Democracy and Corporatization: Structures and Power Dynamics in Digital Media
From the publication of the first web pages to livestreaming daily life on Periscope, momentum around the conversation of technological and societal convergence has been building. Considering what Treré and Barassi (2015) called the “history of technological utopianism and its interconnection with the development of western thought,” we are fascinated with the divestment from labor technology provides us. However, this ultimately distracts us from the nearly unrestrained power of the ruling class derived from these same technologies, as well as the roles of capitalism and Western politics in how these structures are owned, distributed, and traded. This research consults the emerging literature concerning digital spaces by means of connecting and clarifying the power dynamics between society, technology, and democracy. By analyzing the case studies and esoteric philosophies of writers in the fields of development communication, social movements, digital technology, and political structures, this research seeks to make the arguments for greater civic engagement in technological accessibility, oversight in public and private ownership of digital technologies, and the development and protection of democratic spaces in digital spaces.
For millennia, the way humans have developed their habits and structures of communication has been a driving force in societal evolution. Elements like vocabulary, facial expressions, and vocal inflection all lend themselves to how efficiently we communicate in physical reality. The rapidly intensifying ubiquity of digital, text-based communications in our everyday lives force us to reconsider two aspects: how we are making ourselves understood by each other, and through what means we are attempting to communicate. Having a personal conversation is free in both the economic and societal meanings of the word; having a conversation on a social media platform involves engineers, advertisers, accountants, executives, and even the government, all of whom are trying to ensure the return on investment of their labor, time, and money.
Our digital communication methods have changed in such a short amount of time relative to our sociological development, and in such a drastic way that we are forced to reassess when, where, why, and how we are communicating in digital spaces. This study will focus on the social and systemic power structures that influence the way citizens use digital media, mainly within the context of movements for social change. This study will focus on three main elements of communication: societal, technological, and democratic. The first section, Society, will explore the reasoning behind the societal structures in which we use digital media to communicate. The second section, Technology, will discuss the systemic power structures which determine how and on what terms digital media is available and accessible for citizen use. The third section, Democracy, will discuss the absence and importance of democracy in current internet ecology. A final summary will pull together the recurring elements of the three sections.
Society
In Garcia & Treré’s The #YoSoy132 Movement And The Struggle For Media Democratization In Mexico (2014), the authors’ focus on the #YoSoy132 movement provides one example of the imbalance of political and technological power between citizens and their government. The movement’s goal was to require open access to the internet as a constitutional right and “the democratization of the mass media, in order to guarantee transparent information, plural and impartial, to foster critical consciousness and thought” (Garcia & Treré, 2014).
In the article, the authors distinguish the efforts of the media students involved in the movement, who, in conjunction with media scholars, were able to promote media democratization by exposing the corruption of the political system and its control over their means of communication. Because of the inherent existence of digital communication in the young radicals’ lives, they were able to provide “courses, tutorship and seminars in relation to communication and the media” to other students in order to develop a “communicative citizenship” (Garcia & Treré, 2014). This fell in line with the media students’ desire for interdisciplinarity, meaning the solution to their complex problems lied in the dedication of working groups of students from different academic backgrounds.
Social media virilization afforded #YoSoy132 national and international recognition in their movement despite the attempt of the ruling party to criminalize their protests. While their naturalized use of digital media aided them in some regards, one of their ultimate failures to enact media democratization, according to the authors, came from their strict adherence to digital media. Regardless of notions of technological convergence, they committed themselves to strictly digital dissemination of information, ignoring the fact that the majority of Mexicans receive their political information via mainstream television. Overall, “social media played a pivotal role by providing online spaces for circulating information and organizing, by creating counter-hegemonic sites of struggles and by contributing to the awareness and strengthening of communicative citizenship” (Garcia & Treré, 2014).
Tweets And The Streets: Social Media And Contemporary Activism (Gerbaudo, 2012) contrasts Garcia & Treré; Gerbaudo by focusing on the over-indulgence and over-dependence on digital technology in situations of collective action. The idea of technological fetishism, mentioned again in the next section, describes the “technovisionary discourse … as the reflection of a neoliberal ideology, incapable of understanding collective action except as the result of some sort of technological miracle fleetingly binding together egotistical individuals” (Gerbaudo, 2012). This means that the emotional connection citizens have with their technology, stemming from their almost complete dependence, causes them to see the technology itself as the savior of their societal ills, rather than a tool to be used in collaboration with collective action.
