Radical Activism

link to radical politics on the internet

My topic

My essay will focus on online and offline environmental activism. Specifically I want to interview people who use sites such as myspace to connect and/or collaborate with likeminded activists, communities and organizations. Focusing on some of the positive aspects of the internet for globally distributing environmental information. I also want to look at how these communities are organized and what kind of effect they have on influencing the broader collective consciousness. Because these communities are often organically formed, de-centralized and fragmented, I think they can be innocuous where real life environmental struggles exist, and therefore are limited substantially by their frail infrastructures. On the other hand, this could be seen as an advantage as it allows multifaceted avenues to express and act out their collective goals while being geographically dispersed.

 

These are just some ideas I have been playing with. But they are likely to be manipulated and played with according to my data and research. 

Towards a Mapping of Cyberspace

Cyberspace in the postmodern world

Networked Culture

In relation to Colemans article Remixing Citizenship, I thought it showed most cogently the positive potential of the Internet in terms of the power it gives lay people (citizens) and grass roots organizations a stage to voice their opinions. By moving politics online, people can have access to a diverse amount of divergent information that they ordinarily would not have access to through mainstream channels. The internet gives people the space for online communication and interactive dialogue.  

This essay flipped the top down model on its head by saying that it was politics that needed to change not the youth. By giving young people a say in how information is disseminated and in what way it is presented, politics will eventually become more relevant for the technologically astute generations.

The main problem I see with this hypothesis is that in order for politics to be restructured, old hierarchies must be given up first; if this is to happen power will have to be forcefully taken not given. Those who are in power are not going to give it up quite that easily. What do they have to gain by letting youth have more power within modern institutions? By giving youth power they are essentially giving power to all those groups that have ordinarily be marginalized by the mainstream Western ethos (i.e. radicals, revolutionaries and dissenters). I think the voices of many of the young people in this article show that they don’t want to engage in politics because they see it as pointless and boring; they want to change the system so that it works for them, instead of them working for it. This kind of fundamental change seems a long way off.

Networked Society

The process of social organization is a one of dialecticalism. In other words technology both affects society and is affected by society. Unfortunately this process cannot be put in positivistic terms, because it lacks any objective goal. Just like religion, science has core mythological narratives at its heart. Thus technology remains teleological in terms of its supposed power to liberate humanity from its powerlessness in the face of natural forces. But once again, with the advent of global warming and mass environmental degradation, we are being shown that rather than being separate and distinct from the natural world we are a part of it. Thus, what was once seen as progress can now be seen as destructive and hazardous to human health. Any attempt to control nature lead us to a deeper understanding of the extent to which we are inextricably connected to it.

I would probably be a substantivist in terms of where technology fits in the social world. In other words It has an effect on our phenomenology (perception of the world and society) as human beings. However I think this also requires a social constructivist perspective to show the multi-faceted and divergent effects technology has on different sectors of society. Part is socially constructed, part is technologically determined.

For example the internet changes the way we conceptualize time and space as well as identity and social interface. Distance supposedly becomes irrelevant; we can communicate globally without the geographical restrictions we used to experience in the past. But the problem with this analysis is, we are still limited physically, by time and space, and by the actual social, cultural and economic conditions we live in. So the “death of distance” is as much a construction as it is a reality. We are still bound by external structures that influence our behaviour and shape our potentiality.

Thus technology both determines the ways we see the world and is determined by the way we see the world. We both use technology and are used by it.

Changes in the Organization of Knowledge

“Invisible collages” seem to function like other aspects of a community which are informal. They are a place to communicate ideas and thoughts without the usual hierarchies that are implicated in any social organization. Like in real life communities we have formal and informal arenas, within which we learn to act and interact accordingly.  

Knowledge is constructed and communicated in a very piecemeal manner. It doesn’t just appear; rather it evolves slowly and precariously, until all the participants internalize parts of its structure and then replicate them so that they seem ‘natural’ and ‘objective’ to the group.

