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Thanks, Ricardo, for sharing these tools, initiatives, and gestures. I
admire your generosity in appreciating macro-critiques but at the same
time avoiding some of their sweeping generalizations by your grounded
theorizations and engagements with local situated experimental
activist-art practices. Some of the dissident
journalists/bloggers/artists outside the United States, in Africa and
South Asia, I have met over the years, are cognizant of how their
goals of using social media and mobile technologies at a micro-scale
during contingent circumstances do completely vary in ideologies from
the neoliberal subjectivities that the social media companies want to
create. It is somewhat ironical when, at times, activists advocating
for political reform and human rights through social media/blogs in
Africa and South Asia find themselves embedded in funding structures
of NGOs who in turn are related to neoliberal discourses/capital.
These are challenges that have to be overcome. At other times,
connecting local resistances together does not seem to lead to a
scaling up, but as you note, local particularities/singularities do
not need to (should not) be stepped on for the sake of finding global
scale answers. In any case, as you note, complete withdrawal on the
part of dissident/creative scholars-activists-artists cannot be an
answer, and I agree, that ways will(have to) be found.
Acts of shifting and disturbing state and capital emerge in Richard
Grusin?s discussions of roadblocks and disrupting network service, if
I am reading correctly, as ways of thinking of premediation as force
of resistance. His influential conceptualizations of ((re)mediation
and) premediation also help to problematize the tendencies to
ontologically fix social media as being of a particular kind. For
some reason, I feel we have discussed more about social media (and the
mutual imbrication of social media and social justice as well) than
social justice (I maybe wrong about this feeling). I understand we
have to think relationally here. And so, here is a question I have
been pondering: If as some critics note, social media help the status
quo to accumulate (more and more) social capital as much as they allow
the ?marginals? to amplify their resistance (sometimes resistance is
curbed or rendered invisible online too) against brutalities,
inequities, and injustice; what is social justice, and what is its
relationship to social capital?
Thanks again, rahul
Quoting Ricardo Dominguez <rrdoming...@ucsd.edu>:
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Dear Tod@s,
Yes, I do agree that the best tactics in relations to what platforms are
used and when-are to use jump-mode as much as possible, especially in
terms of sharing
information. Also, using temporary peer-to-peer mesh wireless
networks-like Fire Chat:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/16/tech/mobile/tomorrow-transformed-firechat/index.html
And similar apps. Even better building your own.
In terms of transparent gestures that connect data-bodies and real-bodies
during actions on the streets and on-line. Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0
and 2.0-have always insisted on connecting the two in extreme intimacy.
During our VR Sit-Ins we always state who we are, where we are, and what is
happening. In order to connect our data-bodies to the streets, for instance,
in our recent e-action:
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/TodosSomosAyotzinapa/
That focused on the limited, tactical question, pushing the Mexican .gov to
release 11 students that had been arrested. The Mexican .gov knew who we
were.
Nothing was hidden, including the code. (And of course we understand that we
are citizens of Empire and a great deal of privilege to be transparent).
We did the same thing with the Transborder Immigrant Tool (this allowed a
great deal of back and forth the "authorities").
At the moment a number of artivist and activist have been pushing the
developing of opaque/camouflage gestures to deal with the question of
surveillance as being a core tactic.
Also, because of Transborder Immigrant Tool, Amy Sara Carroll who
developed the tactical poetry for it-initiated the question of
translucency as important part of the projects aesthetics.
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
I wanted to clarify that when I noted "Also grounded activists rarely
have a technological bias" in the earlier email, I may have sounded
ambivalent considering the next sentence. What I meant was "Grounded
activists rarely are technological determinists."
Also, in light of discussions on surveillance and of bodily
disconnections in the earlier threads by Anaïs and Tim, I was curious
if at some point we might want to think more closely of the
entanglements of data bodies and street bodies.
Another aspect was the public-ness of social media. Social media help
organize public protests in materially public places, but they too are
to some extent public spaces (of discussion), albeit privately owned.
Social media cannot be idealized as public sphere or public space
because they are often privately owned: they are semi-public forums as
Thérèse Tierney among others have argued. They also can be relatively
anonymous. A related point: do social media need to idealized public
spheres/public spaces for social justice efforts? Sometimes, perhaps
anonymity would help more than online visibility.
Quoting mra...@sas.upenn.edu:
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I appreciate the focus on entanglements of social media and social
justice with power. Indeed, social media is being used by different
groups for different reasons as David and Tim note. Social media
itself as something very different from broadcast or mass or
mainstream media needs much debate (though differences exist and
need to be accounted for). The proclivity to suggest that social
media is essentially decentralized or distributed, and not
hierarchical, is again untenable. To be selective about social
media's uses would also be a mistake. All this said, activists in
situated contexts are trying to find ways of using social media for
translocal resistance: they are disrupting and shifting flows of
capital for lobal gestures, to borrow from Ricardo. Activists, I
talk with, understand electronic medium's power dynamics, are aware
of capital's (re)appropriations and sometimes are disenchanted too,
but more often than not, they seem to remain committed to tactical
trespasses believing another world is possible. Activist
idealizations can be problematic and yet one can be self-reflexive
about them.
Also grounded activists rarely have a technological bias: as I
earlier noted, an activist said knowing Twitter Trends algorithm can
help only to a limited extent; unless enough urban people can be
found in Twitter who are interested in rural issues and can
circulate them, algorithms cannot work by themselves. Furthermore,
as I mentioned before, social movement organizing in campaigns for
social justice, depends on many kinds of media and not just social
media (if we really have to categorize or separate social media from
rest of the media at all). In the cases I discussed, Twitter was
only one social medium in a configuration of multiple media. In some
cases, text messages sent from a cellphone (with a dying battery
(life)) proved most crucial. In medial configurations related to
environmental movements I discuss, media include radiation
detectors, protest performances, street graffiti: one could argue
these media are pretty social. Much can be said about (and should be
said about) surveillance in social media, data bodies and metadata
collection,and journalists and activists battling surveillance (in
social media) negotiate these challenges. A very everyday practical
exercise I witnessed was platform jumping - shifting from one
platform (where one's identity or anonymity is threatened or
expression/article is blocked) to another.
Thanks, rahul
Quoting David Golumbia <dgolum...@gmail.com>:
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_______________________________________________
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http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
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http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
--
Ricardo Dominguez
Associate Professor
Visual Arts Department, UCSD
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/
Principal Investigator, CALIT2
http://bang.transreal.org/
email: rrdoming...@ucsd.edu
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
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http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
_______________________________________________
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