AntiWar Activism: New Media and Protest in the Information Age

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Anti-War Activism New Media and Protest in the
Information Age

• Kevin Gillan (Manchester)
• Jenny Pickerill (Leicester)
• Frank Webster (City)

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Project Aims

• New forms of political activity.
• The Anti-War movement.
• Ways in which information and communications
  technologies (ICTs) are integrated into these
  new politics.
• The changing information environment that
  surrounds war today.

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Contents

• Ch.1 Post 9/11
• Ch. 2 Changing Information Environment
• Ch. 3 Representation, Beliefs and Identities
• Ch. 4 Alliances and Fractures
• Ch.5 Power and Borders
• Ch.6 Coping with Activism
• Ch.7 Communications Technologies Practices and
  Possibilities
• Ch. 8 Conclusion

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Anti-War Campaigning in a Changing Information
Environment
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• Experiences of War
• Mediation
• Digitalisation
• Limits of Control Paradigm
• Symbolic Struggles

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• We are engaged in the first war in history in
  an era of e-mails, blogs, cell phones,
  blackberrys, instant messaging, digital cameras,
  a global internet with no inhibitions, hand-held
  video cameras, talk radio, 24-hour news
  broadcasts, satellite television. There's never
  been a war fought in this environment before

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Alternative Information Environment
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Alternative Information Environment

• 'it's very difficult to get mainstream media to
  relate to us at all, but I don't care anymore.
  These people who get livid, "look we have this
  demonstration, we have all these people, there's
  not anything in the paper", I don't expect
  anything from them (the media) anymore. So if we
  get something that's just a bonus. And the reason
  why it doesn't trouble me anymore is because we
  do definitely have our own networks'.

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Information Circuits
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Information Circuits

• Information flows from established media to the
  anti-war movement
• Information flows from anti-war movement
  activists to mainstream media
• Web Sites, Blogs and Interactivity

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Beware Mediacentrism Place and Practice matter
enormously
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Beware mediacentrism

• Critical of 'people who see it the internet as
  the end in itself. There are lots of people
  actually campaigning who submerge themselves into
  it completely. Oh, they drive me mad. I know
  individuals whose whole life is producing their
  blogs, but they're not related in any way to
  anything that goes on, on the ground, so I don't
  know the point'.