Leah Lievrouw

Alternative and Activist New Media, v. 3.0
Much of the recent promise of new media and information technologies for social and political activism, and the debates surrounding their use, have centered on their Web 2.0 features — that is, they are “social media” that enable like-minded but geographically dispersed or isolated actors and communities to interact, share concerns, and mobilize around issues and causes that matter to them. The excitement generated in the last few years by the supposed “Twitter revolutions” in the Middle East, for example, or the rapid, dramatic spread of the Occupy encampments and their free-form movement organizing strategies, was due in no small part to a sense that the “social” in social media make these devices and systems uniquely powerful modes for informal interpersonal recruitment, expression of grievances and alliances, mobilization, and gathering resources, with the power to subvert or work around traditional, centralized, mass-media channels of political agenda-setting and messaging. Not only might marginalized or oppressed groups express their views in media forms that dominant political actors and interests could not always control; activists could also use social media to mobilize support networks on a global scale. The genres of alternative and activist new media that I outlined in the first edition of Alternative and Activist New Media certainly reflected this Web 2.0/social media orientation. To some extent this presentation reflects on the sobering outcomes of recent movements and the role that digital technologies have played in them. It will explore the prospects for social and political activism as global digital networks move toward what is already called Web 3.0, where online life and culture are dominated by the capture and circulation of “big data” in remote “cloud” storage architectures open to pervasive state and private-sector surveillance, the totalizing vision of the “Internet of things,” the data-saturated hyper-personalization of online services and automated assistants, and the accelerating enclosure of the online public sphere into myriad proprietary “walled gardens” and “ecosystems.” Will there be a move from what Henry Jenkins has called “attention-based activism,” in which action amounts to audience membership in a consumerist framework of content production and consumption, to new forms of “data activism,” “data-driven activism,” or related interventionist practices like “design activism”? If so, what might these emerging projects look like? In line with the conference CFP, I will discuss three major implications of the increasingly data-centric new media landscape for democratic processes: how such systems might function as instruments of democratic politics; their consequences for the public sphere; and whether, and to what extent, they may constitute a foundation for a new kind of politics.

Biography
Leah A. Lievrouw is a Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research and writing focus on the relationship between media and information technologies and social change; recent books include Challenging Communication Research (edited for the International Communication Association; Peter Lang, 2014), and Alternative and Activist New Media (Polity, 2011). With Sonia Livingstone, she was co-editor of the four-volume Sage Benchmarks in Communication: New Media(Sage, 2009), and The Handbook of New Media (Sage, 2002; Updated Student Edition, 2006). Other edited and co-edited books include Competing Visions, Complex Realities: Social Aspects of the Information Society (with J.R. Schement; Ablex, 1987) and Mediation, Information and Communication: Information and Behavior, vol. 3(with B. Ruben; Transaction, 1990). Works currently in progress include the second edition of Alternative and Activist New Media (Polity), Foundations of Communication Theory: Communication and Technology(Blackwell), and Media and Meaning: Communication Technology and Society (Oxford University Press).

Lievrouw holds a PhD in communication theory and research from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of California, an MA in biomedical communications from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining UCLA in 1995, she was a member of the faculty of the Department of Telecommunication and Film at the University of Alabama (1991-95) and the Department of Communication in the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She has also been a visiting scholar at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and the Information and Communication Technologies and Society (ICT&S) Center at the University of Salzburg (Austria).