The past two decades have seen an explosion in activism organized through digital space. From the early-90s efforts of the Zapatistas to build a global support network for a localist struggle to the recent tumultuous revolutions of the Arab Spring, digital technology has enabled organizing for social change in ways that previous generations of activists could scarcely have imagined. And yet, is the ascendancy of digital activism truly that surprising?
As cultural interactions and materials are increasingly enacted online, it is only to be expected that digital natives seize upon clickable social repertoires to articulate new political possibilities. Rather than analyzing the effects of a particular platform or technology in isolation, I examine the social dynamics that contribute to the dissemination of contentious frames and messages throughout digital space. By examining the network dynamics of everyday online socializing, I seek to elucidate some of the repertoires of contention through which digital activists have achieved critical mass.
These immanent dynamics of everyday online social interaction provide the basis for understanding how networked collectivities come to attach social significance to contentious ideas, and then mobilize individuals for offline collective action.I further argue that classical social science theories of group organizing are unable to account for the seemingly spontaneous and eruptive nature of digitally-organized movements. The difficulty, I argue, is not that theories of collective dissent are not empirically grounded, but that they are complicit with institutional edifices of static knowledge production in ways that resist recognizing the emergence of novel collectivities.
In elaborating this point, I initially focus on a case study of the 2008 demonstrations in Seoul, South Korea over the Lee Administration’s decision to lift the import ban on American beef. These demonstrations offer a prime example of the ways in which digital movements do not call for us to create new theories in place of old, but instead argue against the essentialist process of theorization itself. They further show how thinking of activism as online versus offline tactics represents a false dichotomy, since digital space augments, supplements and motivates offline spaces of encounter.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter one: lifecycle of a digital movement, south korea, 2008
Chapter two: the contentious politics of studying contentious politics
Chapter three: active scholarship and two sciences of the social
Chapter four: modern movements, modern theories
Chapter five: anomalies and emergent collectivism
Chapter six: politicizing digital space
Conclusion
Thesis Objectives and Key Themes
This thesis examines the multiplex dynamics of groups engaged in digital political activity, arguing against the metaphysical assumption of essentially homogenous social units. By applying concepts from social theory and metaphysics to cases of digital collective action, the author seeks to undermine the illusion of unified, autonomous social wholes and instead proposes an ontology of process that views group dynamics through multiple levels of detail and digital interaction.
- Critique of "grid-think" and the application of metrical conceptual technology to complex social systems.
- Exploration of "abstract machines," "assemblages," and "actants" as lenses for understanding digital collective action.
- Investigation of the 2008 South Korean "mad cow" beef protests as an emergent digital social movement.
- Analysis of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT) as early examples of digital tactical media.
- Reframing the role of scholarship to act as "active scholarship" rather than distant, "royal science" observation.
Excerpt from the Book
The machine of theory-creation for social sciences seems to be in trouble.
It seems like we’ve raised the bar to impossible heights: one must simultaneously presuppose some notional expectation of the behavior dictated by underlying properties without scripting reality according to some highly appealing and universally applicable schema composed of homogenous units of analysis. These Ptolemaic rotations drawn first and only in our imaginaries of false mastery to simplify reality to our liking will inexorably fragment into ever-tangled epicycles, escaping our grasp and finally bursting like soap bubbles. The world is more complex than a Newtonian mechanism; the universe of culture exponentially more so. Our experience of highly complex and internally variant social systems should make us highly skeptical at the outset of assuming that a mereology of homogeneity (where the assumed sameness of the parts is axiomatically generalized to the social whole) can adequately represent the chaotic becomings of any collective social assemblage. There is no grand ‘social’ as such, merely an aggregate of the local.
In this thesis, I shall seek to explore the multiplex dynamics of groups of people who engage in political activity digitally, through the communications technology that grounds the internet, often at great distances from one another. However, at a very fundamental level I am still talking about groups of people, and the properties that emerge from the complexity of these groups. The social distance between two lovers divided by the Pacific Ocean may be significantly smaller than the social distance between two reclusive neighbors sharing the same apartment building, or two students at the same school. We perhaps have grown used to thinking about groups of people in a particular way that artificially generalize ascribed qualities of individuals to macrosocial behavior, when in fact the behavior of groups may be radically internally distinct.
Summary of Chapters
Introduction: The author introduces the profound ambiguities of theorizing collective social entities and challenges the assumption of homogenous social units in social science research.
Chapter one: lifecycle of a digital movement, south korea, 2008: This chapter investigates the South Korean beef protests of 2008, characterizing them as an emergent social assemblage deeply grounded in digital networks.
Chapter two: the contentious politics of studying contentious politics: The author discusses the paradigm shift required in social science to account for emergent political collective actions and critiques traditional, static analytical models.
Chapter three: active scholarship and two sciences of the social: This section contrasts "royal science"—which attempts to fix static truths—with "nomad science," which focuses on evolving movement and fluid patternicity.
Chapter four: modern movements, modern theories: The author interrogates the "modern" nature of social movements and explores the historical relationship between human agency, power relations, and the evolution of political dissent.
Chapter five: anomalies and emergent collectivism: The focus turns to the first-order ontological questions regarding the entity doing the contending, pushing for a perspective that moves beyond rigid classification.
Chapter six: politicizing digital space: This chapter explores the struggle over the meaning of digital space, contrasting its potential as a "digital commons" with the dangers of enclosure and surveillance.
Conclusion: The author synthesizes the arguments for active scholarship and highlights the potential for digital space to foster novel, non-institutional forms of resistance.
Keywords
Digital activism, social movements, assemblage theory, contentious politics, process ontology, nomad science, actant, political opportunity structure, digital space, collective action, meta-activism, rupture-talk, social media, network theory, tactical media
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the core argument of this thesis?
The thesis argues that traditional social science methods fail to capture the complexity of contemporary digital social movements because they rely on essentialist assumptions and static units of analysis. Instead, it proposes a "process ontology" that views these movements as dynamic, heterogeneous assemblages.
What central themes are explored?
The work explores the nature of collective agency, the influence of digital technology on political mobilization, the critique of traditional "royal science" methodologies, and the emerging paradigm of "active scholarship."
What is the primary research goal?
The goal is to elucidate the limitations of current social science taxonomy and to suggest a more fluid theoretical framework that can account for the empirical variance seen in digital collective action.
Which methodology is employed?
The author uses a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour, and concepts from social movement theorists like Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly.
What does the main body cover?
The main body examines the 2008 South Korean beef protests, the digital tactics of the Zapatistas, and the broader theoretical implications of digital communication for social movements and the "modern" understanding of political space.
Which keywords define this work?
Key terms include digital activism, social assemblages, actants, process ontology, nomad science, and contentious politics.
Why are the 2008 South Korean protests significant to this study?
They serve as a concrete case study of how digital social networks allowed for the rapid, massive mobilization of diverse population segments, which traditional social movement theory initially struggled to explain or predict.
What role does the Zapatista movement play in the analysis?
The Zapatistas are presented as a prime example of a post-representational movement that utilizes "tactical media" to maintain autonomy and resist co-optation by institutional powers, demonstrating a bridge between theory and practice.
How does the author view "expert knowledge"?
The author is highly critical of "expert knowledge," arguing that institutionalized knowers often use established theoretical frameworks to normalize and erase the unique, disruptive characteristics of novel social phenomena.
- Quote paper
- Edmund Zagorin (Author), 2011, Invisible machines. Collective action through digital space, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/180309
