Stefania Milan

WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and the Exercise of Individuality: Protesting in the Cloud

When WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video in spring 2010, featuring a US army helicopter shooting Iraqi civilians, cyberactivism was not a hot topic in the mainstream media. However, thanks to the ability to leverage the potential of the Internet to influence political debate, WikiLeaks quickly imposed itself as a headline-grabbing organization. The mass media fell in love with WikiLeaks, not least because of its enigmatic nature, its organizational model based on individuality, and the juicy revelations about its frontman Julian Assange. In the wake of WikiLeaks’ major releases that year, the amorphous online network known as Anonymous also came under the spotlight, notably for its pro-WikiLeaks cyberattacks. In February 2011, a CNN journalist wrote, “Perhaps the most controversial incarnation of the WikiLeaks model comes from Anonymous” (CNN, 2011).

When Algorithms Shape Collective Action: Social Media and the Dynamics of Cloud Protesting:

How does the algorithmically mediated environment of social media restructure social action? This article combines social movement studies and science and technology studies to explore the role of social media in the organization, unfolding, and diffusion of contemporary protests. In particular, it examines how activists leverage the technical properties of social media to develop a joint narrative and a collective identity. To this end, it offers the notion of cloud protesting as a theoretical approach and framework for empirical analysis. Cloud protesting indicates a specific type of mobilization that is grounded on, modeled around, and enabled by social media platforms and mobile devices and the virtual universes they identify. The notion emphasizes both the productive mediation of social and mobile media and the importance of activists’ sense-making activities. It also acknowledges that social media set in motion a process that is sociotechnical in nature rather than merely sociological or communicative, and thus can be understood only by intersecting the material and the symbolic dimensions of contemporary digitally mediated collective action. The article shows how the specific materiality of social media intervenes in the actors’ meaning work by fostering four mechanisms—namely performance, interpellation, temporality, and reproducibility—which concur to create a “politics of visibility” that alters traditional identity dynamics. In addition, it exposes the connection between organizational patterns and the role of individuals, explaining how the politics of visibility is the result of a process that originates and ends within the individual—which ultimately creates individuals-in-the-group rather than groups.

The Alternative Epistemologies of Data Activism

Abstract As datafication progressively invades all spheres of contemporary society, citizens grow increasingly aware of the critical role of information as the new fabric of social life. This awareness triggers new forms of civic engagement and political action that we term “data activism”. Data activism indicates the range of sociotechnical practices that interrogate the fundamental paradigm shift brought about by datafication. Combining Science and Technology Studies with Social Movement Studies, this theoretical article offers a foretaste of a research agenda on data activism. It foregrounds democratic agency vis-à-vis datafication, and unites under the same label ways of affirmative engagement with data (“proactive data activism”, e. g. databased advocacy) and tactics of resistance to massive data collection (“reactive data activism”, e. g. encryption practices), understood as a continuum along which activists position and reposition themselves and their tactics. The article argues that data activism supports the emergence of novel epistemic cultures within the realm of civil society, making sense of data as a way of knowing the world and turning it into a point of intervention and generation of data countercultures. It offers the notion of data activism as a heuristic tool for the study of new forms of political participation and civil engagement in the age of datafication, and explores data activism as an evolving theoretical construct susceptible to contestation and revision.

Four steps to community media as a development tool

Community media represent a crucial input in development processes, playing an important role in democratisation, social struggles, and awareness raising. But they often face difficulties on the financial and legal levels due to the constraints created by national media laws. This paper shows the link between community communication and human development. It provides suggestions for development advocates and communities regarding advocacy for a policy environment supportive of community media. It reflects on the licensing process and financial sustainability of the projects. In demonstrating how practically media policy can be reshaped to meet civil society needs, two case studies are considered: the UK, where the communication regulator has opened a process to license community radios; and Brazil, where thousands of ‘illegal’ community stations are facing repression, but where the regulator has inaugurated a consultation process with practitioners.

Ways of Seeing Data: Towards a Critical Literacy for Data Visualizations as Research Objects and Research Devices

Gray, Bounegru, Milan and Ciuccarelli contribute towards a critical literacy for data visualizations as research objects and devices. The chapter argues for methodological reflexivity around the use of data visualizations in research as both instruments and objects of study. The authors develop a heuristic framework for studying three forms of mediation which data visualizations enact – drawing on research and insights from new media studies, science and technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, cultural studies and critical theory. The chapter illustrates these three forms of mediation with an analysis of visualizations of public finances from civil society organizations, media outlets and public institutions. The authors conclude with an argument towards a broader program of critical literacy for reading and doing research with data visualizations.

The Internet as a Global/Local Site of Contestation: The Case of Iran

This chapter sheds light on the role of the Internet as a site of contestation capable of connecting the local and the global dimension of a protest in countries with a virtually closed political arena. It takes Iran as an exemplary case for the study of the technology-related protest cultures that have emerged at the fringes of a heavily controlled cyberspace. We compare the widespread use of the microblogging platform Twitter and the chat application Telegram, inserting them in a broader geopolitical analysis. We understand Telegram as an emancipatory communication technology (Milan in Social Movements and Their Technologies: Wiring Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2013) and highlight its role in facilitating the exercise of a democratic agency during the 2016 Iranian Parliamentary elections. Relying on interview data and desk research, and positioned at the intersection of media, science and technology, and social movement studies, this chapter adds to our understanding of the complex relation between authoritarian regimes and their digital opposition.

Technopolitics in the Age of Big Data

‘Big data’ offer novel opportunities for civic engagement and foster the emergence of data activism, a form of technopolitics from the ground-up that assumes people’s active engagement with data for empowerment. Proactive data activism, in particular, sees citizens taking advantage of the possibilities offered by data for advocacy and social change. This chapter combines social movement studies and media studies to analyze the emergence of proactive data activism in the Latin American continent. Analyzing the case of InfoAmazonia—a project blending citizen participation and data analysis to generate news about the endangered Amazon region—this chapter adds to our understanding of technopolitics as a way to reinterpret reality, empower people, facilitate collective action, and challenge the establish social norms embedded in our understanding of technology and social change. Furthermore, it contributes to the understanding of how data can restructure social reality, and in particular civil society action.

Autonomous infrastructure for a suckless internet

How can we promote an internet that respects human rights? Investing in autonomous infrastructure built and operated by politically motivated techies, who put their skills at the service of the public interest, may be the answer.

Coding and encoding rights in internet infrastructure

This article explores bottom-up grassroots ordering in internet governance, investigating the efforts by a group of civil society actors to inscribe human rights in internet infrastructure, lobbying the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Adopting a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective, we approach this struggle as a site of contestation, and expose the sociotechnical imaginaries animating policy advocacy. Combining quantitative mailing-list analysis, participant observation and qualitative discourse analysis, the article observes civil society in action as it contributes to shape policy in the realm of institutional and infrastructure design.

Low power to the people: Pirates, protest, and politics in FM radio activism

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