan social activist movements that will ensue on the ground

symbolic center

Paulo Gerbaudo’s term for a meaningful public place that serves as a theatrical stage for activism to be seen and performed, such as park at a city center, a football field, the Olympic medal ceremonies, or a memorial statue

slacktivism

coined by Evgeny Morozov, this concept relates to critiques of online activism as inferior to more traditional forms of activism, with organizing online perceived as so fast, easy, and risk-free, it results in insufficient gains or change

Activism | 179

organizational layer

political scientist David Karpf’s term for the networked groups of people responding together who he argues form the most important agents for change in American political advocacy today

Core Questions

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=67#h5p-24

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=67#h5p-25

Activism | 180

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=67#h5p-26

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=67#h5p-27

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=67#h5p-28

Activism | 181

RELATED CONTENT

CONSIDER IT: A NEW ERA IN ONLINE ACTIVISM?

First, read the article “The Second Act of Social Media Activism” by Jane Hu, published in June 2020 in New Yorker Magazine.

Also consider endings from the Pew Research Center’s 2018 study of American perceptions of the internet as a tool for social activism.

Techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufecki argued in 2015 that the tools to organize activist movements online may move too fast to build coalitions that “think together”. Whether that was true then, is it now? Support your answer, including what might you say to others in the Pew polls who think differently than you in order to explain your views.

Activism | 182

Activism | 183

Graphics by Pew Research Center.

Activism | 184

READ IT: GRASSROOTS ACTIVISTS MUST CONSIDER THE COSTS OF DIGITAL CAMPAIGNS (DELIA DUMITRICA, THE CONVERSATION)

GRASSROOTS ACTIVISTS MUST CONSIDER THE PERSONAL COSTS OF DIGITAL CAMPAIGNS

Attendees at the women’s March on Edmonton, Alta on Jan. 21, 2017. Mylynn Felt, Author provided

Delia Dumitrica, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Mylynn Felt, University of Calgary

Widespread use of social media has made it easier to mobilize collective action, yet citizen activists struggle to navigate these digital tools and increasingly report feeling burned out. Our research on grassroots digital activism in Canada has revealed some of the strategies organizers employ when dealing with the technological, interactional and personal barriers of digital activism.

People’s use of social media for activist purposes clashes with the commercial goals of

Activism | 185

these platforms. For example, as these platforms prioritize popular and recent content, activist messages have to be constantly updated and liked or shared in order to remain visible to wider audiences. This places the burden to adapt upon activists, who must make the best of these tools within the constraints set by the platforms’ algorithms.

DILUTION OR DISSEMINATION?

Social media can enhance activist communication at the cost of loss of control over the message. This matters in collective action, because a clearly communicated set of demands and complaints is essential to obtaining political recognition.

During the 2014 teachers’ strike in British Columbia, three parents came up with the idea of hosting playdates in front of the offices of members of the B.C. Legislative Assembly (MLAs). The parents wanted to pressure the provincial government to negotiate with teachers and end the strike. As they circulated the idea of #MLAPlaydates on social media, they reflected on the possibility of message dilution:

Their solution was a form of “open-source activism,” which entailed monitoring social media to reinforce the message and prevent it from being co-opted, while inviting supporters to adapt and personalize this message.

ECHO-CHAMBER EFFECT

Filter bubbles of like-minded people make it difficult for digital activists to get their messages outside of individual networks. Yet, some platforms are more public than others, using different algorithms to make content visible to their users.

Organizers of Alberta’s #SafeStampede wanted to call attention to the rape culture around the annual Calgary Stampede. They found that:

To combat this barrier, organizers created public profiles on more open platforms like Twitter and Tumblr to breach the echo chamber eject.

Activism | 186

POPULARITY CONTESTS

On social media, visibility is often enabled by the newness and reactions a message receives. Activists need to constantly monitor how algorithms push content to the top of other users’ newsfeed. This pressures them to think and act like digital marketers, strategizing their message production and circulation.

The digital activists in our research spoke to the necessity of adapting to platform-specific practices, as well as the learning curve of understanding these practices in the erst place.

ALLIES AND TROLLS

Alongside algorithms, interaction on social media brings along its own challenges to digital activism.

For the #SafeStampede organizers, social media platforms helped them end each other through their existing networks. Online connections grew into face-to-face meetings and relationships, facilitating critical backstage efforts to their public social media campaign:

Social media also opened the campaign up for abuse and trolling. This was also the experience of another gender-related movement, the Women’s March in Alberta. The organizers described how people searching terms like “transgender” and “pussy hat” launched a gender-biased calculated attack a few days before the march. To deal with the backlash, the organizers resorted to a strategy of “block, delete, report, repeat,” pointing out that:

The camaraderie built online and online helped mitigate the toll of these confrontations. Still,

Activism | 187

online attacks and trolling can easily deplete the already scarce resources that citizen activists have at their disposal.

BURNING OUT AND DROPPING OUT

While our participants minimized the personal and professional costs of their digital activism during our conversations, they also spoke of burnout making long-term involvement unsustainable.

The emotional cost of trolls, backlash and hyper-aggression on social media was difficult for organizers to escape as social media tied their public names to their activism:

Distancing one’s self, either from the movement or from the potential risks of your activities, seems to be the only possible strategy for organizers in these situations.

Furthermore, because social media algorithms display the messenger alongside the message, organizers also expressed concern that their visible activism may create potential career risks.

DIGITAL ORGANIZING STRATEGIES

The citizen activists interviewed in our research employed various strategies to navigate barriers to digital activism. Here are some of their lessons for other activists:

• Stay up-to-date with how algorithms are designed and updated for the platforms you are using.

• Use multiple platforms to reach different audiences and mitigate the ejects of echo chambers.

• Allow some for some change in your message, but monitor the conversation in order to maintain its core.

• Connect with fellow organizers and supporters online.

• Join a local, regional or national collective so you have fellow activists to lean on

Activism | 188

and pass the baton to when you need to step away.

• Anticipate the costs and risks of activism, and reflect on where you need to draw your own boundaries.

• Build flexibility and adaptation into your tactics of action.

While digital activism can be a crucial part of any successful campaign, activists needs to remain aware about the costs and limitations of social media.

Delia Dumitrica, Associate professor, Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Mylynn Felt, PhD Candidate, Communication, Media and Film, University of Calgary

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Activism | 189

Quiz on "Activism":

This is a special chapter devoted to a selection of activist causes to improve the lives of women. We look closely at two online movements outside of the US, one in each hemisphere. Both integrate the global and the local; both work to liberate women from systematic violence. Then we look at a few movements in the US.

But first let’s briefly broaden our lens to online activism in general.

Equity | 128

Passionate public protests: Many protests for women’s rights use the publics of the web to expose private worlds of violence, enacted behind closed doors and silenced with shame.

In the following chapter, we will discuss eve strategies evident in creative online activist movements today, including speed, visuals, performances, inclusiveness, and masked leadership. These eve strategies can be found in many gender-focused online movements as well. But from my perspective, what is salient – what stands out – about women’s movements are the ways the internet is used to enable public conversation around topics previously kept private. Social media in particular affords exposure, the affordance of

Equity | 129

social media to draw matters society guards as private into the public sphere.

People who identify as “men” and people who identify as “women” have lived in the same neighborhoods and households across cultures and time periods. This quality makes gender relationships and activism distinct among activist movements. Issues that arise between groups of different ethnicities, races, and classes are often clearly expressed out in the open; but gender issues are not expressed as openly. Because men and women co-exist so closely in every community, issues between people of different gender identities tend to leak out in whispers and remain more hidden.

WOMEN AS A GENDER IDENTITY: A DISCLAIMER

In order to look closely at two important online movements for women, I have had to exclude many other movements, moments, and identities from this chapter. The premise of the chapter admittedly works against complex understandings of gender, by presenting “women” as a fixed identity group. My goal in chapters 5 and 6 is to give you a selection of histories, tools, and examples to help you understand online activist movements.

As the Wikipedia page on gender reflects, a deep understanding of gender and sexuality must also consider where the boundaries between genders come from and what is left unspoken when we rely on binary gender categories. Movements for the rights of transgender women have evolved within, alongside, and sometimes in response to movements by cisgender women, but these histories are often collapsed into a single narrative. I encourage you to explore and analyze these complex histories with the tools we will discuss in chapters 5 and 6.

Equity | 130

CHALLENGING GENDER NORMS: A EXAMINATION OF AN ANDROGYNOUS SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER

Student Content

Equity | 131

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=57

I decided to take a look at a public figure, and that public figure is Jeffree Star. I chose to examine Jeffree’s instagram account for qualitative observation because in the influencer and social media culture, he is a very controversial and interesting figure to observe.

As I explained in my video and to give a little background, Jeffree Star is one of the biggest Youtubers of our time, as he has 17.1 million subscribers. Not only does he have a ton of Youtube subscribers, he has almost 15 million followers on Instagram as well. It’s compelling to check out his instagram feed…when you have a lot of followers, a lot of opinion and judgement comes with the territory. You are constantly on display. Some people are crazy about him, and some hate him to the core. I think it’s both important and fascinating to see everyone’s beliefs on such a well known social media figure.

Jeffree Star provides makeup tutorials while promoting his own makeup line and accessories. He elms his famous youtube debriefs about on-trend beauty looks and makeup. He has built an empire and gotten very wealthy in the process! Part of his appeal is his dramatic look, the self expression, his outrageous remarks, and the sometimes offensive images he uses. On a variety of topics, Jeffree seems completely comfortable giving his precise and very blunt opinions. Sometimes the comments are crazy and even racist in nature. The man has no filter whatsoever, and is apparently not concerned with backlash or hateful comments from anyone, as he continues to say and do ridiculous things that frequently gets him cancelled from his channel. Not only does him to do and say as he pleases, but he is consistently caught in the midst of crazy drama, leading some to believe the whole persona is made up and attention-seeking. I would say I consider him as more of a “lone wolf” in the influencer industry because of his narcissistic, yet courageous ways.

Equity | 132

I feel like Jeffree Star definitely includes exposure into his life because he doesn’t care about personal, private information getting out and is willing to share anything to get a rise out of people for publicity.

When looking over his Instagram feed, I noticed the comments on specific posts about his beauty line, makeup, and glam image are overall positive. His fans are very vocal, supportive and fond of who he is and what he does, as it shows in his likes.

Jeffree uses crowd culture by promoting and selling his beauty items through his Instagram and Youtube channel to his fans.

As for the posts that contain sexual, explicit and profane content, there are less likes and more hostility all around. You can really tell that most of those comments come mainly from his haters, because there is much more hostility expressed than with other posts. They attack his sexuality, his morality, and more, showing they do not condone what he stands for. Whether you like him or not, he is highly entertaining and his controversial brand is what makes him so popular.

About the author

Mikaela Zamora is a student at the University of Arizona. She is originally from Boulder, Colorado. She loves spending most of her time with friends and family and walking her dog.

SAUDI WOMEN: ONLINE AND DRIVING CHANGE

Saudi Arabian laws and culture enforce a system of male guardianship  over women, whereby every woman must get the approval of a male guardian for decisions about her body and life including passport applications, travel, and marriage. Online activism helps women who are resisting the system of male

Equity | 133

guardianship to connect with fellow activists, read the climate for what they are asking, and connect with specific publics who may support their causes.

#savedinaali

Like campaigns for other identity groups, many social media campaigns for women are branded as leaderless or have masked leadership. A particular feature of social media campaigns for women is the naming of the campaign after a woman who has been persecuted, even though she is not organizing the campaign. Sadly, due to the violence women face that leads to these campaigns, the woman the campaign is named after is often one whose persecution has already ensued.

One example is the campaign to #savedinaali. Dina Ali fed Saudi Arabia but was detained in the Philippines and returned to her family, whom she said would kill her. It is unknown if Dina Ali is severely injured or even alive, but organizers started the #savedinaali campaign to help her and women in similar situations, and draw attention to the human rights abuses of Saudi women. Raising awareness around the situations of particular imprisoned women may lighten the punishment inficted on them – though it does not guarantee safety or survival.

