[iDC] A Reflection on the Activist Strategies in the Web 2.0 Era

[John Postill]

> Future
> reflection on activism and hacker culture should therefore include
> a deep study of the language and rhetoric of presenting conceptual
> models and dynamics of networking.
> 

For some time now much of our sociological imagination has been reduced to a
small set of entwined metaphors such as network, community and public sphere.
Instead of searching for terminological fixes to the growing complexity of our
world that play on these metaphors I would advocate an 'open lexicon' that
draws more profusely from the rich sociological and anthropological heritage
in order to find new terms for new social phenomena. 

Browse any social science glossary and you will find a wealth of perfectly
usable or recyclable terms that we hardly ever find in discussions of
activism, new media, Web 2.0 and so on, e.g. the venerable notion of 'action
set' = 'a group of actors who operate for political purpose, but without a
unified, corporate identity' (see also 'action group') (Barnard and Spencer
1996, Encyclopaedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology). 

I have written about the paradigmatic prevalence of community/network-think
here:

Postill, J. 2008 Localising the internet beyond communities and networks, New
Media and Society 10 (3), 413-431
http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/10/3/413

All the best with this initiative, and I look forward to a fruitful dialogue
on this question

John

Dr John Postill
Senior Lecturer in Media
Sheffield Hallam University
Sheffield S11 8UZ
United Kingdom
j.postill at shu.ac.uk
http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/