The People's Mic as a Medium in Its Own Right: A Pharmacological Reading

Abstract

The People's Mic—a collective amplification of individual voices in public gatherings—has become a hallmark of the Occupy movement. Because those who join the Microphone in call and response occupy simultaneously the position of medium and that of addressee, the Mic allows us to return to an ancient notion of medium as a middle ground that is associated with the public and the common. Extending a pharmacological trajectory in media theory that goes from Jacques Derrida to Neil Postman to Bernard Stiegler, the article argues that the embodied, slow-paced and choral nature of the Mic can be seen as an antidote to the speedy and fragmentary nature of online communication. In other words, even though the People's Mic does not require any technological prosthesis, its use has been popularized in a post-technological society—a society whose communication patterns are informed by information technologies even when they are not directly relying on them. In the second part, the article draws on Michel Foucault's writings on the ambivalent relationship between free speech and democracy in ancient Greece, to argue that the People's Mic allows participants to reflect on the conditions of possibility of democratic communication—of communication in an open, unscripted environment. It concludes that the challenge for contemporary media theory and media activism is to understand how media that are dependent on the messages they convey can generate their own metalanguages so as to have an impact on the information technologies that enable them.

Keywords:

• Occupy
• People's Mic
• Human Microphone
• Media Theory
• Social Movements
• Media Activism

Notes

[1] Gerald Raunig, “Eventum et Medium: Event and Orgiastic Representation in Media Activism,” eipcp, June 2007, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0707/raunig/en (accessed June 30, 2013).

[2] Gerald Raunig, “Eventum et Medium: Event and Orgiastic Representation in Media Activism,” eipcp, June 2007, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0707/raunig/en (accessed June 30, 2013).

[3] Gerald Raunig, “Eventum et Medium: Event and Orgiastic Representation in Media Activism,” eipcp, June 2007, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0707/raunig/en (accessed June 30, 2013).

[4] Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthroup-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 1999, p. 2.

[5] Bernard Stiegler, “Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon,” Culture Machine 13 (2012): 1–19.

[6] See Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (London: Minor Compositions, 2009), pp. 86–87.

[7] See Carrie Kahn, “Battle Cry: Occupy's Messaging Tactics Catch On,” NPR (All Things Considered), December 6, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/12/06/142999617/battle-cry-occupys-messaging-tactics-catch-on (accessed June 30, 2013) and Sasha Costanza-Chock, “Mic Check! Media Cultures and the Occupy Movement,” Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 11 No. 3–4 (2012): 7, doi:10.1080/14742837.2012.710746.

[8] On the history of mediated forms of public speech in New York City see Lilian Radovac, “Mic Check: Occupy Wall Street and the Space of Audition.”

[9] meerkatmedia, “Occupy the D.O.E.,” October 26, 2011, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbmjMickJMA (accessed June 30, 2013).

[10] For the notion of trans-individuality see Gilbert Simondon, L'individuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier, 1989). For the related notion of condividuality, see Marco Deseriis, “Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms and Multiple-Use Names as Minor Processes of Subjectivation,” Subjectivity 5, No. 2 (2012): 140–60, doi:10.1057/sub.2012.3.

[11] UnaSpenser, “Witnessing #occupywallstreet: the power. …  of the people … 's mic,” DailyKos, September 29, 2011, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/29/1021211/-Witnessing-occupywallstreet-the-power-of-the-people-s-mic (accessed June 30, 2013).

[12] UnaSpenser, “Witnessing #occupywallstreet: the power. …  of the people … 's mic,” DailyKos, September 29, 2011, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/29/1021211/-Witnessing-occupywallstreet-the-power-of-the-people-s-mic (accessed June 30, 2013).

[13] Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France 1982–1983 (New York: Palgrave, 2010).

[14] Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010).

[15] See Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life (New York: Penguin, 2003).

[16] Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004), p. 14.

[17] Richard Kim, “We Are All Human Microphones Now,” The Nation, October 3, 2011, http://www.thenation.com/blog/163767/we-are-all-human-microphones-now (accessed June 30, 2013).

[18] Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (New York: Penguin, 1996).

[19] UnaSpenser.

[20] Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 95–155.

[21] Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), p. 36.

[22] Foucault, 183–84.

[23] Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 55.