Sasha Costanza-Chock:Transmedia storytelling in social movements
Intro:
How should we consider “online echo chamber”? How can researchers study the long-term influence of social movements and media on people? What’s the possibility for participatory research and mixed-method research?
Qin and Chelsea had a conversation with Sasha (Associate Professor of Civic Mediaat MIT) during the 2017 ICA conference. She shared her research and opinions on social movements with us.
Q stands for Qin and Chelsea.
A stands for Sasha.
Q : Some scholars think the Internet is not an ideal platform for discussion because of the existence of online echo chambers.
A : That’s really interesting. I don't agree with most of the people who are writing about echo chambers. It doesn't integrate all these critiques. Most of them had the simplistic version of public sphere theory.
I agree that the Internet is not an efficient mechanism for deliberation but that's because of all kinds of access and inequalities online. Some people have always on broadband connectivity and skills of using these tools to circulate their own ideas. Other people have minimal access, for example, using a feature phone with text only and basic access to some networks, or just using an internet cafe to access. So compared with those who produce nice videos and get millions of views, those who you know occasionally and marginally just have most basic access. Also, digital communication doesn't convey affect and emotion well and help to build trust and communities compared with face-to-face communication. So I don't agree with the echo chamber critique, but also don't think that online deliberation is sufficient for a strong democracy.
Nancy Fraser says that there was never one public sphere but always several public spheres. There was a feminist public sphere-While the men were meeting in coffee shops, having public debates, women were meeting in salons, talking about the rights of women. There was what she calls a “Subaltern Counterpublic". From the colonial theory, “subaltern” is that a group of people, in a position of subordination to the dominant power, have a counter public. So people whose opinion is not the mainstream opinion or who don't occupy positions of political power need to form smaller circles to discuss it internally before entering the main, hegemonic public sphere. When you are from marginalized group or population, trying to engage with those within the hegemonic public sphere with a shared consensus immediately, you will be destroyed. So you have to first build a community of people, internally debate and discuss what you want, your ideas, language, and frames, and then you come to consensus externally.
You see how it applies to social movements assertively. For women's movements, movements against slavery, ecological movements, LGBTQ movements, people spreading out individually need to find, locate each other to create a shared identity, and then say “we demand certain rights, respect, and we exist on”. You can't have that if you don't have a smaller subaltern counter public.
But in the current debate about the echo chambers, it ignores this whole critique. It says it's really bad that people are forming these little groups. I'm not saying there's nothing to the critique, but I am skeptical of the claim that it’s automatically a bad thing and what we have to do is to return to a place where everybody shares one big conversation.
Q : How is your transmedia critique related to these discussions on online deliberation?
A : It's not enough to just do things on one platform, we need like a face-to-face organizing process, social media participatory process, and a mass media strategy. A lot of activists make mistakes. They say, “Oh we'll just do everything in this like in the digital space or just on social media (e.g.Facebook group). We can ignore the traditional media.” It's a big mistake. Actually, the traditional media still drives most of the conversation on social media, although we see the counter proposal where Trump effectively uses Twitter to drive the mass media agenda on a daily basis, which is a special case.
We're talking about a transformative media organizing process to analyze social movement, media, and activists. We actually continue to extend and modify that framework, through the work on LGBTQ and two-spirit movements. I was trying to extend Jenkins's theories on transmedia storytelling through social movement limbs.
However,“transmedia” is also sort of an industry term. Media industries now are cross-platform, integrating participatory possibilities into all of their media. On the other hand, we did a two-year participatory research with six community-based organizations that work with different LGBTQ communities in the US (transformative media.cc). It's funny that when we were movement activists, they mistake “transmedia” for “transgender people making media” and say this term doesn't make sense.
Meanwhile, one of the key findings in our interviews was the way that making media is personally transformative for people who take part in that process. By “transformative”, I mean that people develop their own critical consciousness, capacities, leadership skills, and their voice. They learn how to articulate their needs, not only of themselves as an individual, but of the shared, marginalized community. They become spokespeople in the process of learning how to make a film, design effective graphic or build a website. But traditional NGO, advocacy, or social movement media scholarship doesn't talk very much about transformative personal and community impacts. We focus so much on well the audience and media effects, but not about the personally transformative experience.
For many people that we talk to, it may or may not be the main impact. Social movement scholars have a framework for the life-course (biographical) impact. You know the movement is dead, or you didn't win the policy proposal, but what did it change for you personally? It's not surprising that some scholars find that social movement participation often has a huge impact on life paths of individuals. For those who participated, it really changed their life a lot -what type of employment they seek, how they think about the world especially in conditions of police repression when people suffer police violence, and how they think about the state, what freedom means, and what kind of world they want to live in. People meet their lovers in the movements, get married or just lovers, and have children.
Q : It's really similar to what I read about new left movement in the U.S. Some people become scholars and the movement changes their traditional perspective towards social movements exactly. I think it's really interesting and that's what quantitative research typically ignores since we often care about the short-term effects.
A : Yes, we look for the immediate outcome and ignore that the long frame. But actually when you think about how a society transforms, it never happens in a moment. It happens through generations, life course, and there come the big processes of cultural shifts and broader acceptance of new ideas, new subjectivity, and new types of people. There's a strong argument to say that policy shifts often follow broader cultural shifts, which could be observed from every movement in history. For example, for a hundred years the women's movement kept failing to win any real policy victories, but over time it transforms the way that everybody thinks about women. Then we change the laws and enable women to be property owners, as well as to vote. And we have a long way to go to be employed in different sectors, be elected as officials, and etc. Anyway, few people look specifically at the role of media and communication practices in the life-course transformation. That's what I think there's a lot of interesting work to be done.
