[Metalab-announce] Activism and Counter-Activism Behavioural Dynamics in Cyberspace

[Stefanie Wuschitz]

Liebes Metalab,
Eine alte Freundin von mir, *Kinda Al_Sayed,* kommt aus Syrien. Sie arbeitet
als Architektin in London und hat sich intensiv mit den aktuellen
politischen Veränderungen in Syrien beschäftigt. Kinda wird am 30. Mai um
21h einen Vortrag im Metalab halten. Ich hoff, ihr habt Zeit zu kommen und
mit zu diskutieren.


*Activism and Counter-Activism Behavioural Dynamics in Cyberspace*



The exercise of democracy in societies has always been the product that
tradeoffs between two forces; emergent bottom up expressions of individual
interests and top down decisions made by authorities. This equation maybe
imbalanced in systems where power and decision-making is exercised by the
authority rather than by the people.

In authoritarian regimes, when people make attempts to exercise their
democratic rights they will be faced by coercion for which media machinery
and communication tools are either devoted to mislead the public or disabled
to avoid exposing authoritarian actions.  This form of suppression of media
machinery is only maintained through having control over the centralized
form of media. The despotic enforcement of media control has been evidently
busted throughout the Arab spring phenomena as an effect of decentralizing
and personalizing media tools. This new instrumentalization of the media by
the public allowed individual’s emission of information by exploiting all
the affordances of the WWW medium. Social media networks have particularly
contributed to a great extent to the dismantling of authorities’ suppressive
activity. Within this process new forms of emergent behaviors have evolved
as a by-product of togetherness in cyber space that would never have been
enabled in the physical space. Different types of behavioral dynamics were
identified within the flow of messaging between anonymous activists raising
individual’s awareness towards communal values and disrupting activities
exercised by counter-activism machinery. Time as a fundamental component of
the medium’s affordances started playing an essential role in the regulation
of action-reaction dynamics within the messaging flow. In this way the
medium became the message by means of time and the social networking
interface was made value-laden by means of its structure that embraces
different affordances towards time and space. The partitioning of space and
time in these interfaces together with the network structure that builds up
between the different partitions left a huge impact on the influence
boundaries of the message. This is where time as a construct of cyberspace
starts to build a reciprocal relationship with time in the physical space.
Through this reciprocal relationship differences can be identified between
the affordances of Physical and Virtual spaces towards the rise of social
organizations. The phenomenon of twitter journalism casts a very substantial
impact on individuals’ actions and reactions due to its brief and instant
messaging power. Where there are benefits to such medium of communication
there are also risks that are posed by control and distortion of
information. The persistence and spreading of the Arab spring phenomena and
the partial success of it suggests that emergent self-driven reporting
activity will eventually prevail. This suggestion is reasoned by the simple
realism that the powers to control its emergence and contain its spreading
won’t be affordable once passed a certain threshold.




Alles Liebe!

Stefanie
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