Digital media and democracy: tactics in hard times

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” explains an unnamed Bush administration official. This quote sets the tone for a new edited collection reflecting on the role of the media in constructing reality. The lack of a “truth” does not quell the public demand for one, as Boler aptly points out in her introduction: “The desire and longing for truth expressed by the public demands for media accountability is in tension with the coexisting recognition of the slipperiness of meaning” (p. 7). Media, then, in all their forms, become a central battleground for forging meaning and shaping reality. “Media are the most powerful institutions on earth,” Amy Goodman of Democracy Now claims, “more powerful than any bomb, more powerful than any missile” (p. 199). This series of interviews and articles explores how incumbent powers and media activists compete to produce and reproduce their versions of reality through the media. The contributors use the format to discuss the tenuous relationship between media and democracy and the changing role of the news media, as well as to present examples of tactical media. The resulting collection provides an excellent introduction to the current, troubling media landscape and its tactical opportunities.

Digital media and democracy: tactics in hard times

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” explains an unnamed Bush administration official. This quote sets the tone for a new edited collection reflecting on the role of the media in constructing reality. The lack of a “truth” does not quell the public demand for one, as Boler aptly points out in her introduction: “The desire and longing for truth expressed by the public demands for media accountability is in tension with the coexisting recognition of the slipperiness of meaning” (p. 7). Media, then, in all their forms, become a central battleground for forging meaning and shaping reality. “Media are the most powerful institutions on earth,” Amy Goodman of Democracy Now claims, “more powerful than any bomb, more powerful than any missile” (p. 199). This series of interviews and articles explores how incumbent powers and media activists compete to produce and reproduce their versions of reality through the media. The contributors use the format to discuss the tenuous relationship between media and democracy and the changing role of the news media, as well as to present examples of tactical media. The resulting collection provides an excellent introduction to the current, troubling media landscape and its tactical opportunities.

Two Decades of Tactical Media and Art in Brazil Enhancing a Feminist Perspective

This article narrates our work through archive and cartography to discuss a body of research that runs throughout our lives - as producers, developers, non-artists, artists, archivists, researchers. We have been engaging in networks that develop the internet, tactical media, and free knowledge since the beginning of 2000 in Brazil, in a series of festivals, projects, platforms and other forms of gatherings. A lot of this history is lost in databases and we have been putting our efforts together to bring this digital and material archive together, republishing, editing and re activating it. At the same time, it is inevitable that we bring our own perspective to building the archive, what we identify as a feminist perspective, a weaving of histories (reinventeceduras) and modes of production that are also a “maintenance” of technical infrastructure as a practice of care, connected to the reproduction of our own lives. Cartography is a concept and tool that allows for the gathering of the polyphony of the voices engaged, a cartography that is not total, opening up for collective analysis and for the intervention in the present and future.

Electronic Civil Disobedience

This chapter discusses the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group that developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. EDT, like many artivist groups, understood that the “politics of fear” set-off by 9/11 would be used by governments to establish almost everything under the signs of cyberwar, cyberterrorism, and cybercrime in order stop the development of Digital Zapatismo, electronic civil disobedience, hacktivism, and tactical media work across the arcs of Latin America and beyond. This essay establishes the conditions that were navigated by EDT and artivists working across digital platforms to establish new network gestures that would connect and amplify new visions of social formations emerging across Latin America, especially from the indigenous communities that were not deterred by the establishment of post-9/11 planetary war.

Local Broadcasting as Tactical Media

Against the backdrop of struggles that local broadcasters in Turkey who advocate for Kurdish minority rights have endured, I discuss local broadcast journalists’ tactics for creating and maintaining programming that caters to the ongoing Kurdish conflict. Local ethnic broadcasting in Kurdish provinces has long strived to offer an alternative discourse than that of the state propaganda and to mobilize political support within and outside Turkey. In order to illustrate the role of Kurdish activist journalism in political mobilization, I analyze examples of local radio programming from 2010 to 2013, a period during which broadcasters in Kurdish provinces enjoyed relative freedom. I aim to illustrate the instrumentality of activist journalism in an authoritarian regime, and the ways in which local broadcasting is utilized as tactical media by both activist journalists and the community they serve.

Circulation and Exhibition

Taking into account the tactical and innovative ways in which filmmakers resist assigned peripheral modes and spaces of cultural circulation, I demonstrate the operation of an idea critical to independence, that of resistance to the commercially reified roles of consumer–producer assigned to the artist–audience relationship. Circulation I contend, is re-framed as a forum for dialogue that creates “involved” publics rather than limited to frameworks of cultural dissemination marked by logics of quantity, profit and markets. I argue that the construction of participant-publics and the re-evaluation of cultural ownership or ‘copyright’, repurpose both technological and historical norms, giving shape to Geert Lovink’s (1997) proposition of tactical media through which filmmakers create alternative systems of exhibition containing the vital potential to disrupt a highly regulated public domain.

