On the use of social media in activism
bzichettWoah…
"How much of the exchange and circulation of information occurring electronically today is a colossal amplification of what Sartre termed "an inversion of praxis into practico-inert activity"? How much of the blogging transpiring globally -on the part of individuals numbering in the hundreds of millions, often using th e language of resistance - is equivalent to the mass autism that Debord noted? Obviously, political activism means creatively using available tools and material resources, but it should not entail imagining the tools themselves to have intrinsic redemptive values. Lenin, Trotsky, and their cohort made use of every communications technology at hand in 1917 , but they never elevated them to privileged and sacrosanct determinants of an entire constellation of hi storical events, as some cyber activists have done in extolling the role of social media in recent political movements and uprisings. Once there is mystification and the attribution of quasi-magical capabilities to networks, it becomes like faith in a Ponzi scheme that will automatically pay off on be half of the weak and oppress ed. The myths of th egalitarian and empowering nature of this technology have been cultivated for a reason. Police agencies of the global order can only be gratified by the willingness of activists to concentrate their organizing around internet strategies, by which they voluntarily kettle themselves in cyberspace, where state surveillance, sabotage, and manipulation are far easier than in lived communities and localities where actual encounters occur. If one' s goal is radical social transformation, electronic media in their current forms of mass availability are not useless - but only when they are subordinate to strugg les and encounters taking place elsewhere. If networks are not in the service of already existing relationships forged out of shared experience and proximity, they will always reproduce and reinforce the separations, the opacity, the dissimulations, and the self-interestedness inherent in their use. Any social turbulence whose primary sources are in the use of social media will inevitably be historically ephemeral and inconsequential."