Contextual Influences on Social Media Activists' Media Imaginaries

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Veronica Barassi, whose interest is in researching social media and political activism. The relationship between these practices remains underresearched, and while the democratic potential of social media has been highlighted, it is also undermined by a political culture of free labour, neoliberal surveillance, and corporate control.

One way of addressing this is to understand social media as practice – and Veronica has conducted an ethnographic study of three political groups of in Britain, Italy, and Spain. Key conclusions from this is that social media become tools of opportunity and challenge for social movements. Uses of social media and the way they are understood as sites of opportunity and challenge also depend on context-specific political imaginations.

The Cuba Solidarity Campaign, for example, depends on a number of spaces in YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter which share and repeat the campaign’s key messages. These spaces provide networks of communication through which messages can be spread, but they also challenge the group’s political action; it becomes difficult to monitor feedback and comments from readers.

The Corsari campaign is different, as it engages in direct action and a very selective use of social media platforms (YouTube and Facebook). For it, interactivity is the most important element of Web 2.0, and the key problem is privacy and freedom from state oppression (especially in the wider Italian context, where some local governments are controlled by extreme right-wing parties). So, the group is especially careful to untag photographs on Facebook, for example, in order to make it more difficult to trace their activities to individual users, and use anonymous email accounts where at all possible.

How to make sense of these differences? In the first place, by highlighting the cultural specificities of these different media practices. Cultural contexts also affect these groups’ and individual users’ media imaginations, that is, the projectual dimension within which these activities are conducted. Participants imagine their possible uses of media technologies to support their specific causes – and the range of solutions they are able to think of is culturally and contextually dependent.

In researching this, ethnographic approaches are especially important, then – to understand exactly how people act in practice, on the ground.