Introduction

The effect of the internet on political mobilization constitutes the topic of a polarized academic debate. The recent waves of protest that spread from North Africa to Brazil and Turkey have added more fuel to this debate, generating more questions than answers concerning the impact of digital media on contemporary mobilizations. Some scholars suggest that the quick and seemingly viral diffusion of information is producing collectives that are flexible, decentralized and agile. Others consider the forms of activism facilitated by the internet as potentially damaging to the strength and coherence of collective action.

Yet what opponents in this debate seem to have in common is a tendency to view the internet as a tool of political mobilization. Less attention is paid to the assumptions and ideologies underlying the internet and its political role. These influence scholarly research as they shape how the relationship between the internet and politics is conceptualized and evaluated. They also highlight that the internet does not simply play an instrumental role in political mobilization, but also an ideological one. This is because the ideas underlying internet use are enmeshed with specific political imaginaries that privilege horizontality, leaderless organizing and an aversion to hierarchies. Regardless of whether these imaginaries correspond to the reality of protest, they still underpin activist ideologies and are often used on the discursive level to signal a new kind of politics.

By focusing on these two aspects, this special Crosscurrents section on ‘Political Mobilization and the Internet’ aims to advance the academic debate in this field. In the first article of this section, Tim Markham unpacks the theoretical assumptions on political subjectivity that drive scholarly accounts of the role of social media in the Arab Spring. Based on a phenomenological approach, Markham criticises writings on the topic for assuming ‘the spontaneous emergence of freer, more creative subjectivities once the constraints of authoritarian regimes, as well as those of western discourse, have been removed’ (p. ). He shows that this conception of political subjectivity bears a direct relation to the biological and ecological metaphors that cast social media as amorphous, vibrant and progressive spaces where new political subjectivities can spring from. Such accounts disregard that political subjectivities are rooted in the everyday and are produced from, not in spite of, the constraints of institutions such as the state, as well as the experiences of the past and anticipations of the future that inform action in the present.

The article by Simone Natale and Andrea Ballatore focuses instead on the relationship between the internet and political discourse, demonstrating how digital utopianism has shaped the claims and ideology of the Italian Five-Star Movement. Drawing from the books of the movement’s co-founders – Beppe Grillo, the famous comedian, and Gianroberto Casaleggio, a web entrepreneur – as well as Grillo’s blog, Natale and Ballatore show how the movement’s founders use the rhetoric of the digital revolution by likening the movement’s attack on the old hierarchies of the Italian establishment to the disruptive effect of the internet on ‘old media’. Digital utopianism has also shaped the movement’s ideas around grassroots participation and direct democracy that inform its functioning and manifesto.

The special Crosscurrents section on ‘Political Mobilization and the Internet’ also includes two reviews of books published on this theme. In the first one, Christian Fuchs reviews Manuel Castells’ recent book ‘Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age’ which focuses on the Arab Spring, the 15-M mobilizations in Spain and the Occupy Movement. The second review by Taberez Ahmed Neyazi discusses the edited book by Brian Loader and Dan Mercea ‘Social Media and Democracy: Innovations in Participatory Politics’, a comprehensive volume addressing the potential of social media for political participation.

With its emphasis on the relationship between the internet, political discourse and subjectivity, this special Crosscurrents section offers some valuable insights into how we can conceive and study the role of the internet in political mobilization. It is thus a useful addition to an intense academic debate that shows few signs of abating.