Source: The Society of the Selfie: Social Media and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy. Jeremiah Morelock and Felipe Ziotti Narita. Published By University of Westminster Press.115 New Cavendish Street, London W1W 6UW. www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk. 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book59. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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Political Uses of Information Technologies (Chapter 6.5)
Jeremiah Morelock and Felipe Ziotti Narita
The scope and scale of the mobilization of contemporary social movements would be inconceivable without Web 2.0. In the early 2000s, social networks like Friendster, Orkut, Tribe.net, LiveJournal and blogs were based on individual profiles and communities. The newsfeed setups of Facebook, Twitter, etc., opened up a new logic: social networks became social platforms. Interactions have been exponentially amplified, with a list of services and data that are integrated into text, image, video and sound, promoting collective individuation (Yuk and Halpin 2013). In this sense, the features of the society of the selfie – like echo chamber effects, neoliberal impression management and one-dimensional expression to an invisible audience – affirm the individual as both an agent and a milieu that produces content. In other words, with social media one is empowered to express one’s authenticity against standards and moral constraints at the same time as one is dependent on an invisible audience and users that pressure atomized individual expression with the force of the generalized other. Individual engagement takes shape as a remote point among immaterial groups and mobile collectives.
Of course, the splitting of the public sphere and the fragmentation of information it involves can blur the prospects of collective action (Gonzalez-Bailon and Wang 2016). Along with an inhuman amount of data, one-dimensional communication proliferates, and sociality is damaged. However, the society of the selfie does not supress individual autonomy nor collective agency. Social media can favour progressive action and empower activism committed to social development – and this may be the most distinctive feature of political agency in contemporary societies. The first massive use of social media appeared in the early 2010s (Castells 2012) with the multifaceted Arab civil uprisings (Zayani 2015; Faris 2012) and the street protests of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Spanish Indignados and the multitudinary movements against austerity in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and in a context of precarization reinforced by sociotechnical transformations in labour with platforms (Woodcock 2021) and reforms that promoted deregulation of the labour market (like in 2012 in Spain and in 2017 in Brazil). The Spanish protests of 2011, when the young generation that was hit hard by the financial crisis and austerity policies came to the streets, social media was crucial for the identity and scope of their public demonstrations (Taibo 2011). The power of digital networks has replaced the rule of physical spaces of solidarity (neighbourhood associations, trade unions, political party headquarters, etc.) and opened up the local to the trends of the global. Resources and demands circulate much faster and the strong presence of Facebook, personal videos, Twitter and SMS messages can be decisive in the constitution of the multitude, as was already the case in the Spanish example (Candon Mena 2013, 119–124).
The political use of technology is not confined to diffusing opinions and aggregating information about political issues. It can also affirm a social image embedded in prosocial behaviour (Bernabou and Tirole 2006) concerned with the recognition of the individual’s active voice in politics. The Russian protests of 2011–2012 for fair elections are a good example. In the wake of suspicions of electoral fraud in the 2011 parliamentary elections, protests were mobilized via Facebook, Twitter and especially VKontakte – the most popular online social network in the country (Carbonnel 2011; Northam 2012). The street protests occurred in 103 cities, and were the largest since the end of the Soviet Union (Gabowitsch 2017). For individual users, the spectacular spread of videos and images of what was happening in the streets fed a dynamic where users’ actions were dependent on what they observed or anticipated in the actions of others. Participation was connected to a kind of ‘social signalling’, where engaging with and reproducing influential loops of information disseminated through chains of status updates affected one’s social stature, registered in the metrics assigned to the user’s spectacular self. The split between spectacular and organic selves notwithstanding, the online life of the social movement had repercussions far beyond the newsfeed. Digitally shared emotional benefits and political motivations could aggregate subjects due to the greater visibility and interaction with digital surfaces of Web 2.0 (Enikolopov et al. 2020). The 2011–2012 protests also marked a turning point in a political dispute about information technologies (Klyueva 2016): the government tried to restrict online activists at the same time as other platforms (besides Twitter and VKontakte, YouTube became an important tool) gained significance for political communication in Russia (Litvinenko 2021). And here, the invisible audience, animated with the pressures of the generalized other, plays an important role. Under implicit pressure regarding the reactions of others in the form of likes, views, shares and comments, the individual user announces and disseminates their political beliefs – and via loops of influence running through masses of people, a political network and common drives to protest become palpable and recognizable, with constructed collective image in tow. The process constitutes a collection of new political tools to gather resources for mobilization.
