Left out? Digital media, radical politics and social change

ABSTRACT

This paper begins from the basic premise that in considering digital media and its multifarious relations with forms of protest and political mobilization, we are interested in social change. Yet, too often, the key ingredient of protest and political mobilization – the radical politics itself – is left out of our analyses. How can we begin to tackle the challenges posed to democratic politics if we do not talk about actual politics as part of our research? This problem is both conceptual and practical. A politics requires a practice. We cannot understand the nature of the practice without understanding its politics; we cannot understand the politics without appreciating its processes and organization. Yet, so many studies do just this. This paper argues that a fugitive politics limits our abilities to take progressive thought and action forward. By ignoring the actual politics, we end up depoliticizing counter politics because we offer precious few suggestions as to how we can do democratic politics better. Without an understanding of the conditions under which a Left progressive politics could develop then the politics itself threatens to remain ill defined. What might it mean then to put the development of a counter politics at the heart of our analyses? What are the conditions required (including the communicative conditions) for radical political organizations/collectives to endure, build capacity and effect social change?

KEYWORDS:

• Critical
• radical
• political
• inequality
• democratic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author

Notes on contributor

Natalie Fenton is a Professor in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is Co-Director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre and Co-Director of Goldsmiths Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. She has published widely on issues relating to news, journalism, civil society, radical politics and new media and is particularly interested in rethinking understandings of public culture, the public sphere and democracy. Her most recent books are New media, old news: Journalism and democracy in the digital age (2010) (ed.) Sage; Misunderstanding the internet (2012, 2016) (with James Curran, and Des Freedman) Routledge; and Look left: New media and radical politics (2016) published by Polity. [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 The arguments in this article are based on and developed further in the book ‘Look Left: Digital Media and Radical Politics (Fenton, 2016b) published by Polity.

2 There are, of course, scholars who do take a critical perspective and deal with a raft of political concerns when considering the media in its many forms and its relationship with new social movements, political mobilization and protest as well as those that focus on alternative and community media. One excellent example is the collection of articles in Dencik and Leistert (2015) Critical Perspectives on Social Media Protest, but few address politics as both a philosophical and organizational dimension and the consequences this has for the prospects of political transformation.

3 On the same day that the Centre for Macroeconomics in the UK announced that the vast majority of British economists disagreed that austerity is good for growth, the national daily newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, published on its front page a letter from 100 business leaders stating the opposite.