RECOGNIZING THE SMALL BEGINNINGS OF LARGE MEDIA CAMPAIGNS

Activist movements that become large usually began as small, local efforts for change. This is especially true around women’s rights; whispers about a case or pattern of abuse erst spread locally, then grow into regional or global social movements once it’s clear that the abuse is systematic. Take for example the extensive Human Rights Watch campaign (also linked above) to end Male Guardianship in Saudi Arabia. It was many small campaigns like

Equity | 134

the one to save Dina Ali that led Human Rights Watch to produce a 2016 report entitled Boxed In: Women and Saudi Arabia’s Male Guardianship System. The campaign uses the hashtag #TogetherToEndMaleGuardianship along with video and other content.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) is a large, global organization, but small movements gave them key examples and networks on which to build a larger campaign. HRW’s decision to focus on Twitter as a platform required the organization to monitor smaller movements for evidence that Saudis would use and respond to Twitter hashtags for activism. Those small movements provided the core of the larger networks HRW would use in their campaign.

One prior online network example for campaigns for Saudi women is the campaign to allow them to drive. Women have been putting themselves on the front lines and driving – and celebrating this civil disobedience online. In 2011-2013 the hashtag #W2drive (women to drive) was used by Saudi activists to gather a public interested in women’s right to drive, as did the account @SaudiWomenSpring on Facebook.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE RIGHT TO VOTE

Student Content, Fall 2020

My Perspective and Experience with Social Media

I have come a long way with social media. I have encountered the negatives, as well as the positives that come with using social media. In my personal experience, I have always been involved with the use of social media, especially at a very young age. Being exposed at a very young age to so much criticism and opinions all on different platforms in my opinion is a factor of shaping who you are and how your views on certain topics are made. I am positive that with my generation, while growing up in an age where we were the internet

Equity | 135

generation also known as Generation Z, that we all had experiences with how social media influenced us at a young age.

Which is why I wanted to touch upon the political side of how the internet allows and influences us in many ways, while also giving everyone a platform to voice our opinions to each other. Many of those times that I have seen result in arguments caused by a disagreement in the comment section of a post. In today’s time, the internet is filled with hateful comments towards one another about having opposite opinions. Today you see grown adults shaming young adults for the decision they made in the comments of the post.

In my experience during election time, I end that I see lots of advertisements, and political campaigning that takes place, and inevitably consumes a lot of what people see and hear surrounding the election. I found this organization this past year amidst the fact that the year 2020 is the year of the most recent election. I began to see lots of my own peers ending themselves conflicted and even considering not voting in the 2020 election. Quite honestly, I found myself in the same position. This is the erst time I am able to vote in a presidential election. I should have been excited to exercise my fifteenth amendment right, but I was not solely because of the hateful opinions on social media. I felt that I was going to be judged by people for who I voted for and ultimately felt discouraged. I later began looking into different organizations whom I supported and saw how patriotic they were about voting and especially because I am Native American our voice, in my opinion, is suppressed. I began to see things in a new light and later made my mind up about actually going out and voting. I then began to advocate for all voices to have a say in how we vote and how our vote counts, the difference it makes when people do vote.

I find that these types of organizations are truly helpful for those such as myself that really focus on influencing positivity on social media. Social media can be extremely toxic to your mental health and I think overthinking things such as what I did can really affect certain outcomes. If I had not looked into organizations that I like and follow I would not have gotten the courage to really be proud of having the right to vote.

Equity | 136

Also by this author: Rock the Vote!

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=57

Equity | 137

About the Author

Trinity Norris is a sophomore majoring in Journalism with an emphasis in Digital Journalism. Minoring in Information Science and Esociety.

MEMING OF HASHTAGS AND MORE

The use of any hashtag can expand and complicate the spread of a message across a global audience, particularly if the meme flips to become sarcastic or changes direction.

Hashtags relating to Saudi women’s rights led to numerous memes, but most just added force to the movement. #TogetherToEndMaleGuardianship was of course translated – you might also say, imitated or memed – into Arabic, and it is that tag which Arabic-speaking social media users began spreading prolifically. #StopEnslavingSaudiWomen is another tag channeling similar publics. Like #HandsUpDontShoot in the Black Lives Matter movement, it is a phrase speaking directly to an oppressing force, telling them to change their behavior.

However, there is some evidence of the spread of misinformation through hashtags related to Saudi women. For example, a story about Saudi male scientists declaring women “not human” started out on a satirical website, but it spread to other publics – including some who believed it was true, and others who found it useful in spreading fear of Islam. As this example shows, hashtags are easy targets for appropriation – use for a different cultural purpose than originally intended.

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN HELP WOMEN’S CAUSES IN

Equity | 138

PARTICULAR

To understand women’s online movements, including those for Saudi women and women in the Americas (in the next section), it is important to consider relationship communication. First, let’s consider who Saudi women can and cannot speak to and when or where those conversations take place. In traditional Saudi society, women have limited face to face contact; they rarely gather or communicate with people beyond their immediate family, and external communications may be under constant surveillance. This limits the communication of women activists with those who are geographically close to them and to moments of low surveillance.

However, communities devoted to women’s activism can interact online on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and other social media platforms. So the most important affordance of social media for women’s movements is this: movement organizers can orchestrate gatherings and strategies through the use of social media. An example of this is the campaign #women2drive, which Saudi women have been pushing for several years to challenge male guardianship incrementally by focusing on the right to drive.

Another affordance of social media for women’s movements is this: social media can extend and deepen communication among activists, transforming short or casual encounters into opportunities for a more profound exchange of ideas. Social media can allow people who will be gathering in person to get a sense before the event of what others are thinking. It also allows people to continue

Equity | 139

sharing their “staircase thoughts” after they leave the meeting (think of the old TV series Columbo, where the detective seems to be leaving the suspect alone but then turns around just before going downstairs and says: “Oh, there’s just one more thing…”). Staircase thoughts are sometimes considered simply wit that we thought of too late. But l’esprit de l’escalier or “wit of the staircase” as French philosopher Denis Diderot called it, can deepen communication, especially in activist movements that involve covert communications.

A third affordance: Social media gathers and focuses global publics. The web is chaos! But social objects like hashtags cut across the chaos to connect publics focused on certain topics, at times despite great geographic dispersal and distance. Publics drawn to pay attention to online activism include people who are not necessarily organizers of an activist movement but who are paying attention to activist causes.

Some of the publics gathered by social media include large organizations with resources to support movements, leading to a fourth affordance in creating a global movement: Social mediaconnects activists with their publics. Saudi women can feel the support of women activists across the globe with the hashtag #suffrage, and I imagine that is important at moments when the national culture seems to be changing too slowly. Connecting with supportive publics can also lead to organizational and financial support.

The publics gathered through hashtags around Saudi women’s rights and specifically the push to end male guardianship in that

Equity | 140

country demonstrate how publics can build on and connect to one another, through hashtags among other tools. Saudi women have pushed to end male guardianship in the past, and the gathering of publics by these early movements led to the taking up of the cause by larger organizations.

DEMONSTRATIONS ONLINE AND ACROSS THE AMERICAS AGAINST GENDER VIOLENCE

NI UNA MENOS, VIVAS LAS QUEREMOS

Beginning in 2016, a new hemispheric movement is underway expressing outrage over violence against women in the Americas. Ni Una Menos began in summer 2014 in Argentina, culminating in an August 2016 demonstration in Lima that was characterized as the largest demonstration ever seen in Peru. It was reactivated in South American cities including Buenos Aires and Rio Di Janeiro in October 2016, in response to the drugging, rape, and murder of a 16-year-old Argentinian girl.

Hemispheric hashtags coordinating these movements include #niunamenos (not one less or not one fewer) and #vivaslasqueremos (we want them alive) – proactively worded demands that not a single woman or girl be killed by systematic violence. This proactive framing makes every death cause for further protest.

One striking strategy in this movement is its theatricality. From dressing as death in Mexico to applying makeup to simulate bruised and bloodied faces and crotches in this demonstration in

Equity | 141

Buenos Aires, Argentina, these movements rely upon visual impact. In the United States, it is common to embody the unjustly dead – in #blacklivesmatter, the #icantbreathe hashtag for Eric Garner and hoodie-posing to say “we are Trayvon Martin” are two of many examples of resurrection through performance. But this practice of embodying a bruised, bloodied woman is distinct from most feminist protests seen in the US. The performative, graphic strategies in the Latin American #niunamenos demonstrations were not replicated in the massive Women’s March in the US in January 2017, although many women face violence in the US. Perhaps marchers in the US sought to embody the “they go low, we go high” approach – as in Michelle Obama’s speech at the DNC following the recording of Trump boasting of using his wealth and stature to grab women “by the pussy.” But the difference may come down to class more than nationality.

The performative demonstrations in Latin America reflect the grim reality of being unable to “go high” and hide abuse for many of its survivors. Many abused women wear their visible bruises on their faces. The sounds of abuse are more evident on city streets and in smaller apartment buildings than in large houses and suburbs. Abuse of poor women is more visible than abuse of wealthier women – even when poor women don’t live on the streets, lower-class status is generally accompanied by a lack of personally owned or controlled space. As Margaret Rodman has written, “The most powerless people have no place at all.” In these

Equity | 142

hemispheric demonstrations, the streets become women’s place, with demonstrators of all classes increasingly marching them. By making the marks of women’s abuse and murder public, they drag into the public eye what has long been understood as a feature of women’s private lives in the Americas.

Update: #metoo

After this book was released, the #metoo movement ensued, in late 2017. As I write this update, the #metoo movement is sweeping the US and other nations, as charges and evidence of long histories of sexual harassment and abuse circulate in the media and online. The movement has pervaded the academic and political spheres in the US and other nations as well.

SEXTORTION

Student Content, Fall 2020

500 Word Reflection

Equity | 143

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=57#h5p-68

Have you ever posted a photo on social media? Have you ever let a random person follow you on social media? Have you ever heard of Photoshop? Have you ever heard of a person’s face being photoshopped onto another person’s naked body? Have you heard of those people, no, victims being extorted for money, fame, worldly possessions or even real naked photos? If you have then you know what sextortion is. That’s right it has a name, and as you can tell from the audio story I attached above my friend was a victim of this. Sextortion is a serious crime that occurs when someone threatens to distribute your private and sensitive material if you don’t provide them images of a sexual nature, sexual favors, or money.

I think that the story I spoke about gives me a unique perspective of social media because it is such a understated problem related to the Internet. Quite frankly, a lot of people don’t know what they’re posting when they post something, nor do they know who is actually seeing it. This experience was very painful for my friend who had this happen, as well as eye-opening for me as an observer. I watched firsthand the absolute panic and potential crumbling of her future happen before my eyes.

When a provocative photo of you, whether it be real or not, is posted and shared around the Internet it can follow you around for the rest of your life. Plenty of people used sex tapes to extort famous people for money and shared fame. Or they use it against politicians and judges to discredit them, but you don’t think it will happen to a 19-year-old girl who hasn’t begun her professional life. This experience gives me my own personal and cultural knowledge of social media that is different from others due to the fact that I am more aware and a lot more careful with who I allow to follow me on social media platforms.

I know a lot of young women my age who are public and have a ridiculous amount

Equity | 144

of followers for just being an average college student. These women don’t know where their photo is going, they don’t know what could be done on Photoshop nor do they use caution when posting. I thoroughly encourage all young men and women on the Internet to use protection and take precautions in regards to sharing their face, name, school, family and especially where they live. You never know when a person you’ve never met will use sextortion to change or potentially ruin your life.

Our experience with the police in regards to the sextortion scandal was very concerning. The blatant disregard for her panic as well as the assumption that she was lying about the photos, really showed the older generation’s attitude towards this type of extortion. He spoke very condescendingly, he shook his head and said “you’re just a young girl, why would you send a photo like this” and shook off any idea that it wasn’t actually her in the photos. I feel like the younger generation needs to be made aware of this type of scandal as well as the older generation. Because when people who are my age get extorted like this, they need the help from the older generations and when they don’t even know what sextortion is, then nothing can be resolved. I know that my friend’s case file is just sitting on a computer or in a cabinet, soon to be thrown out with the trash. I am saddened by our absence of knowledge regarding this crime, and hope we educate ourselves soon.

Equity | 145

About the author

Melanie Norris is a sophomore at the University of Arizona. She can often be found spending time with her roommates and friends!

Critiques of the #metoo movement are also circulating. One example is the response #whataboutus by working-class women that draws attention to the limits of #metoo in telling their stories. Another critique elevates discomfort among feminists with #metoo’s simplistic image of women as victims, and of the collapsing of such a vast range of behaviors into the concept of “harassment.”

