Politics After Hope by Henry A. Giroux

Author:Henry A. Giroux [Giroux, Henry A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317254003
Google: 9RceCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-03T06:00:18+00:00

Chapter 15

The Iranian Uprisings and the Challenge of the New Media

Rethinking the Politics of Representation

The new communications technology and the diverse social networking sites associated with it are generally represented in the dominant media in terms that are utterly depoliticizing and privatizing and are reduced thereby to personal tools and entertainment devices that allegedly enamour young people all over the world.1 Little is said about the prevalent technological and market-driven rationalities that guide the dominant uses of the electronically based media or how the diverse screen cultures that enable it—such as Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking platforms—either enhance or limit matters of agency, ethics, knowledge, and social responsibility.2 Herbert Marcuse’s concern about how instrumental rationality has undermined technology’s emancipatory possibilities, reducing it to a tool for domination, is generally ignored, except by a few critical scholars whose work is too often missing from larger public debates about the new media.3 For instance, Zygmunt Bauman warns how screen culture and its virtual networking sites undermine democratic notions of the social while promoting a culture of privatization, a culture more akin to the dictates of neoliberalism than to democracy. He writes: “We talk compulsively about networks and try obsessively to conjure them (or at least their phantoms) out of ‘speed dating,’ personal ads and magic incantations of ‘messaging’ because we painfully miss the safety nets which the true networks of kinship, friends and brothers-in-fate used to provide matter-of-factly, with or without our efforts. Mobile-telephone directories stand for the missing community and are hoped to deputize for the missing intimacy; they are expected to carry a load of expectations they lack the strength to lift, let alone to hold.”4

Even though Bauman indeed captures the transformation of North American consumer culture through the new digital media, other sites have also emerged that defy, even as they are made possible by, neoliberal logic and technological domination. Perhaps most significantly, the democratic protests in Iran about alleged electoral fraud in the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009, have rekindled questions about the relations between the new media and the terms on which politics operates, including the new media’s potential to revitalize the public sphere and its construction of social practices and modes of communication that cannot be defined exclusively within the power relations of the nation-state. As the uprisings in Iran illustrated, new electronic technologies and the popular social networking sites they have produced have transformed both the landscape of media production and reception and the ability of state power to define the borders and boundaries of what constitutes the very nature of political engagement. Indeed, politics itself has been increasingly redefined by a screen culture and newly emergent public spaces of education and resistance embraced by students and other young people.5 For example, nearly 75 percent of Iranians now own cell phones.6 Screen culture and its attendant electronic technologies have created a return to a politics in which many young people in Iran are forcefully asserting their power to act and

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