NM&PD, first paper, all ’bout dissent

The internet is a new space for the enactment of civil participation on a vast, unprecedented scale. The array of participatory technologies available to an average user is constantly added to; the list now includes: blogs, forums, chat rooms, comment sections, among others. The proliferation of these technologies has impacted the world of politics in significant, undeniable ways, both through an increasing engagement with the political process, evident in the amount of donations candidates are receiving from online sources¹, and an increasing amount of influence on the content and direction of political discourse both on- and off-line. One of the most potent impacts increasing online civil participation has been the multiplication of “voices” on the internet. The new online spaces have created new venues for these voices to express their dissent or consent, but it is the interactions of these voices, the ways they weave their meanings through each other and around each other, that concerns this analysis.

“Political discourse,” viewed as a system of political voices in dialog with each other, is characterized by a variety of types of communications, communicators, and modes of communication. In part, using the term avoids differentiation between the types of voices in play within the discourse, but that differentiation is vital to an analysis that emphasizes the use of power and authority that characterizes the interactions of different political voices within the discourse en bloc. Specifically, the systems of power in play within the discourse privilege certain voices over others.² This aspect of political discourse is placed in jeopardy when faced with the participatory attributes of the internet.

While the systems of power and control within political discourse are often representative of other aspects of our societal systems of control, the participatory technologies on the internet are consistently providing novel modes of engagement for those not favored by the system. Blogs, for example, are modes of communication through which almost anybody might participate. Their sphere of influence is determined by their ability to attract readers and people who propagate their ideas through the “blogosphere.” While the impact of the average blog is often overstated, the influence blogs have over the entire political discourse, both on- and off-line, is very real; blogs are an example of how an average political voice, not privileged by authority or other import (such as a well coiffed face on broadcast television), might gain the ear of opinion leaders with more powerful positions within the political discourse.³ In this instance, however, the blog’s influence is felt within the systems of control and power. The participatory technologies on the internet also have a potential to contravene the norm.

One way in which participatory technologies might afford unprivileged voices opportunities to influence the political discourse is through the appropriation of other aspects of culture into the political discourse. On the internet, where many various modes of discourse are proverbially and literally only a click away from each other, the melding and blending of distinct discourses is certain. Popular cultures, in particular, are consistently invoked within the discourse in order to change the dynamic of political discourse away from those voices imbued with influence and authority, toward the voices disenfranchised by the traditional vocabularies. In a sense, in political discourse, sanctioned voices might use modes of communication that privilege their messages with certain accouterments unavailable to an average voice, such as a press conference, widely distributed newspaper article, or a certain amount of discussion on weekend political talk shows. The use of popular culture references, then, privilege other voices, audiences, or communities—those that understand a Soulja Boy reference or a visual style particular to Indian bhangra music videos. The appropriation of popular culture encodes the messages with meanings that are opaque to a large part of the players within the discourse as a whole.

The incorporation of a distinct cultural discourse into the political discourse suggests that, to participate as a dissenter, one must use a vocabulary with different symbolic meanings and intimations, speak a different language as it were, in order to oppose the system of dominance within the discourse. While it is true that language influences the power relationships between groups of individuals, the effect of these vocabularies extends beyond a simple question of comprehensibility.⁴ By appropriating popular culture into the political discourse, the dissident voice extends itself to a vastly different audience than the existing discourse might reach without the inclusion. As such, groups within the discourse not previously enfranchised by the language (barred by a lack of familiarity with the dominant vocabulary, as it were), are empowered to create a new subtext within the discourse that empowers them.

As James C. Scott writes, the creation of a subversive hidden transcript allows for a space in which various types and degrees of “negation” occur.⁵ Negation offers those excluded by the dominant group within the discourse, such as political pundits, politicians, or journalists within political discourse, a mode of expression that nullifies the systems of rhetorical control in the employ of the dominate group. In this alternative rhetorical space, a fart joke might negate a historically based analysis; or a home-grown music video might express a personal connection to members of the Armed Forces better than a ceremony. The term used by Scott, however, implies that that tools of subversion used by those seeking alternative empowerment is antithetical to those used by the dominant group. Instead, these tools—the appropriation of popular culture, internet-based participatory technologies, and the use of subversive, negatory rhetorical devices—need to be explored as creative, constructive elements within the political discourse as a whole.

Of particular interest to this analysis is a very small set of videos distributed on the internet that engage with the popular culture in order to empower different voices within the political discourse. These videos are inherently participatory in nature because they afford previously mute voices with the ability to express sophisticated meanings through cyberspace, are exchanged between participants virally, and inspire discussion through some of the other participatory technologies that are found on the internet, such as blogs, comment spaces, and forums. They also utilize technologies that allow for the internet to create new meanings from existing material through the use of bricolage and “mixing;” in particular, the use of non-linear video editing applications that facilitate the parsing and arrangement of digital video.

These video collages are embodiments of the kind of alternative voice expressed earlier in this primer, yet they expand the subversive channel of the hegemonic voices within political discourse in a fundamentally important way—by appropriating the very voices of the dominant players within the discourse for use in the subversive voice. The videos work like this: a speech is made by a member of the dominant group within the political discourse, the speech is recorded on video and posted on the internet. An individual downloads the video and slices it up into many clips in their video editing application for subsequent reordering. Each clip comes with its own snippet of audio, too, such that an individual snippet might be a phrase, word, morpheme, or even a phoneme. When reordered, the new author has the ability to piece together these clips in such a way that the face of the dominant actor and the audio appear to be stating something entirely new in a kind of digital puppetry.

This process, when coupled with music, other video clips, and arranged in playful or ironic ways, has the potential to express subtexts that exist beneath the overt meanings created by the rearrangement of the video clips. The process is one of mixing, mashing, and juxtaposing different meanings, symbols, and references together into a pastiche that, viewed intertextually, commands a greater scope and meaning than the constituent parts. It is this aspect of these video collages that has the potential to reframe an aspect of the political discourse in terms more favorable and more potent to the subjugated members of society. Video collages such as these are changing the way in which dissent is expressed online, particularly in its ability to include groups previously excluded from the discourse.

1http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0308/Obama_raises_55_million.html

2The manner in which systems of power control the discourse by privileging certain political voices over others is important, but not within the scope of this analysis.

3Drezner, D. W., “The Power and Politics of Blogs” http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/blogpaperfinal.pdf

4Scott, J. C., “Domination and the Arts of Resistance” p. 30

5Ibid. p. 111

~ by Gabriel on June 27, 2008.