The creative online activism explored in these chapters is remarkable for its inclusiveness and complexity in the face of these critiques. Branding is hard. Oversimplification is a threat faced by any spreading movement; in this phenomenon, complex causes can be reduced to a simplistic phrase or meaning as the movement spreads. Oversimplification of a message seems inevitable for it to gain national or global traction, as critiques of the #metoo movement charge. Yet the Black Lives Matter movement has remained complex, so why not #metoo?

As of this writing, I do not include the US-based #metoo among the movements I label creative online activism – yet. Although the Hollywood actresses whose accounts received the most attention

Equity | 146

are very visible, the movement’s strategies are not highly visual, or performative; rather, the movement has gained traction through the voices of people who already have access to significant public attention and national platforms. Imagine if they used their skills at performance and visibility to redirect the attention of their audiences to working-class women and women in nations with oppressive regimes? I hope #metoo advocates where the movement is most visible will turn attention to the women who need help most, rather than celebrating #metoo as a simple success.

In the next chapter – as we explore cultural branding – keep activist movements in mind. But also remember that whereas the goal of cultural branding is immediate influence, the goal of social and activist movements is long-term cultural change.

CORE CONCEPTS AND QUESTIONS

Core Concepts

exposure

the affordance of social media to draw matters society guards as private into the public sphere

Equity | 147

male guardianship

the system in Saudi Arabia whereby every woman must get the approval of a male guardian for decisions about her body and life including passport applications, travel, and marriage

appropriation

use for a different cultural purpose than originally intended

staircase thoughts

the affordance of social media to allow people who will be gathering in person also to get a sense of what others are thinking before they meet face to face, and continue sharing their ideas after they leave the meeting

Ni Una Menos

translated from Spanish as “not one less”, this is a hemispheric movement expressing outrage over violence against women in the Americas, this movement began in Argentina and led to an August 2016 demonstration in Lima that was characterized as the largest demonstration ever seen in Peru

oversimplification

the threat faced by any spreading movement for complex causes to be reduced to a simplistic phrase or meaning as the movement spreads

Core Questions

Equity | 148

A. Questions for qualitative thought

1. Start looking at hashtags online used alongside #metoo and also look at stories posted in #metoo over the last several years. In your groups, choose one

or two posts to discuss. What do the stories using like hashtags have in common, and what are some ways that they differ?

2. What are the some of the smaller impacts you have noticed in the years since#metoo and companion hashtags and practices have come about? In your own experiences or those you know about.

3. If you were aware of the women’s movements discussed in this chapter before, what had you heard about them? Do these movements influence you to think differently about women’s roles in the cultures from which these movements came? Explain.

B. Review: Which is the best answer?

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=57#h5p-22

Equity | 149

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=57#h5p-23

RELATED CONTENT

CONSIDER IT: AMERICANS’ EXPERIENCES AND BELIEFS AROUND #METOO

WORRIED ABOUT SEXUAL HARASSMENT – OR FALSE ALLEGATIONS? OUR TEAM ASKED AMERICANS ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCES AND BELIEFS

From The Conversation

Equity | 150

In a survey, 81% of women and 43% of men said that they had experienced sexual harassment or assault at least once.

Mihai Surdu/shutterstock.com

Anita Raj, University of California San Diego

Since the launch of #MeToo, there’s been a lot of attention on problems of sexual harassment and assault in the U.S.

Unfortunately, this has not amounted to much progress in terms of reductions in sexual harassment and assault or improvements in conviction rates. This is in part due to the social and political dissension regarding the veracity of accusations and what constitutes fairness of due process when cases arise.

Our new study, published April 30 by nonprofit Stop Street Harassment, in partnership with our team at UC San Diego’s Center on Gender Equity and Health, as well as others, looks closely at the scope of these issues in our country.

The headline figure is that, as has long been known, sexual harassment affects most women and many men.

Equity | 151

However, our study dug deeper, providing insight into three questions that are central to today’s media coverage of #MeToo.

1. HAVE THE RATES OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND ASSAULT CHANGED WITH THE #METOO MOVEMENT?

In the nationally representative sample of the approximately 2,000 Americans whom we surveyed in early 2019, 81% of women and 43% of men said that they had experienced sexual harassment or assault at least once in their lives.

Eighteen percent of women and 16% of men reported recent sexual harassment or assault in the last six months, which is not a significant change from 2018.

The overall prevalence of sexual harassment or assault throughout one’s lifetime also showed no change.

These endings suggest that improved awareness of #MeToo and potential backlash against it have not altered the incidence or reported prevalence of these abuses.

However, while these data indicate no change in survey reports, U.S. crime data indicate that more people are reporting sexual harassment and assault to the police, possibly due to greater comfort engaging the criminal justice system thanks to #MeToo.

Nonetheless, high rates of sexual harassment and assault, particularly for women, continue to be a norm in the U.S.

2. HOW SAFE FROM SEXUAL HARASSMENT ARE STUDENTS AND WORKERS?

Our study suggests that most sexual harassment occurs on the street or in other public venue.

However, 38% of women and about 15% of men have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace and at school.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/FWbhJ/1/

Harassment in high school was particularly common, reported by 27% of women and 11% of men. Smaller but significant groups said they had experienced harassment at their middle school and college campuses.

This suggests that, despite concerns about sexual harassment in U.S. schools and

Equity | 152

workplaces, long-standing federal policies from the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against these abuses are not effectively preventing perpetrators from acting anyway, typically with impunity.

3. HOW SAFE ARE BOYS AND MEN FROM FALSE ALLEGATIONS OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND ASSAULT?

False allegations of sexual harassment and assault against high-profile individuals are a growing public concern. Some have expressed worry that there is great risk for unfair and unfounded accusations against men and boys.

These fears were raised by some, for example, in national discussions of the allegations against President Donald Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

While our data reveal that most people believe survivors to varying degrees, one in 20 women and one in 12 men felt that most or all of the allegations in recent high-profile cases were “false and that accusers are purposefully lying for attention or money.”

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/hDB3F/2/

While one-third of respondents reported ever perpetrating sexual harassment or assault, only 2% of men and 1% of women said they had ever been accused of these abuses. That shows that, while ongoing public perceptions of false accusations as a major risk persist, any accusation, including false accusations, is in fact very rare.

WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?

Sexual harassment and assault is a persistent issue in the U.S. Our study underscores that it’s particularly common for American children, disproportionately girls. Furthermore, many are also enduring this harassment in the workplace.

When these abuses occur, most bear them in silence, without accusations against those at fault. How do I know this? Well, this is the part where I cannot tell you based on our research, but because I did not tell anyone when I was sexually harassed in school and early in my career: #MeToo.

We say nothing because it is not worth the burden – of tackling institutional accountability when there is little likelihood of repercussions for those who victimize us; of trying to justify or prove ourselves in environments where people continue to believe that

Equity | 153

false accusations and confused memories are common; of taking the time to process what happened rather than just focusing on moving forward, and avoiding those trying to harm or impede us.

I believe that the U.S. does too little to educate the public regarding the nature and scale of problem, or the fact that men are far more likely to be victims of these abuses rather than of false allegations related to their perpetration.

My team’s hope with this work is to give light to the risk and harms of sexual harassment and assault as a social epidemic in our country. Given how rare it is for those affected to seek help, the U.S. needs to prioritize its prevention for the benefit of all, regardless of gender.

Anita Raj, Professor of Society and Health, Medicine, and Education Studies, and Founding Director of the Center on Gender Equity and Health, University of California San Diego

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Read the original article.

Equity | 154

Quiz on "Equity":

1.1 Where is my jetpack?

Sound familiar? This was supposed to be the time of ubiquitous flight and mars travel, cured cancers and realistic virtual reality. Sure, there were major changes, the cost of communication services dropped dramatically, computer parts became impossibly cheap, and the barriers that once imposed scarcity onto communication have come crashing down. But the future looks a lot more like the past than not. Predictions are hard, especially when they are about the future.

What we understand as the past, to be studied as history, as largely collected through traces that are unreliable. What do we actually know about what voters thought in the 1928 election? For that matter, what do we know about voters in the 2016 election? Contemporary communication technologies allow ubiquitous access to information and widely distributed contact with individuals. New models are trumpeted as offering access to additional information and possibility, ecommerce technologies that would promise to know consumers better than they know themselves. At the same time, these technologies seem incapable of actually resolving the problem of public opinion formation and collective action. The underlying problem of the public sphere is not one of technology, but one of passion. So, you don’t have a jetpack and the forces of hate seem to be gaining strength.

Consider the rise of the everything store, once known as the Sears catalog, now Amazon.com.1 There is nothing particularly remarkable about the idea that people would like access to a wide array of goods, delivered to their homes, at reasonable prices. Jobbers delivered an assortment of goods with non-fixed prices, department stores developed additional inventory and fixed prices (a great improvement over constant negotiation).2 Grocery stores and discounters appeared not as a paradigm shift, but as a continuation of the same trend. At times, firms might opt for smaller assortments, but this is merely the play of strategy as the desires of the population are neatly mapped by business operations. The future of retail is also the past.

What continued for all of this time is the desire of the public to be warm, housed, and fed. It is not remarkable that the desires of the public are continuous over time. Deep structures like hunger continue.

1. Derek Thompson, “The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing,” The Atlantic, September 25, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/sears-predictsamazon/540888/.

2. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space (University of California Press, 1986).

Section 1: Theorizing the Future | 5

What varies is the vast array of symbolic expressions of these needs, which come through fashions, cuisines, and other cultural codes. Which is not to say that codes do not become an end in themselves, the rich intertextual life of the public is just as real as the physical life. Manuel Delanda recognized this when he juxtaposed two distinct gradients for the legitimation of a state: symbolic and material.3 A system that provides sustenance with no meaning or intersubjective investment is objectionable, just as a system that has a vast symbolic life with little effect would be an utter failure. Failed symbolic legitimacy can overwhelm physical plenty.

This textbook is not an account of the reasons why jetpack development has been so slow. For the most part these would be effectively explained by elementary physics and engineering. In an article on the topic of jetpacks in The Guardian , Cardiff University Lecturer and science columnist Dean Burnett laid out the key issues with jetpack technology: gravity is a substantial force and most flying machines use properties like aerodynamic lift (wings) to generate enough lift, managing the size and deployment of the engine itself.4 After all, it is not enough to build an engine that might lift a human successfully, but you need to attach it to a human being. The Evergreen Aviation museum, a world leader in obscure craft which includes the Spruce Goose, features a number of single user escape helicopters. James Bond, eat your heart out. Attaching a thruster to a human body is tricky and we haven’t even gotten into special issues in buckle development. Burnett’s argument did not hinge on the difficulty in building the machine, but in the fact that it is not desirable. Jetpacks are far more dangerous than bicycles, people would make terrible choices with them, and they would produce vast emissions of greenhouse gasses. You don’t want a jetpack – notice that word: want.

This is the inflection point for our studies of the future. In communication, the question is rarely if something is possible, but if it is probable or desirable. The title is New Media Futures, our subject matter: what are the possible and probable future technologies for the creation of meaning.

1.2 Disciplinary Context

This book was written for use in a broad New Media program based in the Communication Studies tradition. There are a number of disciplinary threads that tie our traditions into their current administrative alignments. The rhetorical wing of communication traces their origins to a walkout from a writing conference. Mass communication research on the other hand would emphasize the role of social research and media studies from the outset of communication.5 Others would choose moments that resonate with

3. Manuel De Landa, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (London; New York, NY: Continuum, 2011).

4. Dean Burnett, “Jetpacks: Here’s Why You Don’t Have One | Dean Burnett,” The Guardian, September 23, 2014, sec. Science, https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2014/sep/23/jetpacks-science-scientists.

5. John Peters, “Democracy and Mass Communication Theory: Dewey, Lippmann, Lazarsfeld,” Communication 11, no. 3 (1989): 199–220.

6 | Section 1: Theorizing the Future

their particular moment of transdisciplinary contact, from art history to sociology. Communication is not an unusual academic field in this sense.

All academic fields depend on a largely arbitrary disciplinary moment, a point where some critical ontological or epistemological choice was made that determines the answers to many subsequent questions. What does that mean? Economists often begin from a disciplinary fable about the rationalization of barter. Sociologists may reduce interactions to the result of a social force. Artists explore the moment of genius where creative energy seemingly appears from nowhere. Psychologists find the core of all behavior in the cognitive structure of the individual with a lurking basis in the brain.

