Professor Dean writes in the Digital Media and Democracy book that we now have a system of communicative capitalism. She says that instead of being heard, messages are "circulated, reduced to the medium." This reduction results in part from a technological fetishism. We believe that now, more than ever, technology and online contribution equate to democracy and democratic values. Part of this is something (which she mentions in the article and I've mentioned in a previous post) that Slavoj Zizek calls interpassivity. We allow the technological object to act (democratically) for us, and while we feel that we've "done our part," no change actually occurs.
This is backed up, in part, by Clay Shirky's essay, "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality." In it he says that only a few blogs today are read widely, while a huge number fly under the radar and are rarely visited, regardless of whether or not they have a valuable contribution to make to any number of discussions.
Professor Dean says that "to ontologize the political is to collapse the very symbolic space necessary for politicization, a space between an object and its representation, its ability to stand for something other than itself." This destruction of the symbolic removes real hope for political action online, and is simultaneously happening in other regions of our society as well. In the consumer realm, the symbolic has all but disappeared - instead of actual political action, we buy "fair trade" coffee and invest in products which are political for us. Likewise, "by sending an email, signing a petition, responding to an article on a blog, people can feel political."
All hope is not lost, however. While thought like this seems to indicate that any entry onto the web should come with the disclaimer "abandon all hope, etc etc," it does not mean that things cannot change. If we can stop the fetish surrounding technology and break away from the idea that passively "acting" online is akin to political action, then real political action becomes a reality once again. As Professor Dean puts it, "politics in the sense of working to change current conditions may well require breaking with and through the fantasies attaching us to communicative capitalism."
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this is very good; it coalesces with some of the points Corey was pushing in class, namely, attending to the ways the internet is but one tool among many, defetishizing it, we could say, or working to disinvest it of hopes and dreams. And, this could be the way that millennials are different/make a difference. Rather than networked communication saving the world, it's another aspect of the world. (this is from me, not my son, Kian)
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