Communication Technologies and Change

Lecture 9 Week 10

Todays lecture
What is governance?
Relations of visibility and questions of governance. Media regulation? #destroythejoint

Activist groups and practices of mobilisation.

Thanks Getup!

Communication platform assemblages

Social media The creation and control of agency

WHAT IS GOVERNANCE?

What is governance?
Traditional view
Sovereign power power over life and death State-based politics Top-down conception of government Current ACT election

Liberal Democratic politics

Access power through political representation

What is governance?
Governmentality
Study of the art of government Government, broadly conceived Comes from Michel Foucaults College de France lectures 1978, 1982-1984

Neoliberal governmentality
Power is decentred and citizens play an active role in their own governance.

What is governance?
People take over control of their own lives Power is dispersed Governmentality of health
Function of lifestyle rather than chance Responsibility placed on individuals Managed by analysing populations (biopolitics) Health security insurance, risk
Insure against possible future events Calculus of probably across entire populations

What is governance?
The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security. (Foucault 2007: 108)

What is governance?
Power relations internalised Relations of visibility
Not just what you see Visibility as a function of knowledge and technological assemblages

TV show House
Medical doctors capacity to render visible disease and affirmity Function of technical knowledge, probabilities and analysis of symptoms via medical technology

What is governance?
Compositions of relations that produce different visibilities Road safety
At risk populations Insurance Self-policing? Technological visibility speed cameras, point-topoint

What is governance?
Data retention legislation Would enable the Federal government to potentially assess online activity Producing new forms of visibility
Data in this context means meta-data about online activities Produce an aggregate appreciation of online population

What is governance?
Dismantling of the centralised top-down regulatory agencies in the 1980s and 1990s Open up regulatory process
Online transparency, let citizens regulate Regulatory solutions through market mechanisms Fair Trade movement

Gov 2.0 movement

Part of the Department of Finance and Deregulation (ironic title in context of today!)

What is governance?
Media regulation? Focus of the Convergence Review
The review considered the existing regulatory framework applying to media and communications services including broadcast and mobile, in addition to internet content such as websites, internet applications and both audio and audiovisual material. Examined whether current regulation and policy frameworks remain the most appropriate and effective means in a converging environment. Aimed to ensure that media and communications services are provided within an environment that fosters competition, is technology-neutral, encourages a diversity of voices, and protects Australian culture, community values and citizens' rights.

What is governance?
Independent Media Inquiry
The effectiveness of the current media codes of practice in Australia, particularly in light of technological change that is leading to the migration of print media to digital and online platforms.

Report suggested increased opportunity for citizens/audiences lead regulatory framework My submission: explored power relations of cross-platform media assemblages

What is governance?
Recent Gender Wars
Largely organised around comments made by radio broadcaster Alan Jones MRN station 2GB eventually pulled all advertising Released a statement Jenna Price responded on ABCs AM radio show

ACTIVIST GROUPS AND PRACTICES OF MOBILISATION

Activist Groups and Practices of Mobilisation

Activist Groups and Practices of Mobilisation

Activist Groups and Practices of Mobilisation

Not what to think but what to think about (Cohen 1963) Agenda-setting, salience
Affective salience tone of message Substantive salience informational content Transfer of object from one agenda to another first-level agenda setting (what to think about) Attribute salience second-level agenda setting (how to think about)

Activist Groups and Practices of Mobilisation

Inter-media agenda setting (Ragas and Kiousis 2010) MoveOn.orgs Obama in 30 Seconds
Political advertisement competition

Partisan media coverage (The Nation)

Congruent (strong) first-level agenda setting

Explored relation between affective salience and second-level agenda setting Obama official ads and MoveOn.orgs ads
Strong correlation between Obama negative ads and MoveOn ads Weak correlation between Obama positive ads and MoveOn ads

Activist Groups and Practices of Mobilisation

GetUp! and MoveOn Hybrid organisation a blend of traditional hierarchical decision-making by the core staff and Board, coupled with rapid response networked member participation (Vromen and Coleman 2011: 80).

