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The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions by Ray Brescia (review)
Technology and Culture ( IF 0.7 ) Pub Date : 2021-06-04
Allison Perlman

Reviewed by:

  • The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions by Ray Brescia
  • Allison Perlman (bio)
The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions By Ray Brescia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. Pp. 240.

The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions By Ray Brescia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. Pp. 240.

Ray Brescia's The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions offers a blueprint for successful social movements. As Brescia illuminates, to level an effective campaign is to embrace the newest communications technology available, cultivate and utilize translocal networks of movement participants, and develop and disseminate messaging that is inclusive and speaks to multiple communities. Despite the book's title, The Future of Change is not, at its core, a techno-utopian treatise that positions communications technologies as the heroes of tales of social movement victories. Rather, Brescia's book flags how the savvy deployment of new technologies are but one element of campaigns that have been able to achieve their stated goals.

Brescia, a professor at Albany Law School, comes to his topic from professional experience. As he notes in the book, he has long worked as a community organizer and attorney for progressive social causes. His goal is to offer a guide to future activists drawn from extended case studies. The book is organized in loose chronological order. The early chapters establish the three pillars—medium, network, and message—of a successful social movement. The illustrative examples within them span from eighteenth-century uses of the postal service to disseminate revolutionary pamphlets to the mid-twentieth-century embrace of television by civil rights activists, cognizant of the power of images projected into domestic spaces, to propel their cause. These chapters both synthesize existing histories of social movements and apply concepts such as social capital and interest convergence to explicate Brescia's framework for social movement activism; much of the material here may already be familiar to historians of technology and social movements.

Brescia then identifies a period of decline, defined by the adoption of new computing technologies that could generate direct mailing lists. Using this technology diminished social movement actors' capacities to build social trust and to activate local organizing efforts. Furthermore, as direct mail facilitated targeted messaging and fundraising, it simultaneously obviated the creation of messaging that hailed multiple communities. This period, the latter decades of the twentieth century, is the nadir in Brescia's narrative of social movement history.

The final chapters of the book examine specific case studies from the 2010s that are emblematic of how the tide turned in the twenty-first century: the organizing of West Virginia teachers to secure a better contract, a diverse coalition of feminist and LGBTQ activists who pushed for a more robust Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), the efforts to secure marriage [End Page 650] equality in Maine, and the campaign in Long Beach, California, to raise wages for hotel workers. While Brescia notes the role of digital media in facilitating organizing, the lessons of these chapters hinge on the latter two pillars of his social movement roadmap. The VAWA victory owed its success to the solidarities developed across coalition members; the marriage equality campaign's success was tethered to its messaging; and the Long Beach hotel workers gained a raise through the collaborative efforts of diverse participants who solicited support from their respective communities.

The potential and pitfalls of digital media animate Brescia's conclusion. While he acknowledges the capacities of social media to connect activists and build the very sort of coalitions at the center of past victories, he notes how social media platforms rely on algorithms that can produce digital echo chambers, spread unchecked disinformation, and lead to slacktivism, or the mistaken conflation of digital engagement with political action. Brescia underscores the potential of digital media to create ties across multiple vectors of difference, but underlines that they are tools to facilitate people to meet, in real time and in real space, to advocate collectively for progressive social change. For Brescia, ultimately, technology thus is at once critical and peripheral to progressive social movement activism.

While Brescia is commendably circumspect about the role of communications technologies, his work largely...



中文翻译:

变革的未来:技术如何塑造社会革命 Ray Brescia(评论)

审核人:

  • 变革的未来:技术如何塑造社会革命Ray Brescia
  • 艾莉森·帕尔曼(生物)
变革的未来:技术如何塑造社会革命Ray Brescia。伊萨卡:康奈尔大学出版社,2020 年。Pp。240.

变革的未来:技术如何塑造社会革命Ray Brescia。伊萨卡:康奈尔大学出版社,2020 年。Pp。240.

Ray Brescia 的《变革的未来:技术如何塑造社会革命》为成功的社会运动提供了蓝图。正如布雷西亚所阐明的那样,要开展有效的运动,就要采用最新的通信技术,培养和利用跨地区的运动参与者网络,并开发和传播具有包容性并与多个社区对话的信息。尽管书名如此,但《变革的未来》的核心并不是将通信技术定位为社会运动胜利故事中的英雄的技术乌托邦式论文。相反,布雷西亚的书表明,新技术的精明部署只是能够实现其既定目标的运动的一个要素。

奥尔巴尼法学院教授布雷西亚从专业经验谈起他的话题。正如他在书中指出的那样,他长期以来一直担任社区组织者和进步社会事业的律师。他的目标是从扩展的案例研究中为未来的活动家提供指南。这本书是按松散的时间顺序组织的。前几章确立了成功的社会运动的三大支柱——媒介、网络和信息。其中的说明性例子从 18 世纪使用邮政服务传播革命小册子到 20 世纪中叶民权活动家拥抱电视,认识到投射到家庭空间的图像的力量,以推动他们的事业。这些章节既综合了现有的社会运动历史,又运用社会资本和利益趋同等概念来阐释布雷西亚的社会运动激进主义框架;技术和社会运动的历史学家可能已经熟悉这里的大部分材料。

Brescia 然后确定了一个衰退期,定义为采用可以生成直接邮件列表的新计算技术。使用这项技术削弱了社会运动参与者建立社会信任和激活当地组织努力的能力。此外,由于直邮促进了有针对性的消息传递和筹款,它同时避免了创建多个社区欢呼的消息传递。这个时期,也就是 20 世纪的后几十年,是布雷西亚社会运动历史叙事的最低点。

本书的最后几章考察了 2010 年代的具体案例研究,这些案例研究是 21 世纪潮流如何转变的象征:西弗吉尼亚州教师的组织以确保获得更好的合同,女权主义者和 LGBTQ 活动家的多元化联盟推动为了更强有力的暴力侵害妇女法 (VAWA),努力确保婚姻[End Page 650]缅因州的平等以及加利福尼亚长滩的运动,以提高酒店员工的工资。虽然布雷西亚注意到数字媒体在促进组织方面的作用,但这些章节的教训取决于他的社会运动路线图的后两个支柱。VAWA 的成功归功于联盟成员之间的团结;婚姻平等运动的成功取决于其传递的信息;长滩酒店的工作人员通过寻求各自社区支持的不同参与者的共同努力获得了加薪。

数字媒体的潜力和陷阱激发了 Brescia 的结论。虽然他承认社交媒体有能力将活动家联系起来并在过去的胜利中心建立那种联盟,但他指出社交媒体平台如何依赖可以产生数字回声室、传播未经检查的虚假信息并导致懈怠主义的算法,或者将数字参与与政治行动错误地混为一谈。Brescia 强调了数字媒体在建立跨多种差异向量的联系方面的潜力,但也强调它们是促进人们实时和在现实空间见面的工具,以共同倡导渐进的社会变革。因此,对于布雷西亚来说,最终,技术对于进步的社会运动激进主义来说既是关键又是外围。

虽然布雷西亚对通信技术的作用非常谨慎,但他的工作主要...

更新日期:2021-06-04
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