Maria Bakardjieva

Subactivism: Lifeworld and Politics in the Age of the Internet

The potential of the Internet to enhance civic participation has been examined in numerous theoretical and empirical studies. This article concentrates specifically on the role the medium plays in affording and supporting new forms of making sense of public issues and getting involved in civic activities that evolve at the level of everyday life. Characteristically, these forms do not square neatly with elevated notions of political and civic participation. Their significance easily escapes recognition. Building on existing conceptualizations such as those of “life politics” (Giddens, 1991),“sub-politics” (Beck, 1997) and “the political” Mouffe (2005), and “democratic rationalization” (Feenberg, 1999), the concept of subactivism is proposed with the objective to expand received notions of what does and should count as civic engagement.

Virtual Community: No ‘Killer Implication’

NEW MEDIA, NEW COMMUNITIES Thirty-five years after Licklider and Taylor (1968) first envisioned virtual communities, and exactly 10 years after Rheingold (1993) popularized the concept, online sociability is a fact of everyday life. According to a Pew Internet & American Life Project report (2001), 84 percent of all American internet users contacted an online group at least once and 79 percent of these users remained in regular contact with at least one group. Pew noted that more people participated in these groups than bought things online. Are all online groups virtual communities? The answer depends of course on the definition of community. If face-to-face contact is required by definition, then obviously no community can form online. We prefer to approach the question from the standpoint of Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined community: ‘All communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined’ (1983: 18) Thus, some sort of virtuality is a normal aspect of community life, regardless of the nature of the medium on which it relies. Anderson argues that communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Communication media play a central role in determining the different styles in which communities have been imagined throughout history. The great sacred communities of the past (Christendom, the Islamic Ummah, the Middle Kingdom) were imagined through the medium of a sacred language and script. The birth of the imagined community of the nation involved two ‘new media’, the novel and the newspaper, that flowered in Europe in the 18th century (see Anderson, 1983). Broadcast media added a new dynamic to the imagined community new media & society

Reconfiguring the mediapolis: New media and civic agency:

The summer of 2007 marked the growing visibility of blogs and bloggers in the Bulgarian public sphere. A case in point was a spontaneous civic protest spurred by a decision of the Supreme Administrative Court to strip a territory in the south-east of Bulgaria (Strandja Mountain) of its status as a protected natural reserve. Young people and environmentalist groups went out in the streets to challenge the decision, their actions being organized and reported by blogs, websites and text messages. These brief but centrally placed and well-attended civic actions compelled not only the mass media, but also parliamentarians to put the issue on their agendas. This article analyzes the relationship between media messages and street action as well as the dynamics of inter-media exchanges and the profiles of the actors behind them.

Do clouds have politics? Collective actors in social media land

This commentary reviews some of the central theoretical concepts and contentions that represent the intellectual scaffold of this special issue. It looks closely at the notions of collective identity and collective action as they figure in the work of Alberto Melucci. It then critically assesses the argument that these notions should give way to a new model emphasizing how social media connect the actions undertaken by independent individuals. The rich corpus of research reported in the articles is surveyed with the goal to map the positions the different authors take along the collective versus connective dichotomy and to highlight the ways in which their contributions advance our understanding of identity, connectivity and political action in the social media environment.

Mundane Citizenship: New Media and Civil Society in Bulgaria

Abstract This essay examines the new forms of civic and political engagement that the increasing accessibility of internet-based media has precipitated in the Bulgarian context. It discusses the results of three case studies which focus respectively on online forum discussions of a significant political event; a campaign of eco-protests; and the activism emerging from a website and forum dedicated to motherhood. The essay argues that new media have brought civic and political issues and the possibility to deliberate and act on them into the everyday lives of Bulgarians. As a result, the voice of Bulgarian civil society has grown stronger and has been able to penetrate the sphere of formal politics, sometimes with important consequences.

Rationalizing Sociality: An Unfinished Script for Socialbots

This article takes the concept and some of the existing applications of socialbots—software robots that operate on social networking sites and present themselves as human users—as an occasion to trace the evolution of online sociality. The argument mobilizes theories of social rationalization from Max Weber to contemporary critical theory to demonstrate that the appearance of automated profiles (socialbots) on social networking platforms can be seen as a logical step in the progressive enclosure of online social interaction in standardized, simplified, and trivialized forms, frames, and gestures. Critical questions concerning what the growth of robo-sociality may mean for individual users and the online public sphere are posed with a view to charting the directions for a needed public debate.

Home Satellite TV Reception in Bulgaria

This article examines recent changes in the media situation in Bulgaria, particularly in the field of television supply and consumption. It focuses on the problem of how changed social conditions have influenced the adoption of home satellite TV reception equipment. The growing pluralization of Bulgarian society and the increasing differentiation of personal information and entertainment needs are indicated as major prerequisites for the diffusion of the new communication medium. The results of an in-depth study of the motivation of early adopters are reported. An attempt at a typology of satellite television use patterns is made.

Social media and the McDonaldization of friendship

Abstract This article employs the concept of McDonaldization introduced by George Ritzer (1993) in his Weberian analysis of the processes of formal rationalization characteristic of late modern consumer society to reflect on the social and cultural implications of the most recent wave of communication technologies – social media. It argues that social media smuggle formal rationality into the elementary forms of social interaction, most clearly illustrated through the way they redefine the notion of friendship. In an attempt to lay the ground for a “multiperspectivist approach” (Kellner, 1999) to this phenomenon, the article enters the Weberian argument into a conversation with other styles of theorizing social media such as Marxism, Critical Theory and sociological phenomenology.

The personalization of engagement: the symbolic construction of social media and grassroots mobilization in Canadian newspapers

This article explores the symbolic construction of civic engagement mediated by social media in Canadian newspapers. The integration of social media in politics has created a discursive opening for reimagining engagement, partly as a result of enthusiastic accounts of the impact of digital technologies upon democracy. By means of a qualitative content analysis of Canadian newspaper articles between 2005 and 2014, we identify several discursive articulations of engagement: First, the articles offer the picture of a wide range of objects of engagement, suggesting a civic body actively involved in governance processes. Second, engagement appears to take place only reactively, after decisions are made. Finally, social media become the new social glue, bringing isolated individuals together and thus enabling them to pressure decision-making institutions. We argue that, collectively, these stories construct engagement as a deeply personal gesture that is nevertheless turned into a communal experience by the affordances of technology. The conclusion unpacks what we deem as the ambiguity at the heart of this discourse, considering its implications for democratic politics and suggesting avenues for the further monitoring of the technologically enabled personalization of engagement.

The mediatization of leadership: grassroots digital facilitators as organic intellectuals, sociometric stars and caretakers

ABSTRACT Scholars of both resource mobilization theory and new social movement theory recognize leadership as integral to traditional social movements. Following global protest movements of 2011, some now characterize movements relying on social media as horizontal and leaderless. Whether due to an organizational shift to networks over bureaucracies or due to a change in values, many social movements in the present protest cycle do not designate visible leadership. Does leadership in social media activism indeed disappear or does it take on new forms? This paper undertakes an in-depth analysis of data obtained through interviews, event observations and analysis of media content related to three Canadian cases of civic mobilization of different scale, all of which strategically employed social media. The paper proposes a conceptual framework for understanding the role of these mobilizations’ organizers as organic intellectuals, sociometric stars and caretakers. By looking closely at the three cases through the lenses offered by these concepts, we identify the specific styles that characterize digitally mediatized civic leadership.