The tighter the story, the more likely your discipline is to have prestige. It is not that these stories are entirely wrong, but that they always necessarily tell part of the story.

Communication is a great field because it is organized around a number of weak stories. At the same time, this is a curse when dealing with organization of the university system. Is communication a point to organize around or a virus that is withering the marrow of disciplinary rigor?

The critical moments for the study of communication would be decisions about people and context (meaning networks and objects), proximal and distant.

This is not to say that scholars may not connect multiple areas of research, but that most research tends to fall into these slots. The truth is likely between all: it is not that the infrastructure is enough to cause the movement, but that the movement surely would not have formed without it. Academics select an angle because it provides explanatory leverage, that when placed in conversation with other perspectives, can provide rich understanding of the world.

Beyond communication, this book is situated with regards to Futures studies. This is only one of many possible names for this academic trajectory, along with foresight and many others. In his 1932 call for aid, “Wanted – Professors of Foresight!” H.G. Wells called for the development of a field of foresight, this new field would deal with unanticipated consequences that accompanied the development of new technology. The question for Wells: why are publics so reckless when confronting technologies that vastly increase the speed or range of processes? What additional skills could be brought to bear to more effectively engage with these problems:

   There are no Professors of Foresight as yet, but I am by way of being an amateur. Let me draw a plain conclusion from tonight’s audition. Either we must make peace throughout the world, make one worldstate, one world-pax, with one money, one police, one speech and one brotherhood, however hard that task may seem, or we must prepare to live with the voice of the stranger in our ears, with the eyes of the stranger in our homes, with the knife of the stranger always at our throats, in fear and in danger of death, enemy-neighbours with the rest of our species. Distance was protection, was safety, though it meant also ignorance and indifference and a narrow, unstimulated life. For good or evil, distance has been done away with. This problem of communications rushes upon us today – it rushes upon us like Jehu the son of Nimshi. It drives furiously. And it evokes the same question: is it peace?

Section 1: Theorizing the Future | 7

    Because if it is not to be peace foreseen and planned and established, then it will be disaster and death. Will there be no Foresight until those bombs begin to rain upon us?6

This is a conservative idea, Wells calls for a futurism that could imagine a peace that could be created with existing technology. Distance is gone, the question becomes how to deal with closeness in the name of peace. The default condition lacked contact, now that contact has been established, how do we deal with it?

In this same time period, the Futurist movement in Italy took the opposite approach: instead of preserving or creating piece, conflict was desirable. For the futurist, nostalgia is the problem, an oppressive force that prevents the technologies of acceleration from transforming society in new profound ways. Consider this excerpt from a futurist work by Martinetti:

    This is how we deny the obsessing splendor of the dead centuries and collaborate with victorious Mechanics, the force that grips the earth in its network of speed.

    We are collaborating with mechanics in destroying the old poetry of distance and wild solitudes, the exquisite nostalgia of departure, and in its place we urge the tragic lyricism of ubiquity and omnipresent speed.

    Our Futurist sensibility, in fact, is no longer moved by the dark mystery of an unexplored valley, of a mountain pass that we, in spite of ourselves, picture as crossed by the elegant (and almost Parisian) ribbon of a white road, where an automobile gleaming with progress and full of cultured voices abruptly pulls up, sputtering; a boulevard corner camped in the middle of solitude.

    Every pine woods madly in love with the moon has a Futurist road that crosses it from end to end. The simple, doleful reign of endlessly soliloquizing vegetation is over.

    With us begins the reign of the man whose roots are cut, the multiplied man who merges himself with iron, is fed by electricity, and no longer understands anything except the sensual delight of danger and quotidian heroism.7

The sensibility here should remind you of the ideology of contemporary technology conglomerates. It isn’t that technology makes things better, but that technology transforms all of life, and those ways that came before are not simply obsolete but regressive. We should consider this not to celebrate futurism, but to see how this set of ideas about speed and destruction recur. Schumpeter did not invent creative destruction – it was baked into the aesthetics of this movement.8 Martinetti pushes us toward an anti-romantic view of the world. At the same time the masculine ideal of this movement is exclusionary, the celebration of rootlessness costs the stability of the tree. When Mark Zuckerberg promoted the slogan “move fast and break things,” it was intended to exemplify the challenge to the status quo.9 This was a new kind of organization that wouldn’t follow rules. Now, a decade later, we can see that rules of political communication and media ethics

6. H G Wells, “Wanted – Professors of Foresight!,” October 1, 2018.

7. F.T. Martinetti, “We Abjure Our Symbolist Masters, The Last Lovers of the Moon,” in Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 94.

8. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Reprint. edition (Harper, 1975).

9. Nick Statt, “Zuckerberg: ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Isn’t How Facebook Operates Anymore,” CNET, accessed October 2, 2018, https://www.cnet.com/news/zuckerberg-move-fast-and-break-thingsisnt-how-we-operate-anymore/.

8 | Section 1: Theorizing the Future

were hard won and necessary. Zuckerberg wasn’t new, the Futurists understood the appeal of destruction and the power of novelty.

In 1967, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published “Toward the year 2000: Work in Progress.”10 Unlike the romantic appeal for peace of Wells or the anti-romantic zeal of Martinetti, Daniel Bell’s position comes closest to ours in this book (and likely your course):

    Time, said St. Augustine, is a three-fold present: the present as we experience it, the past as a present memory, and the future as a present expectation. By that criterion, the world of the year 2000 has already arrived, for the decisions we make now, in the way we design our environment and thus sketch the lines of constraints, the future is committed. Just as the gridiron pattern of city streets in the nineteenth century shaped the linear growth of cities in the twentieth, so the new networks of highways, the location of new towns, the reordering of graduate-school curricula, the decision to create or not create a computer utility as a single system, and the like will frame the tectonics of the twenty-first century. The future is not an overarching leap into the distance; it begins in the present.11

Bell sees change as occurring in systems. The contributors to the project span the social sciences with a range of prescient insights about the power of computer systems to transform decision making and emerging technologies. This model of future study depends on systems theory and a clinical detachment from what a future would be like. The account in this book differs in that we are not concerned with abstract visions, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s thoughts on the near future of non-educational transfers in cooperative versus wedding cake federalism, but in the creation of things and experiences.12

This is not an exhaustive list of works on the future, there are many more that could easily fall within the purview of a course on the History of the Future and that in a course on the future of futures would be relevant. It is entirely possible that your instructor will include a great many more futurists for your consideration during lecture or in other readings. What I want to pull out of these three works in particular are three themes:

• Wells sees the risk of collapsed distances and accelerating systems. He calls to the fore assumptions about the conditions that stabilize systems that could be eroding. Future thinking can lead to peace.

• Martinetti sees the future as a chance for a new aesthetic, a chance to throw off the restrains of the old order. Future thinking can lead to more productive conflict.

• Bell sees the future as a logistical reality. Future thinking emphasizes the conditions of possibility of the present and probabilistic models of what is to come.

10. This book is a fascinating achievement that covers much of the same potential ground as this book. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Relationship of Federal to Local Authorities,” in Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

11. Moynihan, 1.

12. Moynihan, “The Relationship of Federal to Local Authorities.”

Section 1: Theorizing the Future | 9

1.3 Key Concepts

In this section, I will be describing a number of key concepts in the study of future media. These theoretical interventions will be helpful as they allow you to effectively sort a large number of ideas and see the development of arguments over time. At first this might appear to be jargon — overly technical and specific. Experts use specialized vocabulary for the sake of efficiency. There is no reason why we should say a paragraph when a well-established word would do. By reaching agreement about key discourses and ideas, further ideas can be developed more quickly and with greater depth. Spending time considering the theoretical structure is important in this sense as it allows us to have a discussion about key concepts and classes of ideas without laboriously naming every concept. Intentionally obfuscating ideas is a problem, but we should also be reticent of the idea that all non-technical ideas should be reduced to sound bites or simple binary oppositions. These concepts need to be interesting enough to get at the debates of this time, but not confusing.

1.3.1 Continuity and Rupture

One of the most important tropes in this culture involves the term “modern.” What it is to be modern is to be current and enlightened, modern is new and smart. That which came before is backward. Bruno Latour developed this idea in his book We Have Never Been Modern, where the assumption that the rift between prior practices and new practices is called starkly into question.13 By pushing off the old to the pre-modern false novelty provides an illusion of knowledge, a distinction without a difference. This discourse appears in many forms.

James Carey and John Quick described the idea of the electrical overturning of social structure as the “electrical sublime.”14 The utopian hope that electrification would transform social relations has been an ongoing theme. Carey and Quick describe the Innis-McLuhan exchange, where Canadian theorist Harold Innis argued that electrification would only continue existing power relations, and McLuhan took the position that electrification would enable new modes of life that would restore our everyday space.15 Innis was not opposed to technology, you likely hear the oppositional voice on a nearly daily basis. The point is that ubiquitous technology is neither the key to utopia or the gateway to despair. Questions of value and structure exist independently of the technical details of society. The ubiquity of electricity transformed society, but not in the mythic dimension of producing an entirely new human.

Vincent Mosco made a similar case in his critique of the digital sublime: the ostensibly new digital world

13. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press, 2012).

14. James W. Carey and John J. Quirk, “The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution,” The American Scholar 39, no. 3 (1970): 395–424

15. The critique of McLuhan’s utopianism appears in Bell’s work as well.

10 | Section 1: Theorizing the Future

had entirely different rules and marked a transformation in the ways that things are done.16 It is not the single online video that transforms televisuality, but the Netflix platform delivered through multiple devices. Cultural theorizing that relied on observations of first adopters would miss the actual interactions of the multitudes of users who had not yet arrived online. Instead of online interaction leading to a destabilization of identity, the identifiers of the users were amplified and the editorial function of prior bottlenecks decreased.

The meta-analysis of prediction offers further warnings. Philip Tetlock argues in his classic, Expert Political Judgement, that predictions by experts can be scored for relative accuracy.17 The general outcome of the study suggests that well-designed formal models do an excellent job predicting the future.18 People with open minds and the liberal arts sensibility, my way of describing “foxes,” do reasonably well. The more deeply entrenched in a particular world-view, the worst the predictive accuracy, with undergraduates coming in last. Perhaps this is why we have curriculum committees and professional advisors. The best predictions would seem to come from people who have a fox-like cognitive style, with reduced hindsight bias, a higher propensity for integrative thinking and cautious probability judgements, with few attempts to invoke belief defense mechanisms.19 Tetlock’s advice was in my mind throughout the planning and execution of this textbook:

    We often learn we have gone too far in one direction only after it is too late to pull back. Executing this balancing act requires cognitive skills of a high order: the capacity to monitor our own though processes for telltale signs of excessive closed or open-mindedness and to strike a reflective equilibrium to cultivate the art of self-overhearing, to learn how to eavesdrop on the mental conversations we have with ourselves as we struggle to strike the right balance between preserving our existing worldview and rethinking our core assumptions. This is no easy art of master. If we listen to ourselves carefully, we will often not like what we hear.20

You should also keep this in mind through your life, especially the part about not changing your world-view too quickly. This is not a call to change your mind quickly, but to really think about how you think.

For the most part there is a great deal of continuity – people and their desires remain fairly similar over time. There are also moments of rupture. Theorizing these moments is far more interesting, often taking far more energy and attention that theorizing the continuation of the present. It is critical to balance our theorizing of that which changes and does not change.

At the same time, Nassim Taleb has argued that the approach to theorizing from continuity is backward. The optimal theory for the future in this view would depend on the analysis of structures from the

16. Mosco, Vincent, The Digital Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

17. Phillip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2006).

18. Ibid, 76.

19. Ibid, 143.

20. Ibid, 215.

Section 1: Theorizing the Future | 11

perspective of “black swan” events and more complex dynamics that come with non-linear systems.21 Antifragility is a critical contribution by Taleb for our theoretical approach – instead of assuming that systems evolve toward some harmonious order, he proposes a rigorous accounting of structures, forces, or ideas that thrive on disorder.22

Changes are real and theorizing the big ones is important. In the context of a future oriented media studies be careful not to confuse the possibility of rupture with the likely continuation of the status quo. At the same time, beware of the convenient continuation of the status quo – it can change.

1.3.2 Convergence and Emergence

Among the most interesting and important features of any theory are those that explain the relationships between micro and macro factors. Process development often hinges on factors that are difficult to observe, exist between levels of explanation, or are paradoxically hidden by the very constructs that would make them meaningful in the first place.

