Abstract
Mediation and Protest Movements examine the capacity of social movements to utilize communication and take advantage of media technologies to develop diverse and reciprocal horizontal networks, foster the creation of epistemic communities, and disrupt normative relations between established media and its publics. The edited collection is also invested in bringing the field of media studies, social movement studies, and democratic theory into a more productive and contextually grounded dialogue. The authors assert that such a dialogue is long overdue and that a less siloed approach to research is capable of providing a far more comprehensive analysis of contemporary protest movements in relation to complex media environments, and by extension a decidedly more nuanced understanding of the exercise of symbolic power.
Eschewing the Internet-centric approach often assumed to lie at the heart of contemporary social activism, the focus of this volume is instead trained on how mediation processes are embedded in and enabled by activists’ routines and contentious performances. As such, the emphasis is appropriately placed on the potentialities and limits of “agency” (the capacity to act), with special attention on the notion that technological change has created new opportunities for media consumption, production, and distribution, thus radically transforming the relationship between audiences and producers. The result, as the authors show, has been the rise in activist, often counter hegemonic voices that circulate not only horizontally between social movement communities but also vertically to penetrate formerly “mainstream” political arenas through strategies that subvert established codes of communication and challenge the primacy of official sources. Although often fragmented, decentralized, provisional, and sometimes even anarchist, these alternative voices can nevertheless serve to contest the legitimacy of established media power and help shape a more diverse and democratic public sphere by expanding the range of information and ideas and by offering different (often more organic) representations.
The book is organized into two parts. The first half (chapters 1 through 6) is dedicated to teasing out a theoretical understanding of the relationship between social movements and communication environments. As the book’s title suggests, in this section, the authors engage theoretical questions concerning mediation processes and media practices. Drawing from diverse range of writers including Gitlin, Habermas, Mouffe, Bakhtin, Chomsky, Castells, Hall, Silverstone, Downing, McChesney, Jenkins, Couldry, and others, the theory chapters are empirically grounded in studies of social movements and protests from different parts of the world. Here, the authors productively wrestle with issues central to deliberative democracy, such as participation, recognition, representation, networking, diversity, resistance, and mobilization, in relation to what the editors map out as four core themes:
(1) the importance of visibility and the dialectic between media production and protest performances; (2) the nature of symbolic power and its links to the discursive; (3) the precise role of technology and networked opportunities/constraints for protest and resistance; and (4) the role and position of “audiences” and “publics.” (pp. 9–10)
These core themes and guiding issues are theoretically fleshed out in different ways through communication centered conceptual frames, such as “repertoires of communication” (chapter 2, by Alice Mattoni), “lay theories of activism” (chapter 3, by Patrick McCurdy), “vertical and horizontal media oriented practices” (chapter 4, by Anastasia Kavada), “transmedia mobilization” (chapter 5, by Sasha Costanza-Chock), and, interestingly, satyagraha nonviolence and longitudinal communication efficacy (chapter 6, by Sean Scalmer). Of these, Costanza-Chock’s conceptualization of “transmedia mobilization” as a “process whereby a social movement narrative is dispersed systematically across multiple media platforms” (p. 100) is perhaps the most provocative, as it considers how participation and cocreation can take shape through multiple entry points and thus anticipates how transnational activists’ networks that strengthen movement identity can be constituted through “open” linkages.
Through specific case studies, the second part of the book (chapters 7 through 12) draws from the theoretical considerations highlighted in the first to help explicate how, in a variety of ways, protest movements have taken advantage of technological and cultural opportunities to build community and animate social action. These chapters range from analysis of how social media and Web 2.0 platforms can be used to increase visibility and punctuate the political commitment of movements to how the mixing of mediated and nonmediated communication practices can engender activism, but collectively focus on how communication environments are shaped through activists’ negotiation of the constraints and opportunities within evolving mediascapes. In some very interesting ways, the chapters in this half of the book make salient how “visibility” and “symbolic power”—key objectives and points of struggle for social movements—are produced dialectically through movement strategies and communication practices. For example, in chapter 7, Charlotte Ryan and her coauthors chart a step-by-step “how to” approach to media movement strategies, bringing Freirean participation theory into play with feminist and learning methodologies to create collaborative, equitable action-oriented campaigns of intervention and recognition. And in chapter 10, Simon Teune provides an illuminating case study of how protestors of the 2007 G8 summit were able to break through the filters of the “official” versions of the protest by crafting performative, “newsworthy” visual events to gain visibility.
Both parts of the book come together to present an encouraging assessment of how the trajectories and possibilities of media technologies and communication practices serve as interactive and discursive tools for activists and protest movements. However, while optimistic, the writers in this collection take an appropriately sober view, refraining from becoming overly celebratory of how mediation processes simply fuel contemporary repertoires of contention and participation. That is, along with successes and potentialities, they also identify the limitations and challenges that media-related practices bring to the objectives of protest movements, such as poor message design, lack of cultural translation and resonance, the problem of “slactivism” (passive, online participation), overreliance of market-based platforms, and above all, the limits to inclusion and mobilization. Indeed, in chapter 11, Lisa Brooten calls attention to these points by chronicling the extreme challenges that shape alternative media and civic dialogue in the Philippines—a country where “media access is not widely conceptualized as a communication right” (p. 239)—thus reminding readers that in some parts of the world, civil society is defined more in relation to threats than opportunities.
Acknowledging these challenges and threats, Mediation and Protest Movements nevertheless leans into the possibilities that emerging mediascapes offer protest movements. In this respect, from Peter Dahlgren’s Foreword to the closing chapter, the collection anticipates a conversation moving into the future framed by an ongoing understanding of the structures, tools and tendencies of media industries, and audiences that activist must both negotiate and make creative use of to successfully confront pressing social issues. In fact, one of the more interesting indicators of this in the book is the issue of the environment as related to mediation and protest movements. This theme first appears in passing in the Introduction as part of how protestors have elaborated “image events” but is later taken up in association to climate change in chapter 8. Here authors Julie Uldam and Tina Askanius explore the use of “mobilization video” (in this case, specifically the anti-COP15 video, War on Capitalism) to call for confrontational action. It is a highly useful case study of civic participation seeded through an emerging genre that is closely aligned with noninstitutional politics and resistance. However, beyond this singular chapter, the collection misses the opportunity to more fully interrogate this most crucial of “future” concerns: how environmental activists have employed communication strategies to register environmental injustices or shake public complacency by speaking against the grain of dominant environmental discourses.
The thin presence of this one point of analysis notwithstanding, the editors have assembled a superior collection grounded in careful theoretical considerations and empirically rich case studies, covering a broad landscape of social movement questions and concerns as related to the affordances of media and communication. The value of this edited volume thus lies in how it situates the capacity of media to network advocacy communities, engender mobilization, facilitate intervention, and erase borders between activists and journalists, thus underscoring the vital place of communication in contemporary social movements. But importantly, it also shows how the agency of social movements can express key democratic principles (e.g., participation, deliberation, equality, accountability, human rights) in highly reflexive ways through mediation processes. For these reasons, Mediation and Protest Movements is an important contribution to both the body of literature on protest movements and the field of media studies.