New Media and Activism

Magazines, newspapers, and books routinely publish essays on how to harness a new media skill set: digital video production, mobile (cell phone) device production, blogging/vlogging, and online social networking. In this evolving mediascape, citizens are no longer passive consumers but agents in creating and distributing their own content. Broadly, this content is often humorous in nature and includes anything from comedy sketches to unintentionally released amateur video clips like Star Wars Kid or the Don't Tase Me Bro video.

As much as there seems to be a recreational, commercial culture feature of this content, it is also sometimes politically oriented and occasionally agitational. For example, a group of local activists, organizing protestors at the 2008 Republican Convention in Minneapolis, created a humorous video to welcome like-minded citizens to the city and to direct them to an informational website for the massive demonstrations planned. Similarly, numerous environmentalist movements from around the United States record and stream video of local environmental degradation. These video tours ask viewers to bear witness to the consequences of illegal dumping of hazardous waste. How social movements continue to harness these new media practices for social change is worth serious consideration.

Time magazine identified “video snacking” as a central practice of the evolving new media consumption patterns of the 21st century. The article noted, among other things, that consumption of streaming video is growing and frequent during office lunch breaks. Web content providers have long known that usage spikes at midday during the workweek and, as a consequence, create content specifically for that window. These new practices are commercial in orientation, but they are also emerging from the grassroots. Outside of [Page 363]commercial interests and for ends that frequently challenge the assumptions of the mass media establishment, citizens are increasingly engaged in this new form of digital public address.

Often identified as “user-generated content,” this new media skill set enables average citizens to circumvent the gatekeeping of commercial media and traditional channels of political discourse with self-produced content, ranging from recorded public speeches to I-Witness Video accounts of political struggle. Despite the tens of millions online watching and reading about these videos, participating in the creation of content, sharing them with others on Twitter and Facebook, and writing about them on blogs, little scholarly attention has been paid to what kind of cultural and political work these new media practices can accomplish.

In their book, Digital Generations, David Buckingham and Rebekah Willett suggest there is a growing cadre of citizens who are crossing the line toward more activist forms of participatory media culture. Echoing this sentiment, Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers note in their book Cyber-activism that in recent years small and large networks of wired activists have been creating online petitions, developing public awareness websites connected to traditional political organizations, building spoof sites to make political points, and creating platforms to propel real-life protest.

Yet many skeptics identify mass media use with the private sphere and personal life, in no way uniting private people into an active public, and equally see new media practices as discouraging political debate and public organizing, as merely fostering informal sociability with no specific institutional power. Because blogging, Twitter updates, and Facebook associations require little discussion, center on expressiveness, and lack the close weave of institutional affiliation, publics brought together through them are thought less viable as activist movements.

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