Say no to Theory. Say yes to Layman.

First off, lets be honest, I hated this article. I hate reading theoretical articles. All I really read is "blah, blah, blah, let's use big words to sound smart, blah, I totally know what I'm talking about, blah". I started reading this article like a week ago. I feel like theorists are too far left field. Theorists are Communist. They try to sound and seem like they're in control. Now with that aside, I'll try to write a post on her paper.

Dean’s main focus in the article is that ICTs, our globally networked communication structures, aren’t exactly helping in bringing radical change to neo-liberal capitalism.  Actually, they’re hindering. “The proliferation, distribution, acceleration, and intensification of communicative access and opportunity,” Dean writes, “far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in precisely the opposite, the post political formation of communicative capitalism” (53).

We can point to plenty of examples where ICTs were key in mobilizing large amounts of people, several in a remarkably short amount of time.  Just look to recent movements, organized in large part through Twitter, like #Shoutyourabortion. While we shouldn't downplay or just shy away from understanding these occurrences, we also shouldn't lump them into a big pile and validate them.

Dean’s argument is structured around the debunking of fantasies/fallacies, two of which I’ll outline.

The Fantasy of Abundance
Lots and lots of stuff (opinions,stats, etc.) on the net equals Democratic potential. Phrased differently, what’s important is not that messages are being understood and responded to, as much as the fact that they contribute to the constantly enlarging steam of content.  For Dean, messages lose their specificity in communicative capitalism; stripped of their singularity, they simply become part of a massive data flow.

The Fantasy of Participation
A key point here is that the Net displaces political activity.  Struggles of everyday life are moved to a virtual sphere. Because we feel like posting a blog (like this one) is participation, political energy is redirected, or perhaps distracted, away from “real” organizing.  We feel like we’re participating, but it’s a protected space, containable, predictable, etc.

So I guess I did understand her, but I didn't enjoy a bit of it. Going back to my Twitter example #Shoutyourabortion, it's really just a fantasy of participation. How many of those women would actually speak publicly about how they're proud of their abortion. I would fancy that most of them wouldn't. But within the sphere of the Net, it's a protected space and containable. And let's be honest, how many of their comments were actually seen by others? It was more of the mass quantity of responses that were seen. Not their individual responses. The fantasy of abundance and participation. Why couldn't she say this is Layman Term's? Like I just did. Theorists need a lesson on Layman Terms but they won't. They get attention by not speaking in simplistic terms. BLAH!