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CHAPTER 1
Digital Culture, Activism and Social Movements in Australia
In 2010, protests and civil war broke out across the Middle East, and social media played a significant role in raising global awareness of the events dubbed the Arab Spring (Faris, 2011; Faris & Meier, 2013). The Paris terrorist attacks in 2015 saw social media used as a mechanism to show global support and empathy. For example, in the days following the January attack on the publication Charlie Hebdo, the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie spread across social media and at the time was named one of the most popular hashtags in Twitter history, with more than 5 million uses. The second incident, which took place in November – in this instance a coordinated attack by gunmen and suicide bombers – also saw social media users expressing their support and compassion for Parisians, this time with the hashtag #PrayForParis which was used more than 7 million times. In the United States, #BlackLivesMatter was tweeted 9 million times in just 2015, and over 30 million times by September 2016, with the hashtag becoming a social calling card for social justice and racial equality activists across not only the United States but globally. Taking a different form, the 'It Gets Better Project' – created by media personality Dan Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, in response to an increase in suicides in the United States by teens bullied because of their sexual orientation – is a video campaign to let LGBT youth know that life does indeed 'get better'. This project began when Savage and Miller uploaded the first 'It Gets Better' video on the campaign's official YouTube page on 21 September 2010. This video has since been viewed more than 2 million times. Since then, more than 50,000 video entries have been uploaded from around the world on the campaign's website, receiving more than 50 million views as of January 2017. The 'It Gets Better Project' continues to engage the community – both online and in person (via conferences, pride festivals and government outreach) – to rally for LGBT rights and equality on six continents.
In just the first weeks of January 2017, in Australia, we have between us received multiple digital updates from activist organisations we follow. We have also undertaken a range of actions using digital media tools, including donating to causes, signing campaign petitions, sending emails to politicians and other decision-making bodies, forwarding issue and campaign information through social media ourselves and using apps to support ethical consumption practices. For many of us, digital media is how we do activism in the everyday. We might not be carrying out distributed denial of service attacks – a tactic that involves sending so many requests to a target website that it crashes, described by some hacktivists as a kind of virtual 'sit-in' (see Sauter, 2014) – to draw attention to specific inequities, and we might not be physically chained to a tree or a bulldozer or holding a sign in a physical protest, but our 'clicktivism' is still activist action. Or is it? Has the ubiquity and convenience of digital technologies within the lives of many of us watered down our sense of what it means to take action? Is signing an online petition and sharing it with our friends in social media anything like the activism of earlier decades? Marching in a PRIDE protest in the 1980s and 1990s in Australia carried with it real physical dangers although it also gave rise to strong senses of solidarity; participating in the blockade protesting the proposed damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania carried with it a real chance of imprisonment (1,217 arrests were made, many simply for being present at the blockade, and nearly 500 people were imprisoned for breaking the terms of their bail) and again facilitated that strong sense of being part of a community. A similar situation prevailed during the 2016 and 2017 protests in Perth in Western Australia against the extending of a major highway through wetlands. Participating in a physical sense in any long-term protest also carries with it other material effects such as loss of income. Signing and sharing an online petition or carrying out other online actions rarely carries with it the same kinds of material effects as non-virtual activism. This is the sense in which Shonda Rhimes (2014) stated, in her invited 2014 Commencement Speech for Dartmouth College, that 'A hashtag is not helping', continuing with:
Hashtags are very pretty on Twitter. I love them. I will hashtag myself into next week. But a hashtag is not a movement. A hashtag does not make you Dr. King. A hashtag does not change anything. It's a hashtag. It's you, sitting on your butt, typing on your computer and then going back to binge-watching your favorite show.
And yet, perhaps this is to forget that there always have been many components essential for an activist action to be successful, with two of these being communication and visibility. One person standing in protest simply does not have the same impact as 100, let alone 1,000. What about a 10,000- or 100,000-strong petition delivered to the relevant authority? In this context, international activist organisations such as AVAAZ – launched in 2007 – can work effectively on the global scale only due to digital media technologies. With 44,672,981 members spread throughout 194 countries (as of April 2017), it is only through the temporal and spatial compressions made possible by digital technologies that AVAAZ's (2016) online community has the capacity to
act like a megaphone to call attention to new issues; a lightning rod to channel broad public concern into a specific, targeted campaign; a fire truck to rush an effective response to a sudden, urgent emergency; and a stem cell that grows into whatever form of advocacy or work is best suited to meet an urgent need.
