Doctoral student Charles Pearson, under the guidance of Dr. Alan Klima (University of California, Davis), will undertake research on the development and effects of the new social media structures that support contemporary political movement building. Centralized broadcast media models, once a key strength of political movements in many countries, are now in flux. The models emerging to replace them appear to be both more collaborative and more focused on bottom-up, or "grass-roots," communication. The nature and consequences of this important shift in political participation will be the focus of this research. A study of digital politics provides a rich conceptual site for understanding: a) current shifts in communication and political engagement; b) logics of participation and regulation in emerging open systems; and, c) the increasing intertwining of the technical and the social.
The research will be carried out in the United States in both online and offline settings. The researcher will employ a mix of qualitative research methods, including ethnographic fieldwork and targeted qualitative interviews with key participants and media experts distributed nationally. He will also track and analyze the movement of specific messages in order to gauge the effectiveness of particular Internet-based distributed structures for managing information flows and alignments.
The research is important because it will help social scientists to understand how new technologies are affecting contemporary democratic politics. More generally, the research will contribute to theories of the relation between media and message. Funding this resarch also supports the education of a social scientist.
This research project addressed contemporary transformations in media, technology, and political engagement in the United States. Conducting ethnographic fieldwork from February 2010 through July 2011, this project explored in-depth the development of new kinds of participatory politics. Research found that grassroots movements, utilizing internet media for communicating and organizing, forged participatory social networks and new circuits of political engagement. The building of participatory networks made it possible for particular individuals and groups to shape and direct popular discourse, transforming the relationship between individuals and political parties and traditional interest groups. Given this deep entangling between emerging digital communication technologies and political practice, this project also found that political movements increasingly linked the meaning of their movements to the communicative means through which they were carried out. The values and aspirations of contemporary movements were embodied in participatory network forms, such that organizational forms themselves were conveyors of values and political demands. This finding demonstrates that technology and media are cultural objects, created and shaped through complex processes of social interaction. Contrary to much popular thinking, the implication is that communications media, understood as simultaneously technical and social, lack any inherent or natural political tendencies and effects. This study, therefore, makes important contributions to anthropologies of media, politics, and technology, as well as media studies, political science, and technocultural studies.