When we describe emergence, it is not that some media are “emerging” but that some ideas appear as constellations that then are recognized only once they are in effect in the world. Emergence and convergence are not opposites. It is important to note that this book is written from the perspective that emergence is not unobservable or unknown, but along the lines proposed by Mario Bunge where emergence

is a combination that produces novelty:

    In other words, we explain the emergence, behavior, and dismantling of systems in terms not only of their composition and environment, but also of their total (internal and external) structure. Nor is this enough: we should also know something about the system’s mechanism or modus operandi: that is what process makes it behave – or cease to behave – the way it does.23

A certain structural functional logic can guide our analysis of emergence in media systems. Our emergent combinations are not the mystical combination of parts which make more than their sum, but are embedded in complex assemblages that are already designed to incorporate the possibility of desire. These models also have assumptions and rhetorical frames, generally the social designs that are supposed are biological or mechanical. Despite this oversight, there are important lessons to draw from systems theory, one that is

21. Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility", 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 2010).

22. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2014). The assumptions of order and natality are among the most important reasons for the continuation of psychoanalysis as a field.

23. Mario Bunge, Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge (University of Toronto Press, 2015).

12 | Section 1: Theorizing the Future

particularly pithy and for Bunge useful: don’t skip levels. A theoretical explanation needs to account for the micro, mezzo, and macro, even if just in a cursory way.

Convergence on the other hand implies that two things are merged together. This can be more or less intentional. Sociology and anthropology converge at the cultural dimension of meaning and the model of structures. These modes of convergence do not produce novelty, instead they are ways of arriving at particular structural functions or changes through combination. Convergence tends then to describe the ways that we discuss financial structures that allow a large conglomerate to function or the sort of devices that will provide us with an infinite supply of reruns.

Scalable, planned interventions collide with the everyday knowledge of the field. Michael deCerteau famously framed this as the distinction between the strategic and the tactical.24 James C. Scott used an analog of this insight in his critique of high modern social planning. Plans fail because the way that planners see for scale makes it almost impossible to comprehend the situation in the same way that people on the ground do. When we think about successful convergence, as expressed as a transmedia property, the result is the opposite of novelty. Exposition of an already existent novel story system is the most effective way to generate a return.

This is not to say that convergence cannot produce novel results, but that if the overt design of a system is to produce more of the same it seems unlikely that the conditions for novelty will be truly present.

Figure 1.1: A picture I took on Kings in Corvallis.

What do you notice in this picture? A poorly placed sidewalk. The users of this environment have a clear

24. De Certeau, Micheal, The Practice of Everyday Life, 2nd ed. (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002).

Section 1: Theorizing the Future | 13

preference to walk directly ahead, down the sidewalk that was once placed in this location. Now the sidewalk has been moved slightly people continue to walk where they want.

Desire lines exist in many places, you likely know of locations where the sidewalks were laid out as a grid where people would clearly prefer curves or angles. Robert Moor, reviewing the problem of desire lines, noted that the policy of Central Park in New York City had been to pave the desire lines: to use them as a guide to where sidewalks should go.25 If they had followed this approach the park would have been filled with sidewalks. Purely emergent sidewalk design also fails. The question for designers: how can we balance the factors, honoring the desire of the users of a space without destroying the experience of it?

1.3.3 The Conditions of Possibility

A. The Simple Conditions

There is an important distinction to begin with between necessary and sufficient. Consider the development of a fire, it is necessary for fuel, a source of oxygen, and heat to be present for a fire to ignite. Remove any one of these three necessary elements and there are no longer are sufficient conditions for fire. Warmth and air are a summer day.

Developed by Immanuel Kant in book The Critique of Pure Reason, the conditions of possibility argument provide important resources for media research as it avoids the search for pure forms.26 Instead of a metaphysical position that treats human sensory experience as secondary, Kant produced a system that allows sensation to be the primary focus of philosophy. Within the world of experience, Kant considers some experiences to be special, those that lift us up out of our normal perception – Slavoj Zizek proposes that these experiences are double, they are both sublime and disappointing as they remind us that we exist in a world of perception. Excavation of the conditions of possibility for the media present is an essential task for future studies. The following are two examples of this sort of analysis:

First, in his 2005 classic, Convergence Culture, Professor Henry Jenkins argues that new participatory cultures will be enabled by the convergence of media technologies.27 When students encounter the book they are often quizzical: they live in a nearly completely converged world, the idea of medium specificity or a rigid break between the internet and the television is alien. Convergence is a fact of their lives, it did not have the positive and progressive implications described in the book.

What readers miss in the account of convergence culture is that the underlying drive would be that of a robust culture encountering lower barriers for interaction online. It was not the convergence of the devices

25. “Tracing (and Erasing) New York’s Lines of Desire | The New Yorker,” accessed October 2, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/tracing-and-erasing-new-yorks-linesof-desire.

26. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, 1989), 203.

27. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, n.d.

14 | Section 1: Theorizing the Future

that would have transformed social life, but the changing culture. Accounting for the forces within the convergence story is the reason why we assign this book to this day.

Second, it would be folly to say that all of the implications of convergence culture would have been possible if the culture had simply tried harder. Digital Non-Linear Editing software transformed the workflows of the contemporary media producer. Rapid, ubiquitous time-axis manipulation of video is remarkable and definitely necessary for the development of our current media culture. DNLE did not cause social change alone – it was merely a critical part.

In more concrete terms, the conditions of possibility for a thing are all the things that must be true for it to exist. A house with wooden studs requires a timber industry to produce materials, the entire chain of material operations necessary to make the house are required, but are not necessarily apparent in the consideration of the style of the windows. The conditions of possibility are often invisible and taken for granted.

Distinguishing between necessary and sufficient in this case assumes causation. Although metaphysical speculation is interesting and occasionally useful, for our purposes we can assume that there are causes and effects in this world. Causation is special, and mere correlation is blocked from taking on the power of a cause.

B. Episteme

This analysis of the procession of ostensibly invisible forms is apparent in discourse as well. In his remarkable book, The Order of Things, Michael Foucault describes an episteme, which investigates the discursive conditions of possibility for the present.28 The layering of ideas and the progress of those ideas can also be excavated for analysis, this task is called genealogy. Foucauldian analysis asks the reader to consider the history of an idea and to take seriously the idea that one system of ideas can inflect another.

A powerful effect of this shift is the “death of the author.”29 Roland Barthes criticized the romantic genius and the way that the idea of the author allows a search for a “secret, an ultimate meaning, to the text.”30 This insight has been found in other communication fields as well, Ed Black in the critique of neoaristoelianism: we should judge speeches on the basis of their effect in circulation, not in the intention of the speaker.31 The horizon of meaning must exceed individual intent.

Michael Foucault goes further to attack the institution of authorship and the privilege of the subject in producing text. This post-structural provocation is powerful, as many of the technologies considered in this book, and in communication research today, involve autopoesis – texts produced by automation. Think of the authorship of a Facebook feed – the means by which the feed you view was produced is the selective production filtered by relevance and recency of content created by a number of other people. The website/ app load you experience is untouched by human hands: there was no author as such. This does not mean

28. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Routledge, 2005).

29. Michael Foucault, “What Is an Author?” (Lecture, 1969).

30. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Jonathan Cape (Paris: Noonday Press, 1991).

31. Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 75.

Section 1: Theorizing the Future | 15

that the assumptions that were used to produce the program building are somehow non-human. At this point we tend to infuse the creators of systems like this with the romantic genius quality of the author. Characters like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates replace Shakespeare.

Staging the larger debate about the role of structure and human agency is critical. Some scholars emphasize the profoundly human dimension of communication, framing research through the stories of people. This anthropological strand of communication research is important and stands in juxtaposition to the sociological strands that would focus on the mathematics of diffusion, or the critical/cultural which would decenter the story of the actor and the network for a genealogy of the discourses which made sense of both the network and the actors. The disciplinary matrix of Communication will be explored at length in another section of this book.

How we understand human agency is a profoundly important episteme.

C. Modal Logic

Necessity requires that something be not possibly false. Contingency would allow a conjecture that would be possibly true and false. Those claims which are truly necessary would be limited in the sense that that they would not include the conjectural information. Necessity is boring. Analytic results in general are powerful as they are restricted to simple qualities. The associated theory of positivism depends on the elimination of ambiguous or multiple signs. This presents an important limit on the use of analytic propositions for the study of communication.

If a connection to formal logic is desirable for you as a learner (or instructor) the theory proposed in this introduction would require a rigorous modal logic. Keep in mind, that we are not looking at single qualifiers, but hundreds of nested and reflexive logical structures. At some point, it will be necessary to suspend the expansion of the formation, this choice points toward the concern with infinite regression.

D. Modes of Proof

It is important to consider the kind of proof you are employing. For the most part, you use reduction and abduction in everyday life. Deduction and induction are useful for mathematical processes but are difficult to find in the real world. Much of contemporary argumentation theory offers ways of theorizing the various logical leaps that are made with abductive reason (more on this later).

16 | Section 1: Theorizing the Future

1.3.4 Time and Temporality

When are we? I ask this question often of students, there are many satisfying answers. Some answers conceive of time as an objective thing. As the agents of the Federation Bureau of Temporal Investigations explain to a befuddled Captain Sisko, “time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.”32 There is a powerful truth here: time as we perceive it is real (Time is a condition of possibility – it surely exists, and to consider what it is would be fully speculative) and some events are path dependent. You cannot have microcomputers without transistors. This is the time of chronos: when we are and how events process. At the same time, without the performative dimension of the initial public offering, the moment of the microcomputer revolution would be unmarked.

Kairos positions time as a point, this is the moment of now.33 The means by which the moment is produced are central to communication theory as a whole. Time as a moment is inherently synthetic. Chronos continues to proceed even if we ignore it. Time telescopes as you get older, facts that you once knew that seemed fresh and important can become painfully dated. Consider the way that people talk about electricity generation. In the early nineties, it was a meaningful thing to say that the “technology isn’t ready yet.” If this is baked into your conception of the current moment you have missed decades of innovation. Underlying truisms about how electricity moves. Gone are the days of Enron engineered blackouts, which made sense as California would be an energy importer.34 California now has been known to send solar energy out to avoid over-supply.35 Publics often remain in moments long after the clock has moved on.

32. “‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’ Trials and Tribble-Ations (TV Episode 1996) - IMDb,” accessed October 2, 2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708655/.

33. John Durham Peters, “Calendar, Clock, Tower” (Media in Transition 6, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009), http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/peters.pdf.

34. Julian Borger, “Tapes Reveal Enron’s Secret Role in California’s Power Blackouts,” The Guardian, February 5, 2005, sec. Business, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2005/feb/05/enron.usnews.

35. Ivan Penn, “California Invested Heavily in Solar Power. Now There’s so Much That Other States Are Sometimes Paid to Take It,” www.latimes.com, accessed October 2, 2018, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/.

Section 1: Theorizing the Future | 17

Figure 1.2: US Central Intelligence Agency, 2012 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_Time_Zones_Map.png

24/7, 365. A cliché intended to express that someone is continuously engaged or about an idea. The problem: there are more than twenty-four hours demarcated at any given moment on earth. Assuming that it is 1500 pacific daylight time on a Thursday, it is 1200 Friday on Teraina Island, and 1000 Thursday on Baker Island.36 These times are GMT -12 and +14 respectively.

The standardization of time is a political process featuring precise engineering, not a scientific truism.

1.3.5 Probability

For the most part, students encountering this book will have been educated in a fairly standard model of frequentist probability. The basic dynamic presented is that of a random generator, usually presented as a fair coin, which then produces a string of results that are totally independent. Does a string of wins or losses mean anything in this context? No.

Instead of theorizing the probable in terms of a random device, increasingly the public is presented with dynamic scores that consider the probability of an event, given information, anterior and posterior to a

36. Spend some time looking at this time zone map and it will become clear that time zones are political. https://www.timeanddate.com/time/map/

18 | Section 1: Theorizing the Future

new event that provides information. In an election, there is a likely winner and a likely loser. Adding new information like scandals or policy proposals can change the current probability of a win or loss.

The model for understanding the event of the upcoming election depends on an understanding of the relative durability of our assumptions. Adding new information, like a new poll, to the model would not change how we think of the race from a default position of 50/50, instead based on chronological time and the impending kairotic event, a score could be derived.