Gerbaudo argues that power of influence of social media lies within what he calls emotional tension, which pulls the “highly dispersed and individualised interactions” of digital media together to the “bodily immersion of collective gatherings” (Gerbaudo, 2012). This needs to be the end goal of digital communication for social change: using digital media as a tool to augment and support societal progress, not a space to replace the physical world. This is difficult due to the disparate nature of communication in the physical and virtual worlds; digital media has become a place of escapism from the physical, whether that entails systemic oppression, interpersonal issues, or even one’s own identity. “These technologies cannot substitute public space for a ‘virtual public sphere,’ but only reweave a new sense of public space, refashioning the way in which people come together on the streets. When they are not connected to the construction of public gatherings, social media can also run the risk of isolating activists from the broad constituency of the movement … these movements require the invocation of a sense of locality or ‘net locality’, which involves bestowing them with some degree of fixity, a ‘nodal point’ in their texture of participation” (Gerbaudo, 2012).
In discussing the progress required by digital media activists moving forward, Gerbaudo (2012) writes:
I would argue that activists do not need to change their communicative and organisational practices so as to make them more ‘horizontal’; they need not labour under the optimistic compulsion to achieve a utopian equality of involvement which will never be realised however hard we try. Rather, we need to invent new concepts and practices better suited to capturing the fact that, for all its participatory ideals, the process of mobilisation always involves inequalities and asymmetries in which there are people who mobilise and people who are mobilised, people who lead and people who follow, and the two categories only ever partly overlap.
Jumping off from this understanding of the power balances inherent in digital media usage with social movements, I will discuss the political, corporate, and technological inequities stemming from the corporate architecture of digital media platforms.
Technology
Related to Gerbaudo’s idea of technovisionary discourse is Tufecki’s (2017) term technodeterminism: “the simplistic and reductive notion that after Twitter and Facebook were created, their mere existence somehow caused revolutions to happen.” The internet’s effect on the efficacy of social movements is undeniable, but may undermine the complexity of social structures, other technology, and activism. One aspect of digital media’s sphere of influence on social movements is the intertwined nature of digital structures and cultures with the “Global North” and “Western” ideals. Media and technology corporations are heavily founded and headquartered in the North/West, and thus create a feeling of ownership by these socio-cultural backgrounds. Believing the impact in how citizens collectively influence the socially engineered use of digital media platforms belies the two-way influence between the owners and the users; “technology, too, has structuring power within its constraints that are dependent on its materiality, its formal cause, and its design” (Tufecki, 2017).
The simultaneous gatekeeping and watchdog roles over media use are fluid, but not necessarily balanced. The cultural and hegemonic systems are embedded directly into the coding and programming of the platforms themselves. Because of the algorithm-based hegemony of platforms like Google and Facebook, they are able to exert an untenable level of control over the market, essentializing their cultural monopoly:
Network effects may not mean that the very first companies to enter a new and rapidly growing market and achieve sizable growth will necessarily be the ones to emerge as dominant once the market has matured and growth has slowed. But at that point, whichever companies are dominant will be very difficult for competitors to unseat … Beyond network effects, the costs of entry into these markets have also become high because of the data these companies have amassed. A competitor to these behemoths would need to be massively financed and would still be at a huge disadvantage given the enormous amount of data about users’ habits these companies have already collected (Tufecki, 2017).
