Book Review: Social Movements and Their Technologies, by Stefania Milan

Abstract

Social Movements and Their Technologies. Stefania Milan. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 248 pp. $85 hbk.The use of electronic media by social movements has garnered considerable attention in recent years, with some commentators labeling recent upheavals in Arab world and elsewhere as Twitter- or Facebook-driven revolutions. But labels such as these offer slim insight into complex role that media communication technologies play in lives of social movements. For those who seek to more deeply understand this subject, Stefania Milan's Social Movements and Their Technologies is a good place to begin.A professor at Tilburg University in Netherlands and Citizen Lab at University of Toronto, Milan delivers two important innovations with regard to study of media and social movements. First, she uses sociology-based social movement theory as a framework with which to examine media organizing and activism she discusses, thereby breaking with tendency within media studies to study political media without studying social movement from which this media has emerged, and tendency within sociology-based social movement research of paying too little attention to media making that goes on within social movements. Second, she positions media making organizations, groups, and individuals she studies as constituents within a transnational media justice-driven social movement. Here, she argues, [f]ar from being considered only as tools, media and communication technologies have become a site of struggle in their own right.At center of Milan's research is a comparative examination of emancipatory communication practices (ECPs)-which she defines as ways of social organizing seeking to create alternatives to existing media and communication infrastructure- of two media constituencies, these being community radio practitioners and Internetbased activists. Using language of social movement theory, Milan states that goal of her research is to examine the emergence of media and technology activism, its features, mobilizing frames, identity building, and action repertories.To conduct her study, she interviewed and observed work of community radio practitioners in twenty-four countries and interviewed Internet activists from sixteen countries over a six-year period. From this work, Milan has delivered an insightful study regarding ideologies and organizational efforts that underwrite these alternative and oppositional media-making projects, with her study of Internet projects (which she bundles under term radical techies) being particularly compelling.Describing philosophies that underpin work of techies, Milan observes that these activists share a set of sources of inspiration-namely, DIY culture, cyberlibertarianism, hacker culture, anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, Zapatista discourse, and autonomist thought. On a practical level, Internet activist groups typically aim to provide non-commercial web-based communication tools, such as website hosting and blogging platforms, e-mail accounts, list services, and chat rooms, to citizenry and activist community. In contrast to services provided by commercial systems, they seek to do this while preserving anonymity and privacy of users through encryption techniques. …