Simple probability of course remains, but is not particularly helpful in resolving the implications of multiple factors on a single relationship. If you are expecting probability to be handled in this book as the consideration of a pair of discrete outcomes, you will be lost. More on the mathematics and the Bayesian shift in Section four.

1.3.6 Speculative

A common adjunct term used in the discussion of the future is speculative. Dunne and Raby, in their book Speculative Everything , pose that speculative methods for design are intended to provide a grounded opportunity for the evaluation of potential worlds. Existing within the clear boundaries of the possible, speculation is intended to break the linkage between the probable and the plausible, allowing the consideration of the preferable.37 Fantasy (and metaphysical speculation) are not particularly useful for speculative research.

Dunne and Raby take direction from Ricard Barbrook’s (known for his development of the Californian Ideology) position on future imagination, which begins with a consideration of the way that the image of the future has often been forgotten.38 A limitless future had been promised repeatedly, none of the promises of current boosters are particularly unique.39 In rhetorical studies, this appears in the use of the phrase “future anterior,” invoked as a device where a utopian future potential is leveraged against the present. This is in an important sense the inverse of “tarrying with the negative” where the scales of evaluation are shifted by the application of a nebulous negative value. Although Barbrook does not use this phrase in his writing, the critique comes through clearly in his descriptions of Bell Labs and the wildly optimistic presentations of participatory culture. The utopian promise of technology is always just around the corner, whether that is Walter Cronkite promising a world without hunger or swarms of robots making labor obsolete.

Among the central problems in the existing regime of design thought is the sort of vision employed by these organizations. Design has become a quick gloss for looking to aestheticize their products or plans. Those organizations have a high-modern sensibility which is intrinsically strategic – this idea already

37. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (MIT Press, 2013), 5.p 5

38. Richard Barbrook, Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village (Pluto, 2007), 8; Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1995): 44–72. imaginary futures, 8

39. Barbrook, Imaginary Futures, 243.

Section 1: Theorizing the Future | 19

appears in the discussion of desire and communication. What speculative storytelling often does is emphasize the everyday dimension, the sort of experience that high modern imagination loses.

Speculative design is intended as a political program that can unmoor the tools of design as an academic pursuit from the rough docks of problem solving methods. Instead of a design theory that finds answers to questions posed by powerful institutions, speculation allows designers to find their own questions and to design for society, rather than a particular client. Problem solving is only one of a number of epistemic possibilities, speculation as much as it enables argumentation and debate, is an academic technology that can produce new knowledge in fruitful ways. It is not a new insight that design and argument are deeply linked, what is fascinating are the manifold of discourses presented to justify the lack of creativity in the design process itself.

Where the perspective by communication researchers differs from designers is that we generally are very interested in the ways that discourses would need to change to arrive at a possible future. It would be reasonable to conclude that communication is slightly more conservative in disciplinary outlook then design or architecture. It would also be reasonable to see this as a reflection of larger disciplinary coordinates, as communication is not locked into a problem-solving epistemology.

We should consider some of the methods for speculation proposed by Dunne and Raby:40

• Fictional worlds – literary and artistic contributions can challenge the stability of signs and promote new combinations

• Utopia/Dystopia – work through the ideas to either of the two extreme conclusions: the juxtapositions are productive

• Extrapolation – follow the dreams that lead to existing designs, let the dreams play out all the way to their conclusions

• Idea Stories – writing concepts as narratives; they use the example of red plenty (a new technological planned Soviet economy); use the narrative and look for resonances

• Thought Experiments – collide ideas in a non-narrative form, work with the abstraction of the formula

• Reduction to the Absurd – take the idea to the point that it fails and literalize it

• Counterfactuals – flip one of the actually flippable switches at a moment in history and suppose how that specific change would have affected the present

• What-ifs – flip one of the switches for the conditions of the present and work forward \

The most important point: this is already how people work and think in design, the real reality is bracketed behind a discourse of problem-solving and reality that is itself a discourse. Speculation is powerful because it allows us to retake the imaginative language of design without being loaded into a static concept of reality. Within these categories play with the dimensions of narrative (concrete)/non-narrative (abstract), present experience/past memory/future expectation.

40. Dunne and Raby, Speculative Everything, 67–88.

20 | Section 1: Theorizing the Future

1.3.7 Virtual

Virtual does not refer to a device, be that goggles or a suit, but to the prospect of a synthetic perception. Brian Massumi, Canadian Communication professor and specialist in sensation and communication research, has argued that the virtual only exists in the combination of position and moment, as an effect of an endless loop of sensation, “When its effects are multiple, the virtual fleetingly appears. Its fleeting is in the cracks between and the surfaces around the images.”41 Contemporary affect theory in communication has linked the physical, textual, and relational, “Affects are virtual synthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing particular things that embody them.”42 What does this mean? How you actually feel when you experience something matters. Your body and perspective are not barriers to understanding the world, they are the world. Andrew Murphie describes this as an enfolding, the multiple faces of what is ultimately a single surface.43

The virtual as a form of synthetic perception is deeply connected to the imagination. Once we establish a theory of virtuality that exceeds the sum of parts and perception, the analysis of the virtual comes to include physical and discursive considerations. Virtual worlds are then the worlds we inhabit as well as the imaginary worlds that we feel into possible existence. This book has an expansive orientation toward text, sensation, and technology because it is necessary.

1.3.8 Ideology

Ideology is a commonly used word, generally referring to a system of ideas that provide a coherence to thinking that exceeds the basic descriptive facts of the world. In this sense, everyone is ideological. If you were to remind someone that their world view was in a sense ideological they would likely be offended, there is a connotation in the term which supposes that an ideology is artificial. To consider what ideology is and why it is important, we should consider a few practical ideas.

How do we deal with people who have wrong perspectives? A straight-forward case here would be the consideration of individuals opposed to the vaccination of children. Vaccines are a safe and effective way to decrease the prevalence of infectious disease. The solution to non-vaccination would seem to be to challenge the ideology of the individuals, telling them that experts have determined that vaccination is safe. It must be that some bad piece of information is blocking their mind from arriving at the truth. Remove the bad block and they will think correctly. This doesn’t work. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler’s research has been exemplary in demonstrating boomerang effects where seemingly ideology solving messages actually

41. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 133. 133

42. Massumi, 35.

43. Andrew Murphie, “Putting the Virtual Back into VR,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 2002), 188–215.

Section 1: Theorizing the Future | 21

backfire, increasing the underlying belief.44 What the seemingly crude theory of ideology misses is the idea that expertise, a form of backing that would be taken very seriously in some ideological frames, is negative in the conspiratorial frame of the anti-vaccine movement. Rather than operating as a bad idea that somehow clouds the mind, conspiracy discourse has a much richer symbolic life.

Conspiracy theories are a popular topic for research as they are a wicked problem for moving society forward. Jodi Dean, a leading political theorist, went as far as to ground the conspiracy as one of the foundational units for political analysis today.45 The underlying structure of conspiracy includes the dominant duped view, which is maintained by a nefarious actor who knows secret information, that secret information would lead to a complete overturning of the dominant discourse. A participant in a conspiracy theory is not passive, they are actively working to reveal to you, the revealer the degree to which you are duped by ideology. Elizabeth Anker has argued that the dominant affective position of American politics is melodrama, of which conspiracy is a key form.46 Conspiracy theories are both satisfying and practical. Qanon conspiracy discourses allow supporters of the Trump administration to incorporate bad news into their framework by inverting the roles of other characters in the drama.

If one wears a Q shirt to a rally and demands the release of the OIG report, they likely are aware of the controversy that is the Qanon conspiracy theory and have considered it as such. This is where Dean, citing Zizek and Sloterdjik, have formulated ideology as “enlightened false consciousness.”47 People know that there are inconsistencies in their beliefs but they choose to continue. Ideology is not something that happens to people like a nightmare where they should be woken up, instead ideology is something people do for themselves to make their worlds. Ideological critique has languished in recent years as the mere identification of an ideology means very little and the application of new information likely doesn’t lead to attitude change.

This is not to say that attitude change is impossible, we have decreased tobacco and increased condom use, but that the underlying relationships around belief are not linear or based on simple delusion. Joshua Kalla and David Brockman have found that persuasion related to social issues, such as gay marriage, is

44. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions,” Political Behavior 32, no. 2 (June 1, 2010): 303–30, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2.

45. Dean, Jodi, Publicity’s Secret (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).

46. Elisabeth R. Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2014).

47. The key idea in the psychoanalytic critique of ideology is to acknowledge that people are often actively participating in the reproduction of a discourse, they are not duped by ideology, they are manufacturers of it. As a theoretical construct, this compliments the social science research and provides a forward looking sense of the narrative structure around ideology today. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology; Dean, Jodi, Publicity’s Secret.

22 | Section 1: Theorizing the Future

possible but most effective when not tied to an impending political measure.48 People are willing to have interesting conversations, as long as they are not motivated as such.

It also becomes clear why marketplace of ideas models fail – ideas are often mislabeled, mishandled, and the buyers are often also sellers already coming to market with strict shopping lists. Changing attitudes depends on affective change, a virtual dimension, that is much more interesting for our consideration of potential futures.

48. Joshua Kalla and David E. Broockman, “The Minimal Persuasive Effects of Campaign Contact in General Elections: Evidence from 49 Field Experiments,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, September 25, 2017), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3042867.

Section 1: Theorizing the Future | 23

Figure 1.3: person filling up soda cup at soft drink dispenser by Franchise Opportunities, 2017. www.franchiseopportunities.com/ www.franchiseopportunities.com/

In the May 2012, New York Mayor Bloomberg proposed a ban on giant cups of soda. The reasoning: the consumption of sweetened beverages is a public health problem, if people were made to “double-fist” their nectar they might drink less. You could still buy a ton of soda, it would just be less convenient. The push back was intense: limiting people to 16 ounce cups was a major loss of freedom. Eventually, the regulation was struck down as exceeding the authority of the department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Behavior change is important, especially in the context of population health. If a substance is truly dangerous it is highly regulated. Tobacco and alcohol are good examples here. What do we do with times

24 | Section 1: Theorizing the Future

when the case for regulation isn’t so clear or when an overt ban would be heavy handed? Cass Sunstein (a law professor) and Richard Thaler (a behavioral economist) proposed a theory called libertarian paternalism where instead of overt strong prohibitions on conduct a series of small changes in design called nudges could be employed to subtly change behavior.49 Changes in “choice architecture” could lead to different results by manipulating: defaults, expected error, action mapping, feedback mechanisms, layouts, and incentives.50 If one were to simply change the context around the individual, they would make the “right” choice. What is striking here is the resonance between this position and the crude theory of ideology. There are many times when better designed systems can produce better results, but those situations will rarely align with practical politics or the leverage of the state.

1.3.9 Accelerationism

Just as the futurist aesthetic challenges the provincialism of slowness, vegetation, and romanticism, the accelerationists now challenge the axiological assumptions about slowness, stillness, embodiment, mindfulness (and many others) of contemporary theory. The accelerationist turn calls for the assessment of the choice to decelerate and the theoretical constructions associated with traditional humanistic critique. A key reference point in the literature on accelerationism is the Marxian claim that capitalism collapses because of its own internal contradictions, the dependence of accelerationism on this foundation is also contested.51 Why would this point matter? If we have some predictable end point to social process, it would seem reasonable that if we could engineer that process to accelerate could be beneficial. The inevitable collapse narrative is convenient, but misses the key point made by Friedrich Pollock that as market systems strain under their own contradictions they tend to become authoritarian fusions that he calls “state capitalism.”52 Depending on which core classes you have taken, you can see a lurking debate about the nature of social theory developing here.

Without the broader consideration of social theory, we could also see accelerationism as the choice to embrace contemporary technology. Once the choice is made to embrace technology, the study of the internal structure of capitalism as it is, abstraction, and acceleration, the range of possibilities for both research and politics dramatically increase. Williams and Strnick’s “#Accelerate – Manifesto for an

49. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Penguin, 2009).

50. Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein, and John P. Balz, “Choice Architecture,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, April 2, 2010), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1583509.

51. This introduction is an essential resource for understanding accelerationism. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, “Introduction,” in #Accellerate: An Accellerationist Reader (Fairmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014).

52. Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism: It’s Possibilities and Limitations,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Arato and Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1985).

