Transmedia Mobilization, Participatory Politics, and the Civic Imagination
In October, 2011, an army of people dressed as Zombies, many of them from Zombiecon, a horror fan convention joined the protesters in Washington Square Park, then the home base for Occupy Wall Street, standing in for corporate zombies that were sucking the lifeblood of the 99 percent. Seniors, not to mention the zombies themselves and other protesters, were texting, tweeting, and sending photos or videos: passing the word was the point. This is what democracy looks like in the 21st century, where a more playful style of activism is emerging; one that owes much to fan culture.
The roots of contemporary protest movements such as Occupy can be traced to the 1960s counter culture, however, the tactics have shifted from disrupting the signals or cultural jamming to a politics of circulation in which activist groups surf media flows. Instead of sabotaging symbols of popular culture they capitalize on their power as a shared resource to reach wider audiences. Occupy in that sense, was more a provocation than a movement (Trope and Swartz 2011).
By Any Media Necessary addresses a central paradox between a decay of public trust in core institutions on one hand and an expansion of the communicative and organizational resources available to everyday people on the other hand, where grassroots media are being deployed as a tool to challenge the failed mechanisms of institutional politics. We are signaling that youth are now pursuing politics through other languages than the ones that have been historically acknowledged within research on institutional politics and social movements. Hence, this chapter is an invitation for readers to rethink what counts as politics, where there are signs of political, social and cultural changes occurring around the edges of dominant political institutions.
Across this opening chapter, we introduce four foundational concepts that will inform the case study chapters that follow.
1) Transmedia Mobilization:unlike recent accounts of protest movements which have primarily focused on the political effects of singular platforms, we envision a transmedia mobilization (Costanza-Chock, 2010) in which young activists share assets, and deploy any and all available media channels and platforms to get their message across, “By Any Media Necessary”. Unlike traditional activism which seeks to unify the message, transmedia activists seek to diversify both the message and channel, where communication is not only about content creation, but aggregation, curation and remix. We also discuss through contemporary examples how political story telling can be a strong contribution to a long political process, where the co-creation of shared identities and mythologies can help cement bonding within a movement as well as enhance bridging to potential supporters.
2) Civic Imagination is the capacity to imagine alternatives to current situations. What distinguishes this concept of civic imagination from other concepts of political and public imagination is that it is a cross over from imagining the abstract to imagining things that have not yet been experienced; it is less structured and more fluid. Consequently, we argue that a first step towards change in how we perceive and treat each other would be to develop in oneself the ability to imagine democracy.
3) From Participatory Culture to Participatory
Politics: the book’s focus is not
on new technologies per se, but about the possibilities (real and imagined) that we might use these tools to achieve greater political power and the way that cultural practices are being deployed towards explicitly political ends. Today’s participatory culture is the product of decades of struggle not a natural outgrowth of technological changes. Present day grassroots movements acquire control through means of cultural production and circulation. This chapter situates the term participatory politics amid a flow of views about what constitutes politics emphasizing that it is an aspiration as much as it is a reality. This is all discussed while acknowledging the extant structural inequalities, where despite the fact that new platforms do enable new forms of collective action, they do not always guarantee the inculcation of democratic values or the adoption of a progressive agenda.
4) Connected Learning: at the end of the chapter, we explore the mechanisms that help young people move from being socially and culturally active to being politically active. Through the concept of connected learning, civic organizations can help their young learners move swiftly into forms of social and political engagement by connecting the political realm to other activities they care about.
The discussion and the examples advanced in this chapter all drive us to envision a shift in the way
democracy in the 21st century is being practiced and imagined by both American youth and movements.