Metodologias feministas no ensino da comunicação: Um relato de experiência no curso de Publicidade e Propaganda.

O presente artigo visa relatar a experiência do processo de aplicabilidade de metodologias feministas associadas ao conceito de mídia tática no curso de Publicidade e Propaganda da UFPE. Historicamente o ideal de aprendizagem dos cursos de Publicidade no Brasil seguem o raciocínio imposto para o mercado, no qual estudo e aplicação da criatividade se concentra do consumo e do capital (OLIVEIRA, 2016). À luz das teorias feministas e de gênero como Haraway (1995), Butler (2008), Rubin (1992), propusemos como metodologias feministas (ADRIÃO, 2014) o ensino da mídia tática (GARCIA; LOVINK, 1997) a partir de técnicas para trabalhos com grupos (ADRIÃO, 2014; BARÓ, 1992; FREIRE, 1987) e recursos da arteterapia na graduação de comunicação. Desenvolvidas no contexto da crítica à neutralidade e ao positivismo nas ciências, as metodologias feministas são, de forma mais ampla, estratégias ou instrumentos de mudança social baseadas no ideal de equidade social de gênero (NEVES; NOGUEIRA, 2015) e também de raça, classe social e outros marcadores. Transgredindo a lógica hegemônica da comunicação social e de seu ensino, objetivamos promover um diálogo entre o conhecimento acadêmico e empírico dos movimentos sociais, na construção de uma comunicação social implicada politicamente. Em sala, metodologias participativas e dialógicas ancoradas em propostas como as de Paulo Freire (1987) e Martin Baró (1992), associadas aos recursos da arteterapia que visam o estímulo à criatividade e à expressão de si. Sob a forma de oficinas, discutimos e produzimos mídias historicamente utilizadas por movimentos sociais, tais como: fanzine, estêncil, detournement e memes. Pretendemos a subversão e o uso tático dessas mídias como forma de ampliar a visão sobre a propaganda e a comunicação social das/dos futuras/os publicitárias/os, e de promover um redirecionamento da criatividade e das vozes das/dos sujeitas/os que a produzem. Como resultados, apresentaremos o uso da mídia tática enquanto metodologia feminista na produção e ensino da atividade publicitária.Metodologias feministas. Mídia tática. Publicidade. Comunicação. Gênero.AbstractFeminist methodologies in the teaching of communication: An experience report in the course of publicity and advertisingThis article aims to report the experience of the applicability process of feminist methodologies associated to the concept of tactical media in the graduation course of Advertising and Propaganda of UFPE. Historically the ideal of learning of graduations in Advertising in Brazil follow the reasoning for the market, in which study and application of creativity concentrate consumption and capital (OLIVEIRA, 2016). In the light of feminist and gender theories such as Haraway (1995), Butler (2008), Rubin (1992), we proposed the teaching of tactical media (GARCIA; LOVINK, 1997) as feminist methodologies (ADRIÃO, 2014) work with groups (ADRIÃO, 2014; BARÓ, 1992; FREIRE, 1987) and art therapy resources in the graduation of communication. Developed in the context of the critique of neutrality and positivism in the sciences, feminist methodologies are, more broadly, strategies or instruments of social change based on the ideal of gender social equality (NEVES; NOGUEIRA, 2015) and also of race, social class and other markers. Transgressing the hegemonic logic of social communication and its teaching, we aim to promote a dialogue between the academic and empirical knowledge of social movements, in the construction of a politically involved social communication. In the classroom, participatory and dialogical methodologies anchored in proposals such as Paulo Freire (1987) and Martin Baró (1992), associated with the resources of art therapy aimed at stimulating creativity and self expression. In the form of workshops, we discuss and produce media historically used by social movements, such as: fanzine, stencil, detournement and memes. We intend to subversion and the tactical use of these media as a way to expand the vision of propaganda and the media of the future, and to promote a redirect of creativity and the voices of the subjects that the produce. As a result, we will introduce the use of tactical media while feminist methodology in the production and teaching of advertising activity.Feminist methodologies. Tactical media. Advertising. Communication. Gender.

(Micro)Politics of Algorithmic Music

The chapter explores a shift of emphasis from the macro to micro scale of algorithmic music, by making reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of micropolitics, microtemporality in the work of Wolfgang Ernst, and Shintaro Miyazaki’s concept of algorhythmics. By drawing together tactical media and media archaeology to address the politics of algorithmic music, an argument is developed that ‘tactical media archaeology’ offers an analytical method for developing alternative compositions. By emphasizing more speculative approaches and broader ecologies of practice exemplified by the critical engineering of Martin Howse, the chapter claims that algorithms need to understood as part of temporal, relational, and contingent operations that are sensitive to their conditions and future trajectories.