This “supersession” (Treré & Barassi, 2015) of potential competitors wholly undermines the idea of open consumerism, specifically in a digital media space where the values and priorities would be democratically decided between the owners and users. The economic value consumers provide the corporations through advertising and datafication only further incentivizes the monetization of the users, which ultimately feeds into the rampant technological fetishism of the industrialized world. “The basic understanding is that humans are constantly involved in the production of specific objects, systems and technologies but that capitalism detaches (alienates) humans from these processes of production, and thus makes them believe that the market, commodities or technological objects are autonomous agents, endowed with their own intelligence, and able to define the world” (Treré & Barassi, 2015). The inequality in this transaction between owners and users affect the users far more by stripping them of both their agency and their self-awareness of that loss of agency. In Net-authoritarianism?: How web ideologies reinforce political hierarchies in the Italian 5 Star Movement (2015), Treré & Barassi describe Grillo and Casaleggio’s internet utopia as a “techno-political space where all persons will be able to decide in relation to the political choices they are involved in, because every citizen will be part of a collective intelligence.”
While democracy is often associated with a centralized governing body, in The Dark Side of Digital Politics: Understanding the Algorithmic Manufacturing of Consent and the Hindering of Online Dissidence (Treré, 2016), Treré discusses the real-life effects of what happens when political systems use deep-rooted power dynamics of technological imperialism. He argues that there is nothing inherently democratic about digital media, and the technological advances benefit those in power to a greater degree than the masses, forcing them to “struggle against increasingly sophisticated techniques of control and repression that exploit the very mechanisms that many consider to be emancipatory technologies” (Treré, 2016).
In referring to the increasingly powerful presence of “big data”, he discusses the limitations and errors associated with the datafication of citizens’ digital media presence for the explicit use of political oppression. The first is reminiscent of Tufecki’s technodeterminism, in that the neoliberal hegemony sells the public on the use of digital media as a way to provide a sense of agency in overseeing accountability and transparency: the platforms themselves are seen as the fix. In Treré’s words, “the issue of accountability should be framed as a complex political problem, rather than a technical one … the voice of citizens does not speak in a vacuum, but rather within the boundaries and the limitations of contemporary neoliberalism, that systematically denies and undermines it” (Treré, 2016). Being given a superficial means of power requires the citizens’ use of the platforms, which feeds back into the worsening effects of datafication and subjugation by the ruling elites.
Treré’s second point is about the channels through which the ruling class are able to exert their influence, while the public’s accessibility to these same channels is slim to none. On top of their “traditional channels of propaganda, such as the powerful and biased mainstream media apparatus”, the neoliberal power structure is also able to:
hire crowds of sympathisers that can boost their image on digital platforms, deploy armies of bots and trolls that can be activated to sabotage dissent and hinder critical voices on social media, and infiltrate movements with imposter techies who can use websites to steal sensible activists’ data (Treré, 2016).
These strategies are examples of the inequalities between the working and ruling classes because their use is reliant on the social capital and wealth of the party that uses them. The working groups advocating for social change typically cannot rely on the same systemic imbalances that governments or corporations do; in order to create a system of democracy and equal accessibility, these systemic inequalities must be explicitly exposed, creatively engaged, and tirelessly watched.
Democracy
In The Political Web (2013), Dahlgren writes at length about one of the basic tenets of democracy: participation. Participation is a necessary aspect of democracy because as a system of social and political governance by and for the public, it requires the input of an informed and engaged public. However, as Dahlgren points out, creating that active citizenry requires time and money, both of which are not easily afforded in late capitalist society. He also makes a point to note that our society is one “where many actors are competing intensely for our attention through the media … just having an interest does not automatically mean we will take an interest” (Dahlgren, 2013). This “attention deficit” also depends on which causes or movements are being exposed to us at any given moment, which, as mentioned in the last section, must be critically observed through the lens of algorithmic and corporate control.
Dahlgren also discusses the similar natures of development both democratically and technologically. He writes that democracy is an “ongoing project faced with shifting circumstances and driven by actors with varying commitments” (Dahlgren, 2013), and that because of the multifaceted and ever-changing landscape of what we focus on, when, and how, our attention is constantly being diverted to another issue to be fixed or a position to be advocated. This rhizomatic nature is paralleled by the constant change of algorithms and hardware, which Dahlgren classifies as different models of convergence:
Firstly, there is the basic ongoing technological convergence of computers and digital media, where older media are constantly being reinvented and reformatted to mesh with the new possibilities. Upgrades are incessant. Seen from this angle, the web is technologically constantly in motion. Secondly, there are organisational convergences, perhaps most significantly between the older institutions of the mass media and the newer online actors, with new trade-offs and syntheses steadily emerging. The actors here are many, and the competition, fusions, buy-outs and bankruptcies continue apace, with a very few giants emerging to dominate the web landscape. Thirdly, we have the convergence of one-to-one communication with the one-to-many; this blend of mass and interactive communication is at the heart of social media and signals a historically new communicative capacity accessible to large segments of the world’s population. Finally, we have a number of convergence models regarding content: multimedia (where words, images, and sounds can be combined integrated on the same device by virtue of the shared digital language); transmedia (where the same content is dispersed across a variety of platforms); and mash-ups (which involve sampling, remixing, and reconstituting texts) (Dahlgren, 2013).
