Invisible machines. Collective action through digital space

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Philosophy - Miscellaneous grade: Highest Honors University of Michigan language: English abstract: The past two decades have seen an explosion in activism organized through digital space. From the early-90s efforts of the Zapatistas to build a global support network for a localist struggle to the recent tumultuous revolutions of the Arab Spring digital technology has enabled organizing for social change in ways that previous generations of activists could scarcely have imagined. And yet is the ascendancy of digital activism truly that surprising? As cultural interactions and materials are increasingly enacted online it is only to be expected that digital natives seize upon clickable social repertoires to articulate new political possibilities. Rather than analyzing the effects of a particular platform or technology in isolation I examine the social dynamics that contribute to the dissemination of contentious frames and messages throughout digital space. By examining the network dynamics of everyday online socializing I seek to elucidate some of the repertoires of contention through which digital activists have achieved critical mass. These immanent dynamics of everyday online social interaction provide the basis for understanding how networked collectivities come to attach social significance to contentious ideas and then mobilize individuals for offline collective action.I further argue that classical social science theories of group organizing are unable to account for the seemingly spontaneous and eruptive nature of digitally-organized movements. The difficulty I argue is not that theories of collective dissent are not empirically grounded but that they are complicit with institutional edifices of static knowledge production in ways that resist recognizing the emergence of novel collectivities. In elaborating this point I initially focus on a case study of the 2008 demonstrations in Seoul Sou