Q : What's the problem with the platform-centric analysis in social movement research?
A : It doesn't reflect the reality. In the real world, no activists will say,“Okay, we’re just gonna make media on Twitter”. Instead, people organize social movements, develop ideas about their wants, new subject identities, policy proposals, as well as cultural formations, and then they try to circulate those ideas by any media necessary, which is the title of Henry Jenkins new book, “ByAny Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism”.
Movements are not platform-specific. I just think it's a mistake to limit the scope of analysis. It's much better to do a mixed-method approach, where you spend time with the social movement actors. There should be interviews and participatory research projects where the scholar also identifies with the movement and writes from a subject position. Classically anthropology would call that“participant observation”, but I'm also interested in questions of community-based participatory research, where researchers identify themselves as movement actors and make truth claims about what's happening.
Q : You typically apply participatory research methods and community-led approach in your studies. Would you like to briefly introduce it?
A : The basic proposal is that communities that are most affected by any particular social problem have an incredible depth of knowledge. So researchers should partner with community-based organizations to further develop and amplify the knowledge from communities. Imagine researchers need to work on a crisis of housing for rural to urban migration. One approach is to go to an urban village and study the community as an object of study. But a participatory approach would say that researchers should figure out a way to include community members as part of the research process and actually ask them about research questions, methods, analysis and recommendations. We can learn a lot from the Disability Rights Movement because they have a simple, clear slogan, "nothing about us without us”.
There's a history of social theorist doing participatory research. For example, Marx didn't just sit in his room and write about problems of industrial capitalism. He spent time with the workers, talked with people, and was involved in the labor movement. I think a lot of strongest social theories have always come from engaged scholars who are working with or even themselves are members of the community that's oppressed. We need that kind of work more including in the media and communication field.
Q : In which specific way do you respond to or interact with theories on social change in your research?
A : My work on networked social events is deeply influenced by the work of Manuel Castells, who was my advisor of my doctoral work. I'm also interested in the work of Yochai Meckler on the networked public sphere and networked economy. We just had a workshop last week about “Platform Cooperativism” conversation. A group of scholars including Trevor Schultz, Janelle Orsi, and Nathan Schneider, are critiquing capitalism of Uber and Airbnb using the term “Platform Cooperativism”. These platforms occupy strategic positions where they match the consumer with the person actually providing the service. They don’t need to provide the infrastructure such as homes, cars, but they extract rents or take money on each transaction, and workers get a smaller portion of value that they’re producing, which is still an exploitative relationship. So the questionis how could we create platforms that would be less extractive of the laborvalue of platform workers. And the proposal for “Platform Cooperativism” is that workers should build their own labor market platforms and make decisions together through some democratic process on software dev 46 28723 46 13308 0 0 9105 0 0:00:03 0:00:01 0:00:02 9102elopment, interaction design, marketing and so on.
Q : You research on media culture and social movement as well as work as an activist. What kind of work are you involved in as an activist?
A : The work I do is based on my own participation in social movements and social networks. My first book (Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement) is based on many years of my own participation in immigrant rights activism. The transformative media organizing project work with LGBTQ communities is based on my two-year experience working with movement organizations and my own identity as a non-binary trans feminine. So it's linked to the communities that I work with and the types of activism that people are doing, which is informed by social movement theorist, but also by the everyday practices of movement groups.
Q : Some scholars argue that academic value should keep neutral, but some would encourage to be political. What do you think about it?
A : I believe neutrality is a myth. All research happens from a particular subject position, but it doesn't mean that I don't believe in empirical methodology. You can step back a little bit and say what research questions are you even asking because research questions are going to be informed by a political stance whether it's acknowledged or unacknowledged.
We should make it explicit and acknowledge it's a political decision where we allocate our time, energy, and resources both as individual researchers and as a field. We should talk about why most of the communication scholarship is not addressing these critical questions of social equity, wealth inequality, gender parity, human rights, ecological devastation. We have to make those decisions and say it's time for media communication research to do engage with these political questions.
Q : Finally, we have a tradition to invite our guests to recommend a favorite book, a movie, or music to our audience?
A : Octavia Butler. She's a black science fiction writer from Los Angeles, writing a lot of wonderful books including a series called “The Parable of the Sower". It's a science fiction novel about a future where the world has collapsed and small groups of people survive. It's about a group of people trying to escape apocalyptic Los Angeles, making their way to the mountainside and creating a kind of community, based on love, healing and caring for one another in the middle of a collapsing world. It engages with questions of race, gender, and sexuality.
微信排版丨张钰杰
图片来源于网络
引擎出品，必属原创
欢迎关注，自由分享
【我想转载】请注明文章出处及网站链接：j-engine.fudan.edu.cn；媒体机构（含各类网站及微博、微信平台）需转载请在后台留言联系授权。
【我要投稿】请将您的原创稿件投递至邮箱j_engine@fudan.edu.cn，小编将与您取得联系。
【我愿加入】请在后台留言：姓名+学校+邮箱+手机号，我们期待您的参与。