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Many thanks to Renate and Tim for devoting this month's -empyre- discussion to
one of the most pressing issues of the moment in (mainly) US politics--the
extraordinary uprising of political protests across the US in response to the
spate of unjust murders by white police of (mainly) black men. Thanks, too, for
inviting me to formulate and share my thoughts on the issue. I have several
things I would like to say, but will do so in multiple messages, as Renate has
urged us to avoid messages that require scrolling. So here goes.
1. Renate and Tim have noted the incredible complexity of the question of "the
relation of social media to efforts in acquiring social justice and social
change." I would want to begin by insisting upon the historical and
medialogical specificity of these relations. Thus the relations of social
media to social justice in the Arab Spring (roughly 2010-2012), for example,
were very different from those in the US in 2009-2012, starting with the
University of California tuition protests in 2009, the Wisconsin occupation of
the state capitol in the Act 10 protests of early 2011, and the Occupy Wall
Street protests in NYC and beyond in 2011-12. Medialogically these relations
were very different as well, especially insofar as print and especially
televisual media have now (beginning with coverage of the Arab Spring)
thoroughly incorporated social media into their reporting and news coverage, so
much so that I think it would be a mistake to separate social media from
distributed mass media, although not a mistake to try to distinguish among
various media forms for analytical purposes.
2. In my 2010 book Premediation I argued that media in the 21st century have
begun increasingly to focus on the pre-mediation of events before they
happened. Beginning in 2004 I had argued that the US governmental-medial
apparatus had so thoroughly premediated the Iraq War in the months leading up
to the US invasion that when it finally took place there was little
uproar--certainly much less than there had been in the widespread global,
socially-media coordinated protests that had occurred in February of 2003. In
fact when I presented this argument in Europe in the spring of 2003, most of
those who had participated in protests across the continent admitted that even
while protesting they had felt the futility of doing so, as if the war had in
some sense already begun. The premediation of the Iraq War marked in some
sense a sea change in US and global media from a focus on the past and present
to an increasing focus on the future. This shift, I argued, particularly in
news media, was related to the shift from print to televisual to networked
media, with print news focused on what had just happened, televisual news
focused on what was happening live, and now socially networked news focusing on
what was to come. My book predated the efforts towards social justice outlined
above, so I have been interested to see how print, televisual, and networked
media have adapted to these social movements. One way this happened especially
during the Arab Spring was that media like CNN would go to commercial teasing
viewers with tags like "after the break, we'll look at the latest tweets from
Tahrir Square." By now, most televisual news coverage, and print news, too,
covers social media as an event in the world no different from marches,
demonstrations, die-ins, or other forms of protest.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Richard Grusin
rgru...@gmail.com
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