Universities, Civility, and Repression in the Age of New Media

Abstract

This chapter attends to surveillance performed under the guise of civility, with civility being deployed as an instrument for disciplining. The techniques of repression evident in the excerpt, perfected with the mix of surveillance and calibrated control under authoritarianism, embody the normative mode of governmentality of the neoliberal university. Civility serves the Empire by disciplining dissent while simultaneously deploying the White exceptionalism of academic freedom in asserting neocolonial power. The hegemonic US-based literature on new media and democratic processes point toward the democratizing roles of new media in the context of social movements as witnessed in the Arab Spring and other similar movements globally. In the absence of existing frameworks and channels for communication, new media infrastructures such as blogs, Facebook posts, and tweets often serve as sites for resisting the hegemonic ideologies. Incivility, performed as a communicative inversion, is the reference frame for silencing dissent on new media.