Social media - towards a new democracy?

For the past months I have become increasingly interested in the connection between social movements and social media. Within the field of contentious politics and scholarship on new social movements there exists a common view where political movements are always involved in a struggle towards being represented according to their own needs in media. Already early in movement history tendencies can be found that political claimants made use of new technology to spread their messages, where perhaps the most clear example is the lutherans use of the new printing press during the early 16th century. This line then continues from abolitionist pamphlets, the early labour union press towards the more fanzine influenced papers of the 1980's and 1990's. 

However, the launch of the internet led to a virtual explosion of counter culture knowledge circulations, with early forums in the 1990's serving as a first example of early digital mobilization. However the largest breakthrough for the internet within movement mobilization came in the late 2000's with the launch of social media. In research this was early discussed in Clay Shirkys article from 2011 which divided the research-community into two different camps: techno-optimists and techno-negativists. In Shirkys paper it is proposed that the social media would eventually lead to movement mobilization without central co-ordination, which thus would shorten the gap between a question arising and people taking to the streets. Throughout the past decades or so, we have seen several organizations following Shirkys prediction, from the early #occupy-movement to later movement such as the #blacklivesmatters. Still Shirkys ideas have been criticized for being overly optimistic and that technology also brings forth risks such as increased survilance. 

As a contemporary political historian I am not overly sure that the development of social media will lead to an increased political participation. The famous notion of so called slacktivism is one of my key concerns, were people will think that it is sufficient to like a political post on instagram to have made a protest. But what however are rather clear to me is that social media probably have transformed the way political action is taken, as well as become an important part in changing social values. One  examples of this is the #metoo-campaign which originated as a form of protest towards sexual harassment but also helped launching a new wave of feminism. In this regard the hashtag not only created a political opportinuity to challenge pre-dominant norms, but also helped the formation of women as political agents anew. Since the hashtag was directed towards the most basic social category of all, gender, it became possible for women to constitute their own voice and demands, which re-defined both the public and private sector. 

I labelled this post as social media - towards a new democracy? since I think that research now are starting to adress the long term effects of social media on society. On the one hand, social media have managed to create enviroments were people re-defining what forms of subjects they are (man, women, ethnicities) and thus generated enabled new formations of social categories. What perhaps is most important is however that once these formations have been formed, they also allowed a greater degree of political action without the use of neither conventional social movements, lobby-groups or political parties. One of the most pressing questions is therefore not whatever or not political action have been transformed by social media or whatever or not Shirkys predictions were right. It should by this stage be rather clear that the political landscape have been transformed in ways we could not begin to guess when Faceboom was launched in the early 2000's. 

However, the question still remains on what this transformation will lead to. First and foremost it exists a clear risk that the representative democracy will not suffice to survive in this political landscape, were political action no longer are primarilly facilitated by part-movements. In the end it is possible that the launch of social media will lead to a lowered degree of faith in traditional parties since they no longer mirrors peoples way of organizing. Thereby western democracy perhaps stands for one of its greatest challenges since WWII, namely how to become legimate in a time-period where ideology matters less and less. Another question, that research only have begun to phantom is how social medias capitalist logics affects protest organizations. In research on online based social movements it have become clear that the market-driven algorithms affects not only which voices that are heard in the debate, but also the structure of political movements. One example of this is that Facebook creates a division between adminstrators and users, thus assigning people leadership even within flat organizations. Thereby, the movements have to become centralized even though this was not part of their original goals. 

Will we in the end live on what pro-pronents of Shirkys thesis describes as more of a direct-democracy based society? Or will this form of organization lead to a decline in democracy and thus end in a authocratic rule? Or will the outcomes be entirelly without our grasp? Only time will tell. There was no way for Gutthenberg to know the launch of the press would force the world out of the medieval ages (a term not yet invented in his own time) and enter an era known as the enlightment, in which contemporary democracy have its roots. Likewise, I think that Zuckerbergs launch of Facebook might led to far greater consequences than people stalking their exes online.