Communication Technology and Contentious Politics

Module Title: Communication Technology and Contentious Politics

Module Leader: Dr Sharath Srinivasan

Overview:

There is no shortage of contemporary scholarship, popular writing and reportage on the implications of digital technologies for politics: from the impact of AI and algorithmic decision-making on bureaucratic and administrative power, and the use and abuse of surveillance technologies in the time of COVID-19 or against minority or migrant groups, to bots, trolls, ‘deep fakes’, disinformation, conspiracy and distorted democracy and the international political economy of hyper-dominant technology companies and a new data colonialism or ‘surveillance capitalism’, but also the importance of social media for protest and resistance from Occupy and the ‘Arab Spring’ to MeToo and Black Lives Matter … the list goes on. To better understand our digital present (and future), this module charts a journey through human history to understand the relationship between communication technology and contentious politics.

The disruptive effects of the digital age for politics are apparent for all to see, yet they arise out of a longer history of the complex and dynamic relationship between communication technology and politics. The invention of writing’s relationship to the emergence of bureaucratic power, the age of political reformation and nationalism and the advent of the printing press, global empires and the role of telegraph and broadcast, and now social media and generative AI in a time of democratic crisis: communication technologies have played an important role in manifesting and shaping profound political change.

This module takes a historicised approach to the relationship between communication technology and politics to understand authority, power and political contestation in a digital age. The approach avoids presentism and exceptionalising transformations in our digital age as ‘like nothing ever before’, while also not underestimating the importance of recent upheavals in changing the actors, logics and practices of politics. Motivating these enquiries is a strong normative purpose: learning from recent and past experience, how can we radically rethink civic action and democratic popular sovereignty in our technological present and future?

All along, we are taking up the essential question of politics, Lenin’s “Who? Whom?” (who has power over whom?). Politics is about the claiming, projecting, reproducing and contesting of power between groups. We are using a rich heritage of scholarship that has examined changes in when, for whom and how political power has historically manifested in and through information and communication technologies to situate our enquiry into changes in our digital age. Arising right at the same time as a seemingly inexorable rise in surveillance, extraction and the debilitation of democratic politics in our digital age is a surge in global protest and resistance movements: from Occupy, the ‘Arab Spring’ and Hong Kong to Black Lives Matter and global climate action. Yet surveillance technologies are also feared to be defeating these modes of resistance. We return, then, to Lenin’s ‘Who? Whom?’ question and how communication technology illumines a dialectic between two dimensions of political power: the capabilities of power over others and the possibilities of power with others. Power over others is rarely primarily coercive. It is sustained with and through information and communication capabilities that also make possible power with. Similarly, exemplars of power with others that communicative affordances made possible were invariably sustained through, and hedged in by, the rigidities of organisational forms, economic structures, legal constraints and extant social hierarchies. The tension is age-old and needs to be understood if we are to get a grip on its configurations in a digital age.