Communication, Culture and Social Change by Mohan Dutta

Author:Mohan Dutta
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030264703
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Participation is formulated as engagement toward inclusive citizenship. Big data and computational approaches are connected to the expressions of voice, albeit constituted within the ideological structures established by Department for International Development (DfID). Missing from the articulation of community voice are articulations of structures. The ideology of inclusive citizenship is driven by the goal of including citizens in the forms of engagement dictated by the structure, obfuscating the anchors to transforming structures. Moreover, such fetishized framing of technologically determined politics in the global South erases the strong social movements and activist organizing among subaltern communities that do not register on the digitally mediated platforms. The largely middle-class nature of digitally mediated movements, such as the anti-corruption movement in India remains erased from the discursive space and fails to critically interrogate the complicity of these movements with neoliberal governmentality. The questions—who has access to participatory spaces of technology, who is able to participate in these spaces, and what is the nature of the participatory change processes on technologically mediated platforms—are critical questions.

For movements on the Left, the techno-fetish translates into the celebration of platforms at the cost of the erasure of the broader contexts, politics and structures that constitute organizing. That much of the movement organizing takes place in everyday communities and interactions, in forming and sustaining identities of resistance, in the coming together of subaltern communities in face-to-face interactions and communicative spaces outside of the logics of capital often escapes the Whiteness of the techno-obsessed Cyber-Left at global sites of technological privilege in the North (Wolfson, 2014). The techno-fetish unwittingly replicates the logics of the very modernization paradigm that lies at the crux of the neoliberal transformation of the globe, with an ideology that places capitalist technologies (yes, these technologies, including Twitter and Facebook, are the technologies of capital) as the solutions for resistance, contributing to expanding the markets for techno-capital. Furthermore, the Whiteness of the techno-fetish violently erases the voices, narratives, and everyday work across subaltern spaces in the global South where the violent project of techno-capital is being resisted, dismantled, and alternative logics are being put forth (Ness, 2016).

Scholarship on networked movements, for instance, attends to the ways in which networks of information communication technologies catalyze change through the creation of opportunities of participation, recognition and representation, privileging the networks and simultaneously erasing the broader contexts of the protests, the organizing of the Left in streets and communities, the organizing work of traditional unions and Left parties, the demands for fair wage through traditional techniques of Left protest, such as strikes and walkouts and so on. Protests and activist movements thus enter seamlessly into the logics of planned social change interventions carried out by powerful transnational development agencies, foundations and corporations, often clandestinely (Obregon & Tufte, 2017). Protest politics emerges on a seamless continuum with neoliberal development communication and social change, converging on the centering of strategic communication (Obregon & Tufte, 2017). For United Nations agencies, Rockefeller Foundation and USAID, technologically mediated protests are incorporated into strategic communication for social change.

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