Media and the Digital Age
Paper/Proposal Title
The Potentiality of a Digital Revolution: Alienated Activists and the Surveillance State (abstract)
Location
University of Dayton
Start Date
10-2-2015 4:00 PM
End Date
10-2-2015 5:30 PM
Abstract
The following paper will examine the ways in which digital media is used by both activists engaged in struggles of inequity as well as the State. Specifically, the paper focuses on the use of digital media in the antiracist organizing following the murders of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York. Activists relied on digital media to share information, narratives, as well as create networks for mobilization. The State relied on digital media to provide counter-narratives and promulgate a fear-based rhetoric depicting activists as “looters.”
This paper emphasizes the potentiality of power in utilizing digital media as a way to challenge human rights violations in the U.S. Through an Athusserian lens; this analysis interrogates the process of subject formation within the digitized terrain in which citizenship is made possible through the performance of patriotism and dissent through digital media. Ultimately, human rights advocates must ask themselves if and how violent power can be recapitulated through digital democracies or if the revolution, ultimately, will not be tweeted.
Included in
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The Potentiality of a Digital Revolution: Alienated Activists and the Surveillance State (abstract)
University of Dayton
The following paper will examine the ways in which digital media is used by both activists engaged in struggles of inequity as well as the State. Specifically, the paper focuses on the use of digital media in the antiracist organizing following the murders of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York. Activists relied on digital media to share information, narratives, as well as create networks for mobilization. The State relied on digital media to provide counter-narratives and promulgate a fear-based rhetoric depicting activists as “looters.”
This paper emphasizes the potentiality of power in utilizing digital media as a way to challenge human rights violations in the U.S. Through an Athusserian lens; this analysis interrogates the process of subject formation within the digitized terrain in which citizenship is made possible through the performance of patriotism and dissent through digital media. Ultimately, human rights advocates must ask themselves if and how violent power can be recapitulated through digital democracies or if the revolution, ultimately, will not be tweeted.
Comments
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