Thus all knowledge is a collaborative project, even if it seems compartmentalized. Modern cyber-networks weaken the ‘objectivity’ of any one claim; lessening its power to form self-sustained, reliable and established ‘truths’. Because knowledge is being transformed at an incomprehensible rate it is virtually impossible to understand as a whole. We only perceive miniscule parts of it as our minds are constituted in such a way that they only allow a certain amount of assimilation to be realized.

We like to think that technology aids our cognitive abilities, when in actual fact it probably inhibits them. When once we had to remember and memorise countless stories in pre-literate times we now have information at the touch of a button (stored in a database). This has implications on the literal nature of knowledge. Before we wrote things down, they were remembered through mythologies and allegorical stories. Now statistics and facts flood the internet in the form of ‘neutral’ information without any mediating significance or metaphorical substance. I am interested in what implications this has for human ontology. As human beings we seem to be driven by meaning and meaningful interaction. Although it would be impossible to prove, I would debate, as many other sociologists have, that modernity, and to a more pronounced extent postmodernity, offers us very little epistemological stability within a unified symbolic order (if we can even use these terms anymore). Meanings are fluctuating constantly in postmodernity, which means our identities are made hyper-reflexive. We can obviously still communicate, but this interaction is emotionally limited, rather than enhanced by many new technologies, in terms of its existential significance for humans. Our ontological foundations disappear leaving us floating, lost in an endless sea of empty signifiers.      

Shifting powers, individuals and networks

The difference between information and knowledge could be compared to the difference between facts and interpretations. They are inextricably linked. One is useless without the other. It is like having raw data or statistics but no formula or theory to give meaning or systematic form to it. In the Postmoden era we supposedly live in, both these two realms are drifting further apart to the point where they reach either hyper subjectivism or amorphous objectivism. The gap grows larger and larger with no end in sight. We are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information with no seeming order and coherence to it. Information is unmanageable because it is extremely diffuse; while our interpretive lenses multiply exponentially to create an indecipherable matrix of disorder, disarray and chaotic flux. The minute we try to impose order on information it subverts it, twisting, manipulating and deconstructing it; reconstructing it in new and innovative ways that eludes the regulatory mechanisms that try to shape it.  

Virtual spaces of information

A few questions that arose of these lectures and readings were: How virtual is the virtual reality of the internet? Does the internet signify a disjuncture between the physical world we live in and the non-physical realm of the internet or is this dichotomy an illusion? If the non-physical world of virtual information influences the material world of economics, politics and culture can we call it virtual? Apart from the obvious, how are communities on the internet different to real communities? Do they perform the same roll or are they deficient? Do online identities actually have an impact on offline identities?  Underlying these questions is one main question that keeps popping up: Is the creation of virtual social processes online a product of increasing atomization, alienation and individualization in post-industrial societies? It seems that instead of more meaningful social relations being propagated by virtual worlds the exact opposite is happening. Relationships become loose, fluid and transient leaving no room for long lasting communities of ascent. Rather than being driven by peoples emotional connections to family and community their relationships are lead by either consumer, industrial or vocational goals. These goals effectively work against community making it devoid of any real commitments and responsibilities. Thus it become less of a community and more of a disconnected group of individuals each pursuing their own selfish objectives.    

The internet as a social entity

The internet is a social entity insofar as it is controlled and operated by and for humans. Granted technology does drive and orientate the way in which people are able to use it (i.e. it is structured and designed in a certain way, for a particular purpose, by a specific community of people).  The way I see it computers are nothing without people. Computers are just an extension of our bodies and minds. The internet helps us to organize, synthesize and network information. That’s not to say we as consumers choose how the products we consume are designed. We pay someone else to do all the technical engineering and ergonomic planning. But do not have a direct influence on the product. 

Even if products are made with restrictions and limitations, humans appropriate and adapt them to suite their own needs. A product might be made to fulfil a certain purpose, however an innovative individual might come along modify or re-interpret the product so as to re-invent it for their own unique requirements. The internet seems to personify this trend because of its de-centralized nature. Technological artefacts are flexible, and there meanings are constantly negotiated by people. However the way in which they interact with technology is loosely structured by the product’s intended purpose. This delimits meaningful use and therefore also influences the possibilities we have to manipulate it.  

Information

There are no facts, only interpretations.