Invisible machines. Collective action through digital space (PDF)

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Philosophy - Miscellaneous, grade: Highest Honors, University of Michigan, language: English, abstract: 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.