Multiplicity, Autonomy, New Media, and the Networked Politics of New Social Movements

Abstract

A contemporary politics of contestation and dissent is linked to the development of what have been termed new social movements (NSMs).1 This chapter discusses key aspects of discourse theory in relation to studies of the Internet and the mediation of political identities in the politics of NSMs. These have grown out of a complex social and political history — a history in which politics itself has shifted from a traditional focus on institutions processed via organized systems to a concern with more disparate social movement alignments. This shift has challenged traditional forms of political representation and articulation within the public realm while responding to the changed social, political, and technological conditions and circumstances under which political citizenship is enacted. Contemporary transnational social movements are a combination of collective action and individual subjectivities that mix personal expressions of political allegiance with public debate in an online context. The spaces of action and debate have shifted from local/national configurations and terrestrial media to “global” counter-summits and the Internet (although the latter does not exclude the former). One of the striking differences between the counter-publicity of transnational social movements and the counter-politics of the nation-state is the lack of a common identity and rejection of unifying meta-narratives of organization.