Trere, Emiliano ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2496-4571 2018. Nomads of cyber-urban space: media hybridity as resistance. Mortensen, Mette, Neumayer, Christina and Poell, Thomas, eds. Social Media Materialities and Protest: Critical Reflections, Critical Perspectives on Citizen Media, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 42-56. (10.4324/9781315107066-11) |
Abstract
The chapter begins with the appraisal of three main fallacies that define the field of digital activism: spatial dualism, technological presentism, and alternativeness. To overcome these fallacies, the material multiplicity of the media practices of the Mexican Barrio Nómada collective are explored. Relying on multi-method engaged research, the chapter scrutinizes the notion of “total communication” that pervades the practices of the Barrio. Total communication involves the incessant navigation of three communicative tensions between: the physical and the digital, the old and the new, the corporate and the alternative. This chapter demonstrates that total communication is not just a matter of communicative abundance, but that technological multiplicity and hybridity can represent forms of resistance per se because sustaining a varied media ecology keeps the dissemination of critical content flowing under every adversity. Illustrating the ways through which the Barrio is able to traverse the complexity of cyber-urban space, this chapter highlights that bodies still reside at the centre of collective action. In contrast to an image of counter-power as a smooth journey between “spaces of places” and “spaces of flows”, it shows that activists’ nomadic practices are relentlessly troubled by the insecurity and uncertainty of Gore capitalism.
Item Type: | Book Section |
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Date Type: | Publication |
Status: | Published |
Schools: | Journalism, Media and Culture |
Publisher: | Routledge |
ISBN: | 9781138093065 |
Last Modified: | 23 Oct 2022 13:38 |
URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/111239 |
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