Section 1: Theorizing the Future | 25

accelerationist politics,” poses a different accelerationist future. The traditional points for the critique of the human sciences as romantic returns to what is increasingly a fantasy world. The future is taken by those who actively deploy the tools of modernity toward their own ends:

    To do so, the Left must take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made possible by capitalist society. We declare that quantification is not an evil to be eliminated, but a tool to be used in the most effective manner possible.

…

    The tools found in social network analysis, agent-based modeling, big data analytics, and nonequilibrium economic models, are necessary cognitive mediators for understanding complex systems like the modern economy. The accelerationist Left must become literate in these technical fields.53

The left in the context of this extended block quote can just as easily mean humanists or social scientists or artists. For many years, it was fashionable to critique computational means of thought production and then a necessary defense for meaningful theoretical structures. Today, these moves keep academic debates frozen in time. Among the most important ideas to move beyond is the critique of mastery, the idea that the claim to use technology in a quantitative project was something of a claim to fully represent the world and control that representation.54 Researchers need to be good with technology. Future media students need to deploy a combination of theoretical, cultural, and technical methods, they don’t need a sophisticated list of excuses for why they don’t know how to do things.

More metaphysically, Nick Land, a key accelerationist theorist, argues that the accelerationist moment is a feedback loop.55 By unleashing cybernetic power the accelerationist turn could potentially enable the singularity, which is the concept that a powerful enough computer could allow the uploading of all intelligence into a single artificial meta-structure.56 The question of the desirability of assimilation into a collective is another question entirely. For advocates of singularity, the prospect of brain-computer interfacing is exciting as it transforms the condition of possibility of embodiment. For those opposed, it is embodiment itself that is the heart of the human condition. At the same time, only the artificial intelligence of capable of producing the singularity can truly be said to be sufficient to cause such an event. It is entirely possible that brain-computer interfacing will never reach this level – more on this in section three. Accelerationism can provide three important insights:

• If we assume that social processes are knowable and predictable, their engineered outcomes, if positive should be hastened. Fatalism is a choice made by humanists and social scientists, not a necessity.

53. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, “#Accellerate,” in #Accellerate: The Accellerationist Reader (Fairmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014).

54. Williams and Srnicek, 360.

55. Nick Land, “Teloplexy,” in #Accellerate: The Accellerationist Reader (Fairmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014).

56. “The Singularity Is Near » Homepage,” accessed October 2, 2018, http://singularity.com/.

26 | Section 1: Theorizing the Future

• Humanistic critique often relies on implicit value assumptions that intrinsically conservative, and should be challenged or inverted.

• The possibility of a wildly divergent future with an alternative cosmology.

1.3.10 Simulation

The prospect that reality is an illusion has a long history across many human cultures. Sensation is not satisfying, there must be some other reality out there. Make no mistake, this is not a claim that the physical world does not exist, but that there is no higher essence that could somehow be beyond the world as we understand it.

Jean Baudrillard provocatively claimed that “the Iraq War did not take place.”57 What he meant by this was not that there was no military conflict in Iraq, but that role of media performance in the war was such that it produced a new reality of war, a virtual world where one experiences the war through the vision of a military system attacking a building. The kinds of wars, and seemingly spectacular yet invisible costs, could dramatically recalibrate the choice to engage in armed conflict. At the highest level, this forms a simulacrum, a symbolic world more real than reality.58 Escape is not an option, there is no way out of language, the alternative is to critique the most pernicious forms within our simulation. In opposition to the central thesis of accelerationism, that there is an end point that can be approached to history or a system of symbols, Baudrillard reminds us that there is no end point. History is always already in the dustbin as we are continuously remaking it, there is no end point that we are moving toward: just more discourse.

The most popular simulation topic today comes in the form of the simulation argument. Presented in this form by Nick Bostrom, we are asked to consider the possibility that we are currently living in a simulation. The essential premise of this argument is that it is likely that a highly technically advanced civilization would have seemingly infinite computing power.59 From this point, the prospect that a civilization could run an ancestor simulation (a realistic virtual world that we are a part of) is possible, assuming that the processes by which such a civilization would come to pass would not be entirely self-destructive. Bostrom is thus not arguing directly that we live in a simulation, but that we should consider the conditions of possibility for arriving at the state of post-humanity where we might have seemingly infinite computing power.

Existential risk, the prospect that humanity or any human like civilization could be destroyed, becomes a central concern for the evaluation of possible futures.60 HG Wells consideration in Professors or Foresight wanted, was the new technologies obliterated distance, it was not that a utopia of infinite communication

57. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Indiana University Press, 1995).

58. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (University of Michigan Press, 1994).

59. Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Simulation?,” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 243–55.

60. Nick Bostrom, “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 9, no. 1 (2002), https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html.

Section 1: Theorizing the Future | 27

was coming, but that the new technologies heralded new destructive possibilities. Simulation provides us a framework for considering what the world could and should be.

In a more concrete sense, deepfakes are a profound immanent problem. Deepfakes use neural nets to map images and sounds together.61 Primarily used for the production of pornography, deep fakes allow the simulation of what would be real material. The status of photographic evidence has already been in decline for many years, the deep fake transitions from the world of the singular fake to the entire moving vivacious simulated fake. The reason why deep fakes are so vexing for the public sphere is their ability to fully break the chain of the indexical trace. Phillip Rosen argued that the fundamental quality of images in the public sphere is their capacity to providing evidence of having been there – that there was something real and evidence of action that could exist.62 Metaphysical games are fun, pragmatic questions about the status of evidence in court point toward the danger of simulation.

Simulation is important in three ways:

• Philosophy has been concerned with the feeling that this is all an illusion or simulation for thousands of years: this is a foundational idea. These are tightly bound up with questions of the meaning of life, hope/despair, genesis/apocalypse.

• People are often searching for some trace of perception that is a life-line to the “real” world. No such connections exist.

• Simulations can appear to be more real than reality, are quite useful; dangerous.

61. “How ‘Deep Fakes’ Became Easy — And Why That’s So Scary,” Fortune, September 11, 2018, http://fortune.com/2018/09/11/deep-fakes-obama-video/.

62. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

28 | Section 1: Theorizing the Future

Quiz on "Theorizing the Future":

A Sociolinguist's Perspective

CLAIRE-ANNE FERRIÈRE

#metoo and Twitter | 307

On October 15, 2017 the actress Alyssa Milano ignited a spark with a Tweet.

With this tweet, Miliano was urging those in her publics who had ever been victims of sexual assault and/or harassment to identify as such by saying, ‘me too.’ She did not launch the hashtag as such, but it appeared very quickly – in the following minutes.

#metoo and Twitter | 308

Alyssa Milano and her friend were not the only women who came up with the idea of ‘me too’ to help people express ugly circumstances and violation. Tarana Burke, a civil rights activist, had launched an offline “me too” movement back in 2006 to “give young women, particularly young women of color from low wealth communities, a sense of empowerment from the understanding that they are not alone in their circumstances” (Burke, 2013).

In 2007, activist Tarana Burke began a movement for women of color which was echoed a decade later by Milano’s tweet and the responses. Milano’s access to expansive networked publics gave a similar sentiment to Burke’s the visibility and affordances of an online movement.

Burke’s and Milano’s uses of the phrase “me too” have come to be considered as two benchmarks in one movement due to the connected nature of events they describe. Through the hashtag #metoo survivors’ accounts of being harassed and violated are aggregated, or digitally pulled or presented together as related. The societal norms of sexual harassment and abuse became entrenched in the past through many individual incidents that were normalized in families, cultures, and societies. By aggregating survivors’ memories of these events, the Me Too movement has led to a cultural shift that centralizes survivor experiences, and shifts the blame to those who caused their pain.

The rapid spread of the Me Too movement is directly linked to the Harvey Weinstein case which started on October 5th, 2017,

#metoo and Twitter | 309

when The New York Times published an article entitled “Harvey Weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers for years”, written by Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor (Kantor & Twohey, 2017). Dozensof women have come out denouncing sexual abuse and harassment from the movie mogul, and demanding that the situation in Hollywood change. #Metoo occurs after that case, opening the demands and claims out of Hollywood. Several other events also followed from #metoo, such as the second Women’s March in January 2018 and the opposition to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States over the summer of 2018, to mention only a few. All those events are therefore linked together and organized around common claims, which is why we can consider that all those events constitute a movement, and #metoo plays an essential role in the construction of this social movement. However, it does not play exactly the same role as social media did in the movements of performative activism, tackled in the previous chapter.

In order to get a full grasp of the “me too” movement on social media and how it is used, sociolinguistics comes in handy. Sociolinguistics studies the relationship between language on the one hand (-linguistics – the study of language) and society on the other hand (socio-), more particularly social relations; in other words, it studies how human beings use language and to what purpose. It is therefore an interesting approach to study how social media are used, and how they shape social relations. In this feminist movement, women spoke up, through language, denouncing systemic abuse and demanding that changes be made in society and in social relations between men and women. The movement was built progressively; interestingly, social media was not used the same way throughout the movement, and sociolinguistics helps us understand why it is so.

#metoo and Twitter | 310

1. The Harvey Weinstein Case

In order to understand the relevance of the #metoo movement within the larger feminist movement as well as the relevance of the use of social media, we need to go back to the Weinstein case and its characteristics.

Indeed, if #metoo really turned to social media, the Weinstein case developed primarily through traditional media – i.e. in those forms of mass media that existed before the advent of the digital age (also called the new media age, as a matter of fact), for example, print media, radio broadcasting, and the television among other things. However, it is still important to keep in mind that, even if the denunciations against Harvey Weinstein were mainly done through traditional media (72 out of the 90 denunciations that were made public), all of them can be found on the internet, facilitating their diffusion. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that those women should first choose traditional media to make their denunciations and claims public. On the contrary, very few were made through social media. One element that is essential to take into account is that the two newspapers that extensively covered the case, with in-depth investigations and analyses, were The New York Times (“Harvey Weinstein Paid Oj Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades”, by Megan Twohey and Judi Kantor) and the The New Yorker (“From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell their Stories,” by Ronan Farrow (Farrow, 2017)), two renowned and reliable newspapers. As a matter of fact, these two newspapers were awarded the Pulitzer prize for public service in 2018 for the reporting done by the aforementioned three journalists.

The stories these women were reporting were disruptive – Harvey Weinstein was a very prominent man in the business and even outside of it – and as such, they needed to establish their legitimacy in order to be believed. One way they had of doing

#metoo and Twitter | 311

so was actually by having their stories backed up by established, reliable newspapers. Not all newspapers through which the victims testified are as renown as The New Yorker or The New York Times – some denunciations were published in Variety or Deadline, for example – but the important element here is that it feels like the victims are never alone. Either the stories are reported by journalists, who lend their legitimacy to the victims, or if the victims write in their own name in opinion sections, they still have the legitimacy and weight of the newspapers backing them up.  The same goes for the TV or radio shows.

The theory of denunciation  put forward by Luc Boltanski et al. (Boltanski et al., 1984) supports that idea. In a nutshell, they argue that the higher the profile of the alleged aggressor and the bigger the difference between their status in society and that of the accuser is, the less “normal” the denunciation seems to be, “normal” in the sense of plausible, even possible. To put it bluntly, the more an alleged aggressor has to lose – status, some important position, wealth, etc. – the more suspicious people are because they might believe that the denunciation is not completely disinterested. In our case, even if some of the women who came out erst against Harvey Weinstein were somewhat high-profile people too, Ashley Judd for example, some others were “mere” employees or former employees of one of Weinstein’s companies, and in any case, none of the accusers were actually as high-profile as Weinstein was. Having the support of newspapers such as The New York Times or The New Yorker is therefore extremely important to restore some balance between accuser and alleged aggressor.

This need to legitimize their stories is also apparent in the language they use, more particularly in how they speak about what they went through. Here is an example of a testimony delivered by one of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged victims, Louisette Geiss.

(from 5’29 to 10’47)

#metoo and Twitter | 312

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://opentextbooks.library.arizona.edu/hrsm/?p=107

In linguistics, we often start from our own impressions, how we react to a text, and then we try and end some formal elements to back this up. We can think in terms of positive impressions, as in I felt/think that, or negative impressions, I didn’t expect that/I would have thought it would be more like that.

