Platform Politics: paper submission | 14th February 2011

Simon CollisterDepartment of Politics & International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, TW20 0EXsimon.collister@gmail.com

Dan McQuillanDepartment of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London; London SE14 6NW; UK. d.mcquillan@gold.ac.uk

'What are the particular forms of platform politics and how can we theorize such forms and practices?'

Platforms as assemblages of resistance: a case study of hybridised media activism during the Egpytian uprising

AbstractChadwick (2007) and Chadwick and Stanyer (2010) have identified and started to plot a series of shifts in media and political activist repertoires (Tilly, 1995) “characterised by a complex intermingling” of platforms. They argue that this ‘hybridity’ is directly driven by the emergence, rapid growth and adoption of Internet-based, social networked technologies and tools in parallel with a contingent change in the patterns of behaviour and normative political values by web-enabled citizens.

We contend that this hybridity offers a powerfully constructive way of analysing political activism and mobilization in an era of ‘Platform Politics’.

This approach challenges the assertion that the rise of proprietary, primarily commercial platforms as primary interfaces of the Internet will restrict political expression and activism by proposing a new form of heterogenous platform politics that expresses itself through a complex hybridisation of commercial platforms, open platforms and other digital and analogue and on and offline spaces.

Building on Chadwick and Stanyer’s work we will seek to establish a deeper theoretical understanding of this hybridization by drawing on Manuel DeLanda’s recent work on assemblage theory.

DeLanda (2006) articulates a social ontology that facilitates an interpretative framework based on the identification and analysis of multi-variant material-semiotic assemblages.

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We propose adopting and testing this theoretical approach through an analysis of the hybrid political repertoires played out during the recent uprising in Egypt which saw a fluid and rapid transition of political information production and sharing as well as activism spanning on and offline 'platforms' (McQuillan, 2011).

We believe Egypt is a potentially fruitful case study as it offers us a way of interpreting and analysing assemblages of hybrid political repertoires from a dual perspective.

That is: the way on which activists (re)assembled political platforms and networks during the uprising, as well as the way in which the state, government and other strategic actors attempted to counter-act or ‘territorialize’ (DeLanda, 2006) these assemblages in order to exert control.

By doing so we aim to highlight the possible, optimistic implications of a networked, hybridised media environment for political activism and, in particular, for post-authoritarian societies.

References:

Chadwick, A. (2007). Digital Network Repertoires and Organisational Hybridity.Political Communication, 24 (3):283–301.

Chadwick, A. (2009). New Challenges for the Study of eDemocracy in an Era of Informational Exhuberance. I/S: Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 5 (1): 9-41.

Chadwick, A. & Stanyer, J. (2010). Political Communication in Transition: Mediated Politics in Britain’s New Media Environment. Unpublished paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, September 2–5, 2010.

DeLanda, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Continuum: London.

McQuillan, D. (2011). New Social Networks With Old Technology What The Egyptian Uprising Tells Us About Social Media. Forthcoming.

Tilly, C. (1995). Contentious repertoires in Great Britain, 1758–1834. In M. Traugott (Ed.), Repertoires and cycles of contention (pp. 15–42). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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