In particular, AVAAZ operates according to a model of tipping point moments – what AVAAZ's founder, Ricken Patel, calls 'crisistunity' (as cited in Cadwalladr, 2013) – collecting public support of causes but only delivering it when a massive, global public outcry has the potential to make a significant difference. Digital media technologies make this work – and this timing – possible, as they did the coordination of the protests of the Arab Spring. They facilitate consciousness raising in a massively extended mode to that practised in earlier decades where you, in effect, had to be in the right place at the right time. Rather than needing to have your street and house leafletted – and reading the leaflet before it was thrown out – or passing a notice or being stopped on the street and invited to attend a meeting, the vast interconnected networks of digital media with their multiplicity of hubs and nodes through which information is circulated and recirculated mean that we can become aware of, give our support to and share causes with much less need of serendipity, and without the need to be physically present. In particular, they facilitate our engagement in issues we feel strongly about regardless of geographical distance.
This, then, is the context and focus of this book, to explore and examine – within the Australian context – the affordances of digital culture for activist organisations and advocates for social change. More specifically, this book introduces readers to the historical and theoretical framings and interconnections of activism, advocacy and digital cultures – and some of their points of tension – while illuminating these points with rich issues-based Australian case studies of activist take-ups of digital cultures, tools and platforms. Of particular interest is how digital cultures offer productive mechanisms and spaces for not only the reshaping of citizens into activists but also the achievement of progressive social change, through their explicit facilitation of both deliberative and affective models of popular citizen engagement. These possibilities and examples are pursued through chapters 2–6, with each one exploring a different facet of digital culture, action and activism, and examining it against the work of specific Australian activist organisations, collectives, causes and campaigns. The final chapter, chapter 7, then reframes these discussions in the broader context of digital activism, comparing and contrasting insights from the preceding chapters with regard to some of the main technological affordances and constraints that inform digital culture. This leaves the work of this current chapter, chapter 1. In the following pages, setting the scene for the rest of the book, we pursue three overlapping objectives. The first objective is to introduce readers to some of the key fields and debates informing the contexts and practices of digital activism, including ideas and (theoretical and practical) expectations regarding conventional models of activism and social movements. The second objective is to provide the reader with some background regarding the emergence, practice and make-up of digital culture and digital activism. The third objective in this chapter is to introduce a range of the productive tensions that we hope will resonate throughout the book: tensions between activism, participatory citizenship, consumerism, neoliberalism and tensions concerning the engagement of identities in activism. Understanding the operation of these tensions is, we suggest, imperative for understanding how digital culture can build a constructive nexus among (a) individual engagement, participation and deliberation; (b) collective action and effective activism; and (c) long-lasting social change.
ACTIVISM AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Social movement theory defines a social movement as a sustained conscious effort to bring about social change through extra-institutional means (Goodwin & Jasper, 2003; Wrenn, 2012). A social movement is thus usually expected to be organised, to at least some extent, to possess change-oriented goals and some degree of continuity. Although social movements were once conventionally framed with regard to collective behaviour focusing more on what we typically consider to be Marxist concerns such as resource mobilisation, breakdowns in the social order mainly as a result of class differences, workers' rights and economic issues within organisations, as well as state and society (Buechler, 2011; Diani, 1992; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001; Touraine, 2002; Wieviorka, 2005), newer social movements tend to focus more on the production of collective identity, networks and the messy make-up of movements for social change (Melucci, 1980; Touraine, 2002). Newer ideas then have recognised that social movement activism should more generally be conceived of as encompassing those 'socially shared activities and beliefs' which can be 'directed toward the demand for change in some aspect of the social order' (Gusfield, 1970, p. 2). Such activism thus tends to be issues driven. This, of course, means that different social movements may diverge in their causes and tactics to the point that some movements arguably undercut the focus of others (e.g., the deliberate use of sexist promotional strategies by some animal rights organisations). Activism, in its turn, is generally understood as meaning the taking of action 'to effect social change' (Permanent Culture Now, 2013) – where this action may go beyond what is considered routine or conventional, and where this social change may or may not be framed by a recognised social movement – with activists being those committed to advancing a substantive political or social goal or outcome (Levine & Nierras, 2007). Of particular importance is that this work is usually understood to be a result of scarce or no funding in state-based institutional responses to identified systemic sociopolitical problems or inequities.
