Couldry ends his book with a call to reconsider what conditions need to be in place for voice to meaningfully enter public life; the rise of new media platforms has not guaranteed a political outcome, especially when those tools are controlled by corporations more interested in making money than expanding civic participation. Yet the availability of networked communications has given more people access to the means of expressing their voice, increased public and governmental awareness of the diversity of voices that are seeking to be heard, led to new consideration of what kinds of spaces and platforms are needed for effective political exchanges, and fostered what he calls “new intensities of listening” (140) as more participants feel an ethical need to try to process the emerging conversation. More and more, politics requires soliciting participation, getting people to tell their own stories, and also working together to amplify voices that might once have gone unheard. The Peabody Awards, referenced above, describe their mission as recognizing “stories that matter.” In a networked era, more of us have the capacity to produce and circulate stories that matter to us both personally and politically, but this does not insure that all of those stories are equally likely to be heard by those people who have the power and authority to act upon them.
While telling one’s personal story as a means of political consciousness-raising may have been a central aspect of earlier forms of identity politics, such storytelling takes on new significance when that story may be captured on video and circulated through online platforms and social network tools to reach many whom one might never encounter face to face. Many youth are deploying personal storytelling—through, for example, spoken word poetry—in order to link their stories to larger concerns within their communities, speaking for those who are not in a position to speak for themselves. In a MAPP-hosted webinar, spoken word poet Joshua Merchant described how he prepared emotionally to share his own story:
When I started to write about myself as far as my identity of being a queer black male of color from East Oakland, that was terrifying, and it’s something that’s still terrifying. I am also very aware that if I don’t [share my story], hell of a lot of people are still being muted, a heck of a lot of people from my community are not being heard.… You realize that you have a responsibility. Something that started off as just me needing to express myself because I didn’t have nobody to talk to, or I didn’t think anyone would listen to me, becomes “other people need to hear this because I know they’re from somewhere else than where I am from or from a similar place where this can change something for them.”
We will examine many other examples where looking straight into a camera and sharing one’s lived experience contributes to a larger political process—IC supporters sharing how they became concerned about genocide, DREAMers coming out as undocumented, or American Muslims challenging dominant images of what it means to be Muslim.
However, the confessional video—almost the emblematic example of Couldry’s idea of “giving an account of yourself” in the digital age—represents only one genre of political storytelling. Consider, for example, the case of Jonathan McIntosh, a 20-something political remix artist. McIntosh’s “Buffy vs. Edward” video depicts a confrontation between the pale, glittering young Twilight heartthrob and the empowered demon hunter from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. McIntosh created “Buffy vs. Edward” as an expression of his own frustration with the romanticization of “stalking” across the Twilight series. McIntosh uses Buffy to challenge Edward’s misogynistic and patriarchal attitudes, rebuffing his repeated advances and, ultimately, staking him. The video sparked discussion on Twilight fan forums around the series’ gender politics. Speaking at a Transmedia Hollywood event at UCLA in 2013, McIntosh explained:
I think what was most exciting about it for me was that it did create conversations about what was abusive behavior and what was romantic behavior … how the media [is] sort of framing these very problematic male behaviors as romantic. What was exciting about it is that it happened primarily on blogs devoted to Twilight .… For me, it was trying to create a dialogue about something that is quite serious—you know, stalking and abusive relationships through a lens of something people are already talking about.
A subsequent production, “Right Wing Radio Duck,” adopted a more overtly oppositional stance, though still expressed through playful appropriation of images. In it, McIntosh juxtaposed Glenn Beck’s anti-immigrant rants with vintage Donald Duck cartoons. McIntosh (2011) explains:
I felt that Donald Duck would make an ideal pop culture character with which to explore Beck’s messages and impact. Donald seemed an especially appropriate choice for this remix because he was originally created by Disney to represent a frustrated down-on-their-luck “anybody” character during the great depression. The current economic recession many Americans are struggling with today seem to parallel the struggles Donald faced in the old shorts from the 1930s and 1940s. I hoped that through Donald’s situation, viewers of this remix might understand why people are drawn to the Tea Party. They are often very legitimately frustrated and angry people looking for answers. And most of the time they are not getting any real answers from the corporate mass media or from either political party. In the remix Donald turns to Beck in desperation and is offered answers—crazy answers, but answers none-the-less.
This video drew national attention when “Right Wing Radio Duck” was denounced by Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and other Fox News commentators who refused to accept the idea that it was produced by a young media maker and circulated by grassroots networks, rather than being secretly funded and distributed by the Obama campaign.
There Are No Twitter Revolutions: Understanding Transmedia Mobilization
Malcolm Gladwell (2010) claims so-called Twitter revolutions build on weak social ties and do not motivate participants to put their lives on the line. Make no mistake—what we are describing here is not a Twitter revolution. Gladwell’s historical analysis rests on the unfair comparison between platforms (Twitter or Facebook) and social movements (whether the civil rights movements of the 1950s or today’s Arab Spring and Occupy movements). A fairer comparison might have been between today’s Twitter revolution and the telephone revolution of the 1960s, since we know that Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and other black leaders used the telephone as a key tool for coordinating activities among other black church leaders, freedom riders, and a range of other dispersed sets of supporters. Yet few readers would reduce the civil rights movement to the effects of long-distance phone calls. Rather, the telephone was one tool among many this movement deployed toward its aims. Aniko Bodgroghkozy (2013) documents the various strategies the civil rights movement’s leaders deployed to get their messages onto network television, often by staging protests in sites they felt would be most likely to provoke aggressive responses so that they could force racists to reveal their true faces to the public watching CBS, NBC, and ABC. And, of course, these civil rights leaders translated their cause into cultural references they felt would touch those who did not speak the languages of establishment politics—including even publishing comic books to translate nonviolent resistance into a youthful vernacular (Fellowship of Reconciliation 1955)—while using the communication infrastructure provided by the historically black press to address more focused messages to their supporters.
Similarly, today’s civil rights leaders—for example, the undocumented youth who have rallied in support of the DREAM Act—act across diverse media platforms as well as through face-to-face conversations and street protests. Like many previous generations of civil rights activists, they use conference calls to connect and coordinate among various groups, but they also use social media to coordinate action across a more dispersed network and circulate online video or internet memes to dramatize their political narratives for not just current but also potential supporters (Zimmerman 2012).3 Sometimes, they bypass broadcast media, other times, they seek mainstream coverage.
Whatever inequalities remain in terms of access to technologies, skills, and other social resources, we have found many instances where new media has provided tools and infrastructures by which marginal groups