Despite the variable nature of change, Dahlgren argues that the change itself has a tendency to lean towards markets and privatization and away from what he calls a “formal, accountable political system” (Dahlgren, 2013). I find the political system less than able to be held accountable precisely due to the incessantly hungry behemoth of private interests in political funding, without even properly discussing issues like election systems, voting rights, gerrymandering, and campaign finance. However, it is important to understand that while we are not a democracy, we have elements of democracy in our political structures, and barriers actively preventing democratic intervention in social and digital structures as well.
One such act of intervention according to Forestal (2017) is trolling, which is “a specific kind of political activity that is marked by a refusal to participate in the kind of productive exchange of ideas that marks democratic politics.” In terms of digital media, this is displayed by using language and discourse tactics that are meant to either end the dialog or evoke an emotional reaction, either of which can then be used to manipulate or detract the dialog further, all while utilizing the digital barrier to attempt anonymity and disown socially agreed upon customs and ethics of communication. While trolling can and does regularly occur at an individual, interpersonal level, it is also a tenacious habit of radical, fringe, or otherwise non-mainstream groups.
The focus of Forestal’s argument in The Architecture Of Political Spaces: Trolls, Digital Media, And Deweyan Democracy (2017) lies in Dewey’s democratic ideal of the “neighborly community”, which is exemplified by “reciprocity, accommodation, and inclusion.” Forestal writes that the focus on subjects themselves, such as individuals, systems, and behaviors, is insufficient without the context of how these online community spaces are built, managed, and used. She states the key to making Deweyan democracy applicable in digital media is “boundedness” and flexibility: “with clearly demarcated and relatively circumscribed boundaries, we are more likely to encounter one another repeatedly, forming long-term relationships that are marked by reciprocity, mutual trust, and accommodation. And with flexible spaces that encourage us to seek out new experiences and encounters, individuals are more likely to develop the inclusive and creative habits of Deweyan democrats” (Forestal, 2017).
Summary
In conclusion, this study provided perspectives of democratic engagement in digital media in the hopes that a societal self-reflection of our recent shift in communication values and processes will provide a clear diagnosis of possible causes. While blame may be applied to users or the technology itself, it is important to contextualize the structure of digital spaces in terms of societal, technological, and democratic power dynamics. Future research based on these topics will likely include a greater focus on specific examples of corporatization on digital social movements, as well as on community-based research into harboring political intimacy: “the ability to see one’s interlocutor as a whole person, as more than their opinions, arguments, and justifications” (Forestal, 2017).
References
Dahlgren, P. (2013). The Political Web. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Forestal, J. (2017). The architecture of political spaces: trolls, digital media, and Deweyan democracy. American Political Science Review, 111(1), 149–161.
García, R., & Treré, E. (2014). The #YoSoy132 movement and the struggle for media democratization in Mexico. Convergence, 20(4), 496–510.
Gerbaudo, P. (2012). Tweets and the streets: Social media and contemporary activism. London: Pluto.
Treré, E. (2016). The dark side of digital politics: Understanding the algorithmic manufacturing of consent and the hindering of online dissidence. IDS Bulletin, 47(1). Retrieved from http://bulletin.ids.ac.uk/idsbo/article/view/41/html
Treré, E., & Barassi, V. (2015). Net-authoritarianism?: How web ideologies reinforce political hierarchies in the Italian 5 Star Movement. Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, Iii(3), 287–304.
Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. New Haven; London: Yale University Press.
