Séance 13 - Politique et culture numérique : I – Révolutions numériques

Introduction

Enjeux de nature

Enjeux de nature - 1

[W]e not only have to reconsider where to look, but we also have to reconsider what we are looking for. In this sense, a porous approach to what is political is desired, one that will allow for a more individualised, lifestyle-based approach to politics.

Enjeux de nature - 2

[T]he Internet makes everyday political talk visible. Seas of informal political conversations, which researchers in the past have had difficulties gaining access to, are now readily available online due to the archiving wonders of the Internet. Moreover, the Internet makes political talk visible not just for researchers, but also for people and participants.

Enjeux de nature - 3

Enjeux de nature - 4 - La chambre d'écho - 1

Enjeux de nature - 5 - La chambre d'écho - 2

In a democracy, people do not live in echo chambers or information cocoons. They see and hear a wide range of topics and ideas. They do so even if they did not, and would not, choose to see and to hear those topics and those ideas in advance. These claims raise serious questions about certain uses of new technologies, above all the Internet, and about the astonishing growth in the power to choose—to screen in and to screen out.

Enjeux de nature - 6 - La chambre d'écho - 3

We say that an echo chamber exists if the political leaning of the content that users receive from the network agrees with that of the content they share.

Enjeux de nature - 7 - La guerre de tranchées

The Internet not only provides the opportunity to discuss issues with like-minded people, it also increases the possibility of doing so with people who hold considerably different points of view. The Habermasian ideal is that debaters will change their minds according to the quality of the arguments presented in the debate. The literature on motivated reasoning has rather shown that people’s prior attitudes strongly bias how they process arguments, and that this bias is reinforced not only through selective exposure but also through selective judgment processes. Therefore, when people are presented with opposing arguments in online debates, these arguments may not make debaters question and alter their initial opinion, but instead lead to a stronger belief in the previously held opinion. We call this trench warfare dynamics.

Enjeux d'efficacité

Enjeux d'efficacité - 1

In the wake of the momentous changes that swept the region in 2011 – uprisings which toppled governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and which have seriously imperiled the governments of Bahrain, Yemen and Syria – and the widespread belief that social media played at least a supporting role in those events, scholars are again confronting the question of social media’s role in revolts and revolutions. Yet too often this discourse amounts to asking: “Was it a social media revolution?” and then manning the barricades for one’s preferred position on the question. The extant discourse on “social media revolutions” is doubly frustrating since the mono-causality of social media is rejected out of hand by the very digital activists whose efforts played so crucial a role in the uprisings.

Enjeux d'efficacité - 2 - Slacktivism - 1

“Slacktivism” is an apt term to describe feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact. It gives those who participate in “slacktivist” campaigns an illusion of having a meaningful impact on the world without demanding anything more than joining a Facebook group. Remember that online petition that you signed and forwarded to your entire contacts list? That was probably an act of slacktivism… “Slacktivism” is the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation: why bother with sit-ins and the risk of arrest, police brutality, or torture if one can be as loud campaigning in the virtual space?

Enjeux d'efficacité - 3 - Slacktivism - 2

[It] still managed to mobilize millions of young, largely white, Americans - typically thought to be too self-involved to care about world affairs - to consume and spread a story about the plight of black children in a far-off land. And, unlike so many other activist documentaries, KONY 2012 did not only preach to the converted. Rather, it managed to capture the attention of teenagers, that most elusive of demographics, by reframing a complex issue as an urgent, timely, and righteous cause with a clear cast of villains, victims, and heroes.

Enjeux d'efficacité - 4 - Slacktivism - 3

[E]ven if the most jubilant views are unwarranted, no evidence was found to suggest that the Internet is directly harmful for democratic engagement, which is what the accusations of slacktivism propose. The Internet sparks new forms of civic engagement that differ from previous forms of engagement. Even if these new activities are effortless and do not expose the participants to risks of any harm, they can give rise to intensely energetic efforts for limited periods of time. Most importantly, no results suggest that the Internet activists are substituting their offline engagement with the possibilities the Internet offers, which has been a central accusation against Internet participation.

Enjeux de contrôle

Enjeux de contrôle - 1

Failing to anticipate how authoritarian governments would respond to the Internet, cyber-utopians did not predict how useful it would prove for propaganda purposes, how masterfully dictators would learn to use it for surveillance, and how sophisticated modern systems of Internet censorship would become. Instead most cyber-utopians stuck to a populist account of how technology empowers the people, who, oppressed by years of authoritarian rule, will inevitably rebel, mobilizing themselves through text messages, Facebook, Twitter, and whatever new tool comes along next year. (The people, it must be noted, really liked to hear such theories.) Paradoxically, in their refusal to see the downside of the new digital environment, cyber-utopians ended up belittling the role of the Internet, refusing to see that it penetrates and reshapes all walks of political life, not just the ones conducive to democratization.

Enjeux de contrôle - 2

To be a gatekeeper means to exercise control over what information reaches society and how social reality is framed. Gatekeepers “facilitate or constrain the diffusion of information as they decide which messages to allow past the gates”. Traditionally, these decisions have been associated with journalism, and, even today, print and broadcast media companies remain important contributors to our information environment.

Enjeux de contrôle - 3

In recent years, gatekeeping tasks are increasingly carried out by non-journalistic actors and platforms. For example, in Egypt and Turkey, the social network Twitter was used to circumvent information control by state media and to propagate alternative news items. In western democracies, non-mainstream news sources like individuals on social media or alternative news portals compete successfully against institutionalised news outlets for power over the public agenda. As traditional journalism’s control over publicly available information recedes, new actors like Google and Facebook or blogs like Breitbart emerge that follow strategic or personal interests and influence the selection and dissemination of information.

Enjeux de contrôle - 4

When algorithms draw boundaries by deciding which of the 1,500 potential Facebook stories to make visible on a particular user’s news feed, such decisions are never made in isolation of people. When people make boundaries by attributing algorithmic outcomes to inferences made by a piece of computer code, these attributions rely on the material arrangements that let people make such claims to begin with. If the machine is involved, then people are too. The notion of algorithmic power and politics is not about the ways in which algorithms determine the social world. Nor is it about what algorithms do in and of themselves. Rather, we have to ask how and when different aspects of the algorithmic are made available or unavailable to actors in a given setting. In looking at what constitutes an algorithmic life, the central question therefore becomes: who or what gets to be part of whatever is being articulated as the algorithm.