This aspect needs some clarification. Because activism is typically understood as action that goes beyond conventional politics, social movements and activists more generally exist in complex relationships with state-based political institutions (keeping in mind that the boundary between activism and conventional politics is always fuzzy and dependent on context). Extending the points made in the previous paragraph, this is to say, first, that activists are typically targeting issues that are either considered not recognised or being inadequately addressed by the state – climate change being one very topical example of such an issue. Second, activism is typically undertaken by those with less power, for the simple reason that those with positions of power and influence can usually accomplish their aims using conventional means. A third feature is that because activist action may take forms outside of state-recognised political processes, it may be framed by the state as disruptive of or threatening to state power. Here current state-based framings of some animal rights and environmental activist actions in the United States and Australia, for instance, as 'terrorist' are exemplary. The fourth feature is that social movements and activism, at least since the 1970s, tend to be oriented towards specific issues – themselves typically framed in terms of inequities and justice – rather than working to re-envisage (or take over) state power as such (Fuchs, 2006; Lummis, 1996). Certainly activists may be striving for change in certain state-based policies or practices, but this is a far cry from the aim of taking state power (as was arguably the case with early Marxistinspired social movements). At the same time, however, and fifth, much of the social change–oriented work of social movements and activists – if, that is, framed by progressive goals informed by the principles of equality and justice – tends to be described as informed by ideals of democratisation (Martin, 2009; Mummery, 2017). More specifically, newer social movements and activists – through their calls for a collective challenging of inequities and better address of unmet needs (Piven, 2006; Reisch, 2005) – tend to present themselves as engaging democratic principles in their critique of sociopolitical society and can be understood furthermore as striving generally for the engagement 'of active citizens in a participatory politics' (Breines, 1982).
This latter principle is a central concept for examining the work of social movements and activism. Insofar as the work of social movements and activists falls outside of the usual frames for political action recognised by the state, it needs to be understood as voluntary in important ways. We suggest, in turn, that this voluntariness highlights the connections between the work of social movements and activists and what could be called participatory citizenship, which we would define – with the help of van Deth (2014) – as intentional and voluntary activity by citizens which is not limited to targeting government politics and is indeed more often directed at the sociopolitical system with the aim of 'solving collective or community problems' (van Deth, 2014, p. 358). In both cases what matters is active engagement in community issues, where this is based on the democratic belief that the involvement of citizens in the tackling of community issues makes for better citizens, better decisions and better government (Avritzer, 2002; Cohen & Sabel, 1997; Gaventa, 2004; Mansbridge, 1999). What is also important is that action is collective, in this instance meaning that it is undertaken by individuals or groups for a collective purpose, such as the challenging or addressing of a specific community issue or the advancement of a specific idea or ideology (Postmes & Brunsting, 2002). More specifically, this is the idea that individuals commit to coordinating their efforts to secure a common goal that would be impossible to obtain on an individual basis (Bimber, Flanagin & Stohl, 2005).
These are fundamental points insofar as the crucial test in the cases of both social movements and an activist cause more generally is always whether its ideological framing can successfully recruit and mobilise (potential) members to actually struggle for social change. Participation, in other words, matters; it is the overarching drive in all activism. This, however, is ideally a matter not just of a potential member taking up an activist role in the sense of performing a cause-inspired action but of coming to conceive of oneself in terms of the cause. This is the idea that 'individuals participate in protest because doing so stems from their understanding of who they are, both as individuals and as part of a collectivity' (Einwohner, 2002, p. 255). Activist participation, then, is about identification. So conceived, for an individual to identify as a member of a social movement, or an activist for a cause, he or she must have come to align his or her personal identity with the movement's collective identity (Snow & McAdam, 2000). In other words, the individual has to form 'a cognitive, moral, and emotional connection' with the movement's broader community (Poletta & Jasper, 2001, p. 285); it is only this identification that facilitates mobilisation and action (Hunt & Benford, 2004; Jasper & Poulsen, 1995; McAdam, 1994; Melucci, 1994, 2013). Collective action, in other words, represents both an enactment of identity and the strengthening of relationality, and it is on this basis Diani (1992, pp. 1–2) comes to define social movements as 'networks of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organizations, engaged in political or cultural conflicts, on the basis of shared collective identities'.
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Excerpted from "Activism and Digital Culture in Australia"
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Copyright © 2018 Debbie Rodan and Jane Mummery.
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