Social media involves new channels and tools for protest and shows potential for creative, spectacle-based political activity. It offers great flexibility to spread contents (Shepard 2015; Penner 2019; Narita 2019), gather many subjects and unite diverse struggles through building ‘chains of equivalence’ among different political demands (Larkin 2013). Due to the individual productivity of contents in the society of the selfie, the new social movements that emerged from the early 2010s involved a sense of exhibition grounded in their hypervisibility, with the impact of images of crowds on the ground. It has rendered social protests more mobile (Elliott and Urry 2010; Cumiskey and Hjorth 2013) and independent from traditional news media, because the portability of personal smartphones facilitates democratized and decentralized information flows, implying more authentic, on the ground reporting. It also feeds the sense of presentism in contemporary culture, since the use of social media changes the temporal orientation of protest, affecting – via diffuse communication – the speed and organization of groups (Barassi 2015; Poell 2020), promoting the disruptive capacities of crowds and mobs that suddenly rapidly organize, act and disband.
With the cultural landscape of the society of the selfie, the opportunities for civic engagement have changed significantly. Counter to the sense of democratic systems’ elitization (Higley and Burton 2006), the society of the selfie favours a more direct and horizontal form of political action. The digital means of communication among activists have empowered individuals and affected their collective organizations, political repertoires and targets (Norris 2010). The traditional avenues for political participation (i.e., established parties, unions, churches and elections) are forced to contend with a modernizing move under a main feature of the society of the selfie, which enables the individual to engage with the generalized other without the traditional mediation of the individual other in embodied copresence. Engagement depends mostly on how the individual is affected by the digital visibility of contentious politics. At this point, the lack of conventional leadership in the construction of public demonstrations is an important sign since it challenges one of the main principles of modern democratic systems: the belief in the correlation between effective leaders and effective democracy (Ruscio 2004). When Hong Kong protesters started using AirDrop to breach Chinese firewalls in 2019 (Hui 2019), they started a spectacular spread of Bruce Lee’s dictum: ‘be formless, shapeless, like water’. Although some movements, like Black Lives Matter, have relatively known leaders, the street dynamics moved by digital media are leaderless. If this echoes the antiglobalization movements of the 1990s (Zirakzadeh 2006), it also points to the appeal of social media that turned every individual demand into something visible. With the multitudinary movements of the 2010s, the subject is not the class nor the ethnic nation, but the ‘indignant citizen’ (Gerbaudo 2017) – an individual who is morally outraged and deprived of citizenship.
The gendered fractures in citizenship gained political visibility within the surfaces of society of the selfie. The political reaction to patriarchy and misogyny is an important counterpart of the authoritarian trends in neoliberal impression management, because it also points to contexts for autonomy and agency, and prospects to broaden political participation. The spread of #MeToo since October 2017 in the United States, especially on Twitter, constructed a political milieu that has enabled subjects to share their experiences and use the new visibility of digital surfaces to diffuse affects involving solidarity and strategies of resistance (Williams et al. 2019). From celebrities to ordinary people, a chain of personal experiences was established and politicized micropublics according to gender issues. Moreover, many hashtags and topics of the #MeToo movement have become a transnational trend that has been circulating through England, Brazil, Morocco, France, Egypt, Mexico, South Korea and the Philippines, above all, due to the pervasive effects of the society of the selfie. The strategies have varied from individuals and small groups that gained voice with social media to vast networks of solidarity (Bicker 2018; Shaw 2019; BBC 2018a; TST 2018; Creedon 2021). On the one hand, the diffusion of mobilizations counts on intersectional forms of oppression that combine gender, race, class and physical appearance, that is, across different domains of power that affect individual identity (Collins and Bilge 2016, 27–28) simultaneously with the rapid circulation of information. On the other hand, new social movements operate as a kind of catalyst mobilization, which starts from molecular problems (a case of rape, a local problem with public transport, etc.) that can constitute multitudinary subjects that, despite their internal individual differences, are politically affected by similar circumstances.
