Review essay: Social media, politics and protest

Abstract

A corollary to the argument that social media politics is not simply the new politics in its entirety or purest or most developed form is that for individuals engaged in online and offline activism, the stakes are not as high as is sometimes claimed. This is by no means to downplay the efficacy of or personal investment in various causes, simply that it is as speculative to presume that someone will realise her political subjectivity most fully in mediated networks as it is to begin from the supposition that her subjectivity is under existential threat from the economic and institutional logics of social media platforms. However much someone is engaged in politics or immersed in media cultures, and however much each demands to be apprehended as a fully formed, always-already world, that someone’s whole being-in-the-world is not really at stake. This derives from Paddy Scannell’s (1996) phenomenological take on television: when we switch the thing on, we are confronted not just with content but whole worlds of frames, reference points, temporalities and value systems that insist on being grasped as they are and in toto. Furthermore, this world of television demands that we engage with it as a particular kind of self – one that understands not only the natural meaningfulness of media genres but scheduling sequences and cycles, the hierarchies of a news broadcast, and how to recognise an authoritative source.