One of the first things that is striking in the denunciations against Harvey Weinstein is the very “stick to the facts” style. Indeed, these

#metoo and Twitter | 313

denunciations are very descriptive, detailed, and sometimes very graphic in what they describe. They are presented as if everything that was done and said during the assault is being reported. Moreover, the denunciations are symptomatic of what we call a paratactic style, also called the additive style: elements are presented, one simple sentence after the other, and there are few elaborate sentences, as follows:

This gives, once again, the impression that they are just providing the plain truth and facts as they happened. On the contrary, it seems that emotions are not so present, as one could have expected of a woman recounting and reliving the assault she suffered. These denunciations are therefore more fact-oriented than emotion-oriented. This also participates in legitimising and having their denunciations accepted and believed.

At that stage – or at the very least in the erst ten days of the contestation – the movement was precisely not a movement: it was only centered on one particular man, Harvey Weinstein, and when claims were made; they were also quite specific, around the issues of the relationship between men and women in Hollywood.  It was therefore limited to the world of Hollywood, which is also fitting with Boltanski’s theory of denunciation that was previously

#metoo and Twitter | 314

mentioned: it is only logical that such a disruptive movement in society should start with women who are renown and have some status compared to “ordinary” people. The movement and its claims needed to be legitimized by well-established people before being broadened to society at large with #metoo.

What we now consider to be the next stage of the movement, #metoo, is quite different from the Weinstein case, on different accounts.

2. #metoo

Tarana Burke gave a Ted talk in November 2018 called “Me too is a movement, not a moment,” (Burke, 2018) and indeed, this stage of #me too was essential in the development of the Weinstein case as a moment into a fully-fedged feminist movement.

With #metoo, tens of thousands of people are saying that they too, were victims of similar kinds of assault. This was made possible through the use of social media, in particular Twitter, as a new and massive medium of protest. Twitter is accessible to anyone with an account: in the United States, in the third quarter of 2017, there were 69 million monthly active users according to the numbers released by Twitter (Clement, 2019). This represents a great change compared to the 90 women or so who reported having been assaulted by Harvey Weinstein. Moreover, more than numbers, the status of the people denouncing abuse changed. They are now “ordinary” people, like you and me, not Hollywood stars: the movement is not limited to Hollywood anymore, but broadened to society in general.

#metoo and Twitter | 315

This is confirmed by the linguistic analysis of “me too” tweets. More than fifty thousand such tweets were posted in the erst twenty-four hours following Alyssa Milano’s erst tweet; for purpose of ease, we will only focus on the erst hour of “me too”, which represents 3,847 tweets. When analyzed with specific software tools that scan the corpus (here, the set of tweets) to identify some of its linguistic characteristics, those tweets show that the most significant themes and concepts that come up are all linked to sexual assault and harassment that women suffer. Indeed, some of the most recurrent words in those tweets are “me too” of course, but also “sexually,” “harassed,” “assaulted,” and “women.” The results therefore show a direct thematic link with the Harvey Weinstein case, and outline the scope of the movement.

What these results also show is a tendency towards generalization. Indeed, there are very few details about the types and circumstances of the assault that people tweeting “me to” are reporting; contrary to the Weinstein case in which denunciations were very specific, with the “me too” movement, specificities are somewhat smoothed and all different types of assaults are gathered under the umbrella expression “sexually harassed or assaulted”, which is used 273 times in the erst hour. On the contrary, any more specific kinds of assault, such as reference to rape, being groped, etc. only occur sixty times in the corpus (out of the 3,847 tweets). This tendency not to go into details with the “me too” movement as opposed to what happened in the Weinstein case can of course be imputed to the format of the tweets itself. Indeed, tweets are limited to 240 characters, which prevents victims from giving too much detail of their individual experiences of assault. It is nonetheless significant that the movement should have moved from traditional media to social media, and not any media, to Twitter in particular, with the character limit. It shows that Alyssa Milano’s intention in launching this movement on Twitter was not to provide people with a space to explain what they went through, but rather to identify as part of a community.

#metoo and Twitter | 316

This community is built on what the members feel they have in common, in this case, the fact that they all suffered experiences of sexual abuse or assault. The specificities of the assault do not matter at this stage anymore. This is also quite evident in the use that is being made of the expression “me too”. What is interesting with this expression is how it is used. Indeed, the software tools can identify what we call collocations, that is to say words that often occur together in the corpus. In our case, some of the most significant collocations are “me too”, which was expected, but also “too me,” “me me,” and “too too,” which is striking. This shows that not only is the expression “me too” often used, it is often used on its own, with no details provided, creating series of tweets only composed of the expression “me too,” which the software tools then identify as collocations. Here is an excerpt taken from the corpus

#metoo and Twitter | 317

As we can clearly see, there are series of tweets only composed of the expression “me too,” analysed as “me too me too me too me too me too…” by the software tools, hence the collocations that we saw. This confirms the idea that, contrary to the Weinstein case, very few details are given by the victims who posted “me too” and that the expression itself comes to epitomise all kinds of experiences of assault that women suffer.

This tendency towards generalization is also evident in the reference to women that is made in the corpus. The term women is referenced 471 times in the corpus, and only 65 times in the singular form woman. We can therefore conclude that in this corpus, women are presented as a group, not as individuals, which confirms this generalization tendency: what matters is not the individual experiences of every woman who identifies as a victim, but the commonalities between all the different experiences of these women (which is actually one of the reproaches that was made to the movement).

#metoo and Twitter | 318

What comes out of the analysis of those erst tweets of the “me too” movement is therefore the generalization process that is put into place. The different experiences and victims are gathered together into one community, a community that is built through this network of tweets. There are several ways through which this network is constructed, and which are already evident in the first hour of the movement.

First, it is important to keep in mind that the online movement began from one tweet, posted by Alyssa Milano, encouraging people to write “me too” as a reply if they identified as victims of sexual assault too. This process of reply is essential in the building of the network: indeed, out of the 3,847 erst tweets, 2,053 are direct replies to Alyssa Milano’s tweet. All the replies are therefore linked together through the original tweet posted by Alyssa Milano. Moreover, 227 tweets tag Alyssa Milano directly with the @ function of social media, and there are also 1,207 tweets using the hashtag #metoo, although it was not mentioned in Alyssa Milano’s tweet. All those means participate in building a network of tweets, with people identifying with a community of victims of sexual assault, on a general level.

The “me too” movement therefore stages a depersonalization and a generalization of the movement, from the particular Harvey Weinstein case to thousands of women saying that they too, suffered sexual assault. Specificities and individualities are left aside to focus only on commonalities. What is at stake with the “me too” movement is the move from the personal to the political, which is an essential step in transforming a moment into a movement, to use Tarana Burke’s expressions. This notion of the personal being political dates back to 1970: Carol Hanisch (Hanisch, 1970) explained in an essay bearing the same name that according to her, individual, personal experiences of oppression that women were experiencing were not isolated but on the contrary repeated, systemic at the level of society, and as such, required not individual solutions, but social, political ones. The important step is therefore

#metoo and Twitter | 319

to recognise the commonality of all individual experiences, to connect them:

The meetings she mentions are consciousness-raising meetings at which women share their personal experiences in order for them to recognise patterns in other women’s experiences. This is what the “me too” movement is doing. It is connecting thousands of similar experiences and highlighting the systemic, social character of those experiences in order to move from the personal to the political. Thus, the depersonalisation and generalisation process that is at stake with the “me too” movement also entails a politicization of the movement, that is to say, recognising that this is a social problem that needs to be addressed at the level of society. It is therefore an essential stage in the construction of the movement, which transforms an individual and seemingly isolated case into a social and political movement.

Nevertheless, social media do not play the same part here as they did with other social movements, such as the Zapatistas, or the Arab Spring movement. In cases of performative activism, social media are an organising and communication tool supporting a movement offline. #Metoo strictly speaking has no reality, existence outside of social media. It led to other stages, such as the Women’s March of January 2018 and the opposition to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh at the Supreme Court of the United States in the summer of 2018, which, as far as they are concerned

#metoo and Twitter | 320

can be considered as forms of performative activism. However, the movement #metoo itself only occurred on social media, in particular Twitter. In a sense, we can even say that it was its own performance: the sheer scale of the movement is in itself performance enough in the sense that it makes an impression and is a very clear statement for the rest of the movement.

3. Social media after #metoo

The use of social media in the feminist movement after #metoo is quite different and is on the contrary closer to creative online performative activism. Social media was for example used during the different Women Marches to organize the events, communicate, and motivate people. The different elements defining performative activism can be identified here too. For example, after Trump’s election, activists needed to organize with speed to mobilize people for the erst Women’s March, which was held the day after Trump’s inauguration. If speed is less of the essence for the following Marches since organizers could coordinate the events ahead in time, speed was also important for the opposition to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. Social media enabled organizers to spread the word and mobilise people.

As far as visuals are concerned, the different events organized around the feminist movement also rely on symbolic visuals, such as the feminist symbol, pictures from previous marches, or, as in the case of the “National Walk Out” event organized as part of the protest against Brett Kavanaugh, pictures of women walking out of the homes or places of work as a sign of dissent. The visuals are both shared before events to mobilise people and during the performances. Hashtags are also used a lot in the different events, also creating a form of unifying visual element.

There are performances that are organised, such as marches of course, but also rallies against Brett Kavanaugh when, among other events, hundreds of protesters flooded a Senate office building,

#metoo and Twitter | 321

shouted slogans, and displayed banners to express their anger. Chants are also used in those events as another form of performance.

The latest feminist movement really emphasized its inclusiveness to all women – or more particularly to all people who identify as women – all races, religions, social backgrounds, and so on. Inclusiveness, or intersectionality as it is theorised in feminism (the theory according to which different forms of oppression intersect and must be taken into account – for example, a black woman suffers discrimination both from being a woman and a black person. It also aims to recognise that not all experiences of women are similar), is an essential element for the feminists involved in this movement.

Finally, organizers are not masked per se, on the contrary, they do not hesitate to publicly express their minds, unmasked, and in their own names. Nevertheless, the movement is also coordinated through different organizations, either feminist groups which existed before the movement or organizations created as part of the movement. Organizations such as the Women’s March communicate on social media under the name of the organization, through which activists therefore take a step back and therefore let the faceless organization speak.

We can therefore clearly see that the use of social media in the #metoo movement and the rest of the feminist movement is not the same. #Metoo is quite particular in this respect and developed solely online, contrary to the other events, for which social media is used as a communication and organising tool and which therefore corresponds to creative online performative activism.

CORE CONCEPTS AND QUESTIONS

Core Concepts

#metoo and Twitter | 322

aggregate

to pull or present content together online as related

sociolinguistics

the study of how human beings use language and to what purpose

theory of denunciation

the more a “called out” person has to lose – status, some important position, wealth, etc. – the more suspicious people are of those who call them out or denounced them, because they might believe that the denunciation is not completely disinterested

paratactic style

also called the additive style, this is a linguistic style in which elements are presented, one simple sentence after the other, and there are few elaborate sentences; often used by speakers wanting to be taken seriously

collocations

a collection of words that often occurs together

intersectionality

the theory according to which different forms of oppression intersect and can worsen oppression overall

Core Questions

A. Questions for qualitative thought

1. Why does the author assert women used traditional media rather than social media to initially denounce Harvey Weinstein? What do you believe would have happened had they relied more on social media initially?

#metoo and Twitter | 323

Bibliography:

• Allred, G. (2017, octobre 10). Gloria Allred Represents a New Accuser of Harvey Weinstein (Louisette Geiss).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4x4vtuJKDs

• Boltanski, L., Darré, Y., & Schiltz, M.-A. (1984). La Dénonciation. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales,

51(1), 3‑40. https://doi.org/10.3406/arss.1984.2212

• Burke, T. (2013). The me too Movement. JustBeInc. https://justbeinc.wixsite.com/justbeinc/the-me-toomovement-c7cf

• Burke, T. (2018, novembre 30). Me too is a movement, not a moment. https://www.ted.com/talks/tarana_burke_me_too_is_a_movement_not_a_moment/transcript?language=fr

• Clement, J. (2019, août 9). Twitter Monthly Active Users in the United States 2019. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/274564/monthlyactive-twitter-users-in-the-united-states/

• Farrow, R. (2017, octobre 10). From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault : Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexualassault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories

• Hanisch, C. (1970). The Personal is Political. In S. Firestone & A. Koedt (Éd.), Notes from the Second Year : Women’s Liberation.

• Kantor, J., & Twohey, M. (2017, octobre 5). Harvey Weinstein Paid Oj Sexual Harassment Accusers for

#metoo and Twitter | 324

Decades. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassmentallegations.html

#metoo and Twitter | 325