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Todd Wolfson on ‘Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left’

by IMCista
Sonali Kolhatkar, host of Uprising with Sonali, speaks with Todd Wolfson to discuss his new book ‘Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left.’

Topics discussed include Indymedia, the emergence of blogging and social networks, IMCs maintaining their own servers, and social movements becoming overly dependent on corporate networks.
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[ Audio: 16 minutes ]

The rise of the internet has been a game changer for political activism. With the ability to instantly communicate with one another, set up meetings, share lots of information quickly, publish images and videos, and focus public attention on important issues political organizing has become more efficient and more creative.

Millions of people all over the world now rely on online social networks to remain connected with like-minded people, and sometimes launch revolutions like in Egypt or Hong Kong.

Although the origins of this form of social and political organizing seem like ancient history, only a decade or two has passed since the early days of internet-based activism.

During those short years, we have seen the rise and fall and evolution of movements like the anti-globalization, anti Iraq war, and Occupy Wall Street protests. What can we learn from these earlier movements for social change in how they organized and developed means of communication?

My guest Todd Wolfson’s new book chronicles what he calls the “Cyber Left.” Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left, is an examination of “the tactics and strategy of resistance” in the years 1994 to 2006 with a particular focus on the Independent Media Center, or Indymedia.

Learn more about about Todd’s work at http://www.toddwolfson.org

Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left, by Todd Wolfson
(History of Communication Series, University of Illinois Press)

UIL Press: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/89cmd2yt9780252038846.html

Digital Rebellion examines the impact of new media and communication technologies on the spatial, strategic, and organizational fabric of social movements.

Todd Wolfson reveals how aspects of the mid-1990s Zapatistas movement–network organizational structure, participatory democratic governance, and the use of communication tools as a binding agent–became essential parts of Indymedia and other Cyber Left organizations. From there he uses oral interviews and other rich ethnographic data to chart the media-based think tanks and experiments that continued the Cyber Left’s evolution through the Independent Media Center’s birth around the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. From there he looks at the participatory democracy that governs global social movements and the ways democracy and decentralization have come into tension, and how “the switchboard of struggle” conducts stories from the hyper-local and disperses them worldwide. As he shows, understanding the intersection of Indymedia and the Global Social Justice Movement illuminates their foundational role in the Occupy struggle and other emergent movements that have re-energized radical politics.

A trained socio-cultural anthropologist, Todd Wolfson is currently an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. He is also a community organizer and in 2006 co-founded the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia.

“Combining the passion of an activist and the reasoned arguments of a scholar, Wolfson wonderfully details the emergence of the Cyber Left. In Digital Rebellion he not only celebrates its political potential but also, and more importantly, provides a lucid critique of the forms it has taken thus far.”
–Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire, Multitude and Declaration

Sources:
http://uprisingradio.org/home/2015/01/15/digital-rebellion-the-birth-of-the-cyber-left/
https://pathtothepossible.wordpress.com/2014/11/18/digital-rebellion-the-birth-of-the-cyber-left/
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