New Media and Global Civil Society
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The last two decade’s digital revolution has opened a new terrain for activist uses of media. It would be hard to imagine how any form of the ’global civil society’ could have arisen without the fertilizing and empowering force of new communication technologies. However, while the Internet seems to be rather powerful in providing practical informations for individuals already willing to participate, its potential to create or trigger engagement for a cause among the less willing are more limited. While it enables already existing local communities to represent themselves or form alliances at a larger scale level, the Internet seems less efficient in mobilizing grassroot community formation among the powerless. Castells’ or Touraine’s worries are certainly not baseless: ‘digitally coordinated’ international-scale new activisms seem to operate mainly ‘in negation’ of, or in defense against, capitalism, war or globalization and less as channels through which organic social forces from below could be mobilized. This paradox of the Web’ politics raises disturbing questions.
- Is it necessary that the mobilizing forces of new media remain limited and contingent?
- Is activism a hopelessly western phenomena bound, on the one hand, to democracy and capitalism, on the other, to socially and culturally privileged groups?
- Can the global issues represented by new activisms (environmentalism, 9/11, war in Iraq, consumerism, global capitalism) mobilize vital social energies in various (non-western) local contexts?
The answers to these questions can be brought less by theoretical speculation than by the particular experiences of activists and of researchers working on the terrains where the virtual, the global and the local intersect. The aim of this panel is to understand how digitally coordinated international activism really works: not as a lab experiment, not as an ideal, but on the ground, against the harsh background of local reality.
Panel leader:
Saskia Sassen:
Electronic Markets and Activist Networks
Towards a Sociology of Information Technology
Confirmed panel participants:
Dr Richard Barbrook (School of Media, Arts & Design, University of Westminster):
NEW YORK PROPHECIES - The Future Is What It Used To Be
Zsolt Boda (Institute of Political Science, Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
Dominique Cardon (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales):
Can we free ourselves from media formats ?
Le Forum et le Réseau. Une analyse des modes de gouvernement des forums sociaux
Richard Rogers (New Media University of Amsterdam): Study Announcement
Paper presenters
Chris Bailey: The Liverpool dockworkers' strike 1995-98 and the Internet
Daniel Drache: New Geographies of Power and Counter-publics: The Political Economy of Dissent and Battle for Public Space
Natalie Fenton: Contesting global capital, new media and the role of a social imaginary
Hammer Ferenc: Strange but responsive bedfellows: Single-issue activism and the commercial media
Panel forum: Please find the discussion board of the panel here
