Digital Media Activism : A Situated, Historical, and Ecological Approach Beyond the Technological Sublime

• This chapter engages with the notion of digital media activism. The starting point is that current studies often fall short in situating digital media activismwithin a longer historical trajectory and in the context of a complex media ecology, comprising both old and new media interactions. As a result, they frequently assume activism has been (and is) predominantly “digital”. Countering this assumption, this chapter argues for the importance of establishing both a historical perspective and a contextualized ecological lens of this concept, allowing for anuanced analysis of activist media practices beyond the technological sublime. In the first part, the chapter situates the notion of digital media activism within broader research on media activism and then disentangles its constitutive elements, i.e. “digital”, “media”, and “activism”. In the second part, the chapter brings together attempts to historicize and contextualize digital media activism. It shows that a historical perspective is able to capture the continuities and evolution in relation to a long history of technologically mediated activism. Then, it illustrates how media ecology perspectives can contextualise digital activism by (a) identifying the coexistence of multiple media practices and artefacts;(b) elucidating motivations and obstacles in the adoption and rejection of digitaltools; (c) shedding light on how citizens purposely disconnect from media tech-nologies as a form of resistance.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Keyword

activism

media activism

mediated activism

social movements

mediaecologies

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)