Reconsidering New Media's Capacity for Empowerment

The second ECREA 2014 plenary speaker this morning is Tristan Mattelart, whose interest is in the transnationalisation of the news. He begins by noting the ambivalent nature of the notion of empowerment, which has been used in the past by disenfranchised groups to raise the social conscience in order to gain more power; but more recently it has been adopted by neoliberal groups, for whom it now simply means increasing the productivity of marginalised people.

Such changes can be seen in the characterisation of Web 2.0, which has also been described – by authors like Howard Rheingold – as an empowering technology. But to find examples of such notions, we could go back further, to a time when international radio broadcasts – for example into Eastern bloc countries – were seen as empowering local populations; ideology was one of the main pillars of authoritarian regimes, but it rested on very unstable foundations. Dissidents sought to establish independent spaces that allowed them to live within the truth, and international radio broadcasts contributed to the development of such spaces; they were the means to construct such spaces and to disseminate dissident information.

Can we consider these international broadcasts as empowerment tools for the dissidents, though? No, we cannot: they were simply used as a tool amongst many by the dissidents, and they were themselves tools of power created by Western governments and invested with geopolitical dimensions and capitalist ideologies. The rules of Western journalism could work against the dissidents, in fact: only gross human rights violations would make a good story for these stations, for example, but not the issues leading up to such violations.

The Cold War was a key moment in the development of the strong belief that such transnational media tools could be technologies of empowerment for people in authoritarian countries, then. This was also seen with subsequent tools from the fax to satellite television; international broadcasts of the fall of the Berlin Wall inspired protests against oppressive regimes around the world, for example. Such media could contribute to the circumvention of censorship in authoritarian contexts, for example.

The tactics of ordinary resistance – the infrapolitics of the powerless – could be studied from this perspective, but the vocabulary of empowerment might still not be appropriate here. It was possible to examine how such transnational media could be received in different countries, and how authorities reacted to such disruptions, but not necessarily how such processes empowered local populations in any concrete way.

In Putinist Russia, for example, transnational media now deliver international news content, but also entertainment, so they do not simply serve a subversive function; further, satellite television and other transnational media now also operate in two directions, broadcasting authoritarian propaganda to other nations. And the representations of life in authoritarian regimes in transnational media may not always be a recognisable reflection of lived experience for people actually living in such regimes.

Back to the Web, as one of the latest media technologies seen as empowering people: it, too, has been seen as a tool for circumventing the domination of the mass media. Benkler describes the opposing logics of the unidirectional mass media environment, and of the distributed and multidirectional networked information environment. The cost of becoming a speaker has thus decreased dramatically, and this is seen as empowerment.

But have Internet media truly changed the way news is covered, for example; have they led to the diversification of news sources, of newsworthy voices? Not in the case of the major online news operators, which continue to follow very conventional news gathering and production processes; the situation may be different for the emerging class of citizen journalists and news bloggers in developed countries, but these, too, largely continue to focus on a fairly narrow range of topics.

Bloggers from developing nations, by contrast, may not necessarily reach a world audience with their content, unless their content is promoted and disseminated by bridgebloggers who serve as intermediaries and gatekeepers and connect it to domestic audiences in developed nations. But this group of intermediaries is small and has a set of very specific skills; they thus represent a powerful elite rather than contributing to a democratisation of the media.

There are also trends for the embedding of new media, especially including social media, within the context of other, more mainstream media. Most research into these phenomena, for example in the context of the Arab Spring, are highly technocentric and consider them in isolation, without taking into account the wider political economy of new production. The complex relationships between old and new, mass and niche media must be thought through, especially also with an attention to mainstream media's continuing gatekeeping function.

Social media content is being used by the mass media especially during breaking news moments; at such moments, citizen journalism can become part of the news landscape, but the same might not be true at other times. Further, much like old media, new media are also being utilised by governments, for a range of purposes including internal and external propaganda. Let us be cautious about using the notion of empowerment, then – let us take into account the constraints of the political economy of news production which still shapes media practices.