Activist Groups and Practices of Mobilisation

Membership
Members do not pay to join or receive a service Opt in to receive emails (and they can simply opt out at anytime as well) on GetUp! campaigns. Recipients of GetUp!s emails choose to take further action only on issues that matter to them.

What is this action? How is it political? Is it?

Activist Groups and Practices of Mobilisation

1. Send an email: to the federal or state legislature, a government agency, the government leader, a company; to a newspaper editor; 2. Make a phone call: to the federal legislature, the government leader, to fellow citizens to vote; 3. Sign an e-petition; 4. Join a local action; 5. Donate money; and/or 6. Watch a video. (Vromen and Coleman 2011: 84)

Activist Groups and Practices of Mobilisation

2010 election Focus: pollution, mental health, and refugees Rapid response
Voter enrolment issue 70% of members supported Launched High Court action 3 week turnaround 98,138 voters enfranchised
Issue Carbon Pollution Mental Health Refugees Native Forests Voter Enrolment Tony Abbotts Conservative Agenda Internet Censorship General Election Strategy, progressive agenda Election Day, visibility, scorecards Combination of carbon pollution, mental health, refugees Total
Frequency %

4 5 3 1 6 2 1 2 5 6 35

11.5 14 8.5 3 17 6 3 6 14 17 100

GetUp! Member Emails by Election Issue 1 June - 23 August 2010 (85)

Activist Groups and Practices of Mobilisation

Clicktivism? One of the key opportunities that the internet has presented to contemporary social movements is an improved capacity to organise high threshold offline actions. (Van Laer and Van Aelst 2010)
Creative function Facilitating function

2010 GetUp!
7,000 people offline activities 20,000 hours volunteer work

Activist Groups and Practices of Mobilisation

GetUp!s agenda-setting capacity? Media coverage
Most neutral, including 88% of news stories Only 13 articles negative, mostly about Abbott & gender ads 76% did not mention political leaning 12% called it progressive 12% called it independent

Vromen & Coleman argue that the routinised recognition of GetUp! as a legitimate political player in Australia (89)

COMMUNICATION PLATFORM ASSEMBLAGES

Communication Platform Assemblages

Affordance theory (Gibson 1979)
Action possibilities latent in the environment, objectively measurable and independent of the individual's ability to recognise them, but always in relation to the actor and therefore dependent on their capabilities (wiki)

Rather than Facebook or Twitter as a platform and interface Think about social media platforms in terms of the affordances for action possibilities

Communication Platform Assemblages

From a network-layered approach to studying platforms *The+ locus of power is shifting away from control over content to the management of degrees of meaningfulness and the attribution of cultural value (Langlois 2012: 9) Not about content, but the conditions by which meaning can emerge (13)

Communication Platform Assemblages

Conduits of governance in 3 ways 1. Manager of information
Abundance of information, too much!! Selects and envelopes information in personalised assemblages (i.e. cookie-enabled Google identity)

Communication Platform Assemblages

2. Managing user perceptions: articulating technical processes with cultural values
Communicative act of friending (networked linkage) versus building actual friendships

Affordances of sharing or upvoting content

Enacts dynamics of visibility and invisibility Produces visibilities and valorises content

Communication Platform Assemblages

3. Shaping user agency
Level of cultural perception through distribution of the sensible
Lazzarato, media produces a world within which consumers have to buy in

Level of software platform, affordances embedded into design Delegation of agency

Communication Platform Assemblages

Governmental approach to platforms
Rejection of specific populations Establishing differentialities along a continuum of agency
Are you a super user, noob, etc.?

Two ways to think about governmentality and assemblages of communication technologies:

As citizen tools to intervene in offline governmental processes and regulation As business and government tools used to control and modulate the agency of online populations