Slides for my keynote address at the Texas Digital Humanities Conference 2015. https://conferences.tdl.org/uta/index.php/txdhc/index/pages/view/keynote

1. S O C I A L M E D I A A N D
R E V O L U T I O N S
I M A G I N E D C O M M U N I T I E S A N D P O L I T I C A L A C T I O N
@adelinekoh

2. C A N S O C I A L M E D I A
C A U S E R E V O L U T I O N S ?
A R A B S P R I N G , O C C U P Y M O V E M E N T S , F E R G U S O N
@adelinekoh

3. N O ?
S L A C T I V I S M , C L I C T I V I S M , “ F E E L G O O D ” A C T I V I S M , I G N O R E S S U R V E I L L A N C E
@adelinekoh

4. M E D I A A N D C R E AT I N G C O M M U N I T I E S
@adelinekoh

5. I M A G I N E D C O M M U N I T I E S
• Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities
• Critics of social media have paid insufficient attention
to the affordances of a community created by the
medium
• Networked public sphere = next battleground
@adelinekoh

6. I M A G I N E D C O M M U N I T Y & T H E
N E T W O R K E D P U B L I C S P H E R E
@adelinekoh

7. A N D E R S O N
• print capitalism -> nationalism
• Walter Benjamin’s “homogenous, empty time” vs.
“simultaneous, messianic time”
• Prior to print capitalism—anachronism irrelevant
• Anderson: “…the medieval Christian mind had no
conception of history as an endless cause and effect or
of separations between past and present.”
@adelinekoh

8. N O L I M E
TA N G E R E
• José Rizal, Father of
Filipino nationalism
• “a dinner party being
discussed by hundreds of
unnamed people, who do
not know each other, in
quite different parts of
Manila, in a particular
month of a particular
decade”
S T O RY O F F L O R A N T E
& L A U R A I N T H E
K I N G D O M O F A L B A N I A
• Francisco Balagtas
• Does not follow
chronological order,
begins in medias res
• simultaneous pasts
created through covering
voices of characters
@adelinekoh

9. P R I N T- C A P I TA L I S M T I M E
• Imagined Community: “hypnotic confirmation of a
single community, embracing authors and readers,
moving onwards through calendrical time”
• “…the idea of a sociological organism moving
calendrically through homogenous, empty time is a
precise analogue of the idea of a nation, which is
conceived of a solid community moving steadily down
(or up) history.”
@adelinekoh

10. T H E N E T W O R K E D P U B L I C S P H E R E
@adelinekoh

11. N E T W O R K E D C O M M U N I T Y
F O C U S O N P R O D U C E R S N O T C O N S U M E R S
@adelinekoh

12. I M A G I N E D C O M M O N A L I T Y
N E W C O N N E C T I O N S
@adelinekoh

13. N E T W O R K E D P U B L I C S P H E R E
• New ‘mediascapes’ / ‘ideoscapes’ (Appadurai)
• Asynchronous communities
• New modes and node for identification and
community
@adelinekoh

14. S O C I A L M E D I A A S S P E C TA C L E :
A R E T U R N T O M A R X
@adelinekoh

15. C R I T I Q U E S O F S O C I A L M E D I A
• Focus on tools & the discursive sphere
• Brea / White“clictivism” ; Morozov, “slactivism”
@adelinekoh

16. PA R A L L E L S I N T H E H I S T O RY O F
M A R X I S M
• Counterinformation conference, Amsterdam 1999
• Eastern European movements—“changing the
system”
• Western Europe—“media tactics”
• Roots in Debord; media as Spectacle
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17. M A R X
• “material” over
“ideological”
• even found in Marx’s
notion of commodity
fetishism
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18. Y E T
• The importance of who controls information is as
important as who controls the mode of production
• “manufacture of consent” —> Chomsky
• Said: “from travelers’ tales… colonies were created”
@adelinekoh

19. W E S T E R N
M A R X I S M
• Focus on “alienation”
• Adorno & Horkheimer’s “Culture Industry”
• oppositional forms of cinema: Third Cinema vs.
First Cinema
@adelinekoh

20. S O C I A L M E D I A / C I N E M A
• Some uses of social media = some uses of Third
Cinema?
• Different media to break through different types of
alienation
@adelinekoh

21. C AV E AT S
• Cooptation of activist
platforms beyond the
state, e.g. “Operation
Lollipop”
• misinformation
• Data-mining by the state/
surveillance
@adelinekoh

22. F I N A L LY:
• Social media does not cause revolutions.
• It affords us a political space from which potentially
revolutionary communities can come into being.
• We need to pay attention to social media & the
community beyond the nation
• The battleground for hearts and minds—no longer
print, but the networked public sphere.
@adelinekoh

23. • Image Credits
• #OccupyHongKong, Pasu Ah Yeung
• #OccupyWallStreet, Marc Occil
• Evgeny Morozov, Tim Wu, New America Foundation
• Community, Yoann Jezebel