Abstract
Reviewed by: Cristina Mislán, Journalism Studies, University of Missouri-Columbia
Unsurprisingly, 21st-century global social movements continue to move across a wide range of media platforms, with social media dramatically transforming the temporal and spatial contexts in which activists have participated in collective action. Recent hashtag movements at times have accompanied on the ground calls for structural change, while others have remained tied to the spatial borders of digital media. Fenton’s recent book Digital, Political, Radical examines recent scholarly mappings of social movements and digital media, offering a complex understanding of online or offline radical politics. While much of media studies literature and popular cultural imaginations of social movements remain tied to fetishized arguments about the liberatory role of media technologies, Fenton starts not from the question of technological affordance and promise but from the “need to understand ‘the political’” (p. 6). This book, hence, offers scholars and students of social movement media a more complicated understanding of contemporary forms of collective action by refocusing our “critical lenses on a politics of transformation in the field of media and communication studies” (p. 5). Drawing from a critical theoretical approach, each chapter asks a different set of questions in an effort to problematize current understandings of digital media activism and provide a way forward for future scholarship.
In the book’s second chapter, Fenton offers an argument that calls for a new understanding of “the means and the meaning of being political” (p. 49). Here, Fenton draws from the scholarship on social movement theory as well as more recent studies of digital activism to argue against the notion that digital activism is inherently democratic. With rapid transformations regarding access, speed, connectivity, and participation, scholarship must redefine the relationship between political activism and digital media. In Chapter 3, Fenton problematizes previous scholarly arguments that have theorized digital media and social movements using Habermas’ concept of the public sphere. Hence, Fenton argues against isolating any one medium from the “entire social and political context and communicative realm” (p. 78).
In Chapter 4, Fenton expands her critique of the Habermasian framework of liberal democratic practice. Here, she argues for a deeper understanding of the political subject, who enters affective social movements. As she suggests, we “need to better appreciate the passion of politics in order to understand better or political futures” (p. 83). Fenton examines the political subject and the role that social media play in bringing people into contact in ways that may challenge traditional Habermasian understandings of democratic institutions. Simultaneously, Fenton is arguing against a restrictive political economic analysis of social media that risks “misnoticing or misrecognizing what politics is” (p. 102). Chapter 5 further extends the Habermasian critique to ask: “If a rational deliberative model of liberal democracy cannot account for the new forms of radical politics emerging in the digital age, then how can we better understand them?” (p. 104). To answer this question, Fenton primarily engages with contemporary debates and questions about the notion of multiplicity and concept of the multitude. Here, Fenton critiques theoretical frameworks that primarily analyze how organizational politics, including difference and multiplicity, play a role in forging powerful actions of solidarity or fragmented movements. Such analyses leave the “politics” of movements “nebulous and ill-defined” (p. 129).
Chapter 6 further examines the notion of politics, primarily on what it means to “be political” and the “politics of being.” In bringing an analysis of power into the dialectic relationship between structure and agency, Fenton argues for a more complex understanding of what it means to be political. Structural constraints that influence who and what gets to be political are explored in this chapter; yet, Fenton moves beyond traditional critiques that describe both political economy and cultural studies as inadequate analyses when conducted within their epistemological silos. Instead, Fenton argues for repoliticizing the economy and resocializing politics to “take account of structural questions of power and inequality while also accounting for aesthetics and performance and the affective dimensions of politics” (p. 160).
Fenton’s critical examination of key theoretical foundations found within social movement and digital media scholarship offers scholars an alternative framework that complicates previous understandings between technology and politics. In doing so, Digital, Political, Radical complicates previous theoretical frameworks that often ignore or inadequately address the role that digital media play in oppositional politics. Thus, Fenton primarily argues for a deeper consideration of the actual politics of movements (what led people to resist in the first place), while calling for a serious integration of various epistemological approaches. Yet, for all of its emphasis on the political, scholars and students may still be left asking: Where do we go from here? While Fenton acknowledges the ways in which online activism is often co-opted by neoliberal economic politics, what is missing is a discussion on another limitation to online resistance. The ways in which activists are now navigating state surveillance online remains a central challenge for many social movement subjects. Furthermore, while Fenton provides some central questions needed to re-center radical politics into this body of literature, the author seems to miss one key scholarly conversation that has already begun to explore how digital media movements are always embedded in physical and geopolitical contexts. Recent scholarly examinations of the “Arab Spring,” for instance, have interrogated Western notions of democracy, resistance, and technology. Such studies have called for a more nuanced approach in examining the complex ways in which the digital sphere has entered politics and resistance. Thus, a conversation about the limitations of Western analytical approaches is a necessary extension to Digital, Political, Radical.