The circulation of political affects, thus, is also a space for political creation embedded in sociotechnical relations in the society of the selfie. Even before the #MeToo movement, many feminist struggles based on social media were underway in peripheral countries. During the #IamNotScaredToSpeak campaign, which took place in 2016 in Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, ordinary women (not celebrities, like #MeToo) started the mobilizations that were extended to the problems of reproductive rights and also gained the streets in Poland with the ‘Black Protests’ (Kubisa and Rakowska 2018; Sedysheva 2018). The Latin American problems with gendered violence have been voiced due to the impression management and the spectacle of the society of the selfie. In 2015 and 2016, the Argentinian protest #NiUnaMenos (NotOneLess) gathered crowds in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Bogota, La Paz and Mexico City, via personal profiles and small groups in social media, to critique the subalternization and gendered violence (Iglesias 2015). But the best example of the role played by the society of the selfie in progressive movements is the Chilean anti-rape song ‘The Rapist is You!’, which started circulating in the streets of Santiago to expose gendered violence (Aguirre 2019) and rapidly became viral in Washington, London, Istanbul, Sao Paulo and Madrid due to Instagram and YouTube. This campaign has proposed a different form of social movement that combines the aesthetics of flash-mob sequences (with imagistic appeal and strong mots d’ordre), rapid diffusion of hashtags and very fluid strategies for mobilization and demobilization.
Those demonstrations encompass the main features of political mobilization in the digital age: fast circulation of data, strong slogans, direct messages and a grass-roots organization grounded in network structures (Carty and Barron 2018). Even traditional political symbols – for example, banners of political parties – have changed with Web 2.0. When Occupy Wall Street diffused ‘We Are the 99%’, a new field for political participation was underway: the use of memes to simplify communication and rapidly be shared in surfaces. As digital images that become iconic due to rapid diffusion and infinite iteration (Shifman 2014), memes can often be exemplars of one-dimensional communication that spreads hatred, they can also be good for progressive causes and resistance.
The same strategy grounded in hashtags and didactic memes – with millions of videos from personal profiles – played a major role in October 2019 in the Chilean streets (Bonnin 2020), which saw the biggest protests since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1990. During the large street protests of May and June 2021 in the biggest Colombian cities (Bogota, Cali, Medellin, Barranquilla and Cucuta), social media played an important role in citizens’ political participation. Against austerity policies, the strong perception of inequality, unemployment and the mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemics under the rightist government, activists have been using personal profiles on Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp to stream police violence, social demands, aggregate resources for mobilization and spread hashtags and images (Meza 2021). In times of disinformation campaigns and fake news, the de-centred public sphere of the society of the selfie, with each individual being the producer of contents and spectacle (instead of being dependent on traditional news channels), has been used to update citizens about the situation in the streets (Bustamante 2021).
Black Lives Matter is a paradigmatic case of the political use of information technologies and social media. The movement gathered many diffuse indignations (Maraj, Prasad and Roundtree 2018), sparked a hashtag and counted upon an anonymous multitude of citizens. This use of digital language was based on the rhetoric of dignity and moral recognition in relation to intersecting issues of gender, race, class and transnational demands. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020, for example, many similar anti-racist demonstrations, critical of police brutality and inequality, took place in England, France, Brazil, Australia, Portugal and Germany (Al Jazeera 2020; BBC 2020). Black Lives Matter is able to be a global network due to the capacities afforded it by the tools of the society of the selfie. With the hashtag, the movement counts on the individual as a producer of spectacular contents: the use of digital images by individual activists has rendered every engagement with a hashtag in social media a political act. From Ariana Grande to Lady Gaga, the iconic figures of the society of the selfie illustrate how the strategic use of social media can also feed a progressive agenda: even personal branding, a sign of the society of the selfie, is not merely about individual exhibitionism. The participatory nature of the spectacle in the digital age opens up new spaces for resistance and this is changing how democracy works.
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