Lim, M. (2015) A CyberUrban Space Odyssey: The Spatiality of Contemporary Social Movements, New Geographies, 07: 117-123
- ️https://carleton-ca.academia.edu/MerlynaLim
Related papers
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Recent studies lament the loss of historical specificity in Los Angeles due to the destruction of landmarks and the removal of ethnic neighborhoods, in addition to distorting representations in the media that divide the city into narratives of celebrity and crime. Selective de-industrialization, de-unionization and the brutal demographic divisions that exist in the spatial organization of LA also provide the preconditions for a loss of regional identity and broad grassroots networking in the city, home to 3.5 million Latino, black, Asian and white citizens that inhabit its 464 square miles. Mike Davis, in his widely read *City of Quartz*, suggests that the loss of public space in LA is a central factor in preventing the mingling of its citizens, preventing their ability to forge networks of solidarity that can result from common experiences among classes, ethnicities and races. In this essay, I advance cyberspace as a location that can potentially provide a common space to enable Angelinos to overcome class, racial and spatial divisions. Norman Klein argues the dematerialization view of cyberspace, dubbing online regional practice as “the digitization of forgetting,” and its ties to localism an impossibility due to the spatial indeterminacy of cyberspace - “a spot un-rooted to any definite spot on the surface of the earth” (Klein, 1999: p. 198). The process of creating an Independent Media Center in Los Angeles (LA IMC), however, establishes an offline/online nexus, creating material conditions for social interaction and community-building; ultimately enriching, rather than erasing, notions of place, regional identity and community. Presently, language differences, ethnic insularity, the digital divide, and the daily grind of the working poor prevent many ties easily achieved in theory. Yet, the process of building alternative online media collectives does provide a viable model for overcoming urban processes of erasure and alienation, an experience common to those that inhabit the decentralized sprawl of Los Angeles. People forging links across online and offline spaces, I argue, can engage in new social relations, linking bodies across divisions of race, culture and space, creating local networks of solidarity. _____________________________
Who Rules the Digital City? Capitalism, Democracy, and Post-internet Activism
In 2001, the world’s first digital city met its end as a freenet initiative and cyber-democratic experiment, subject to a slow death of privatization and inactivity. Meanwhile, some 600 kilometers east, the government of Berlin had just launched the Liegenschafsfond, or Berlin property fund: a state-owned, online enterprise designed to serve as a private-access auction house for unused public land in the city. A decade later, a mobile think tank from New York plans to settle in Berlin’s rapidly gentrifying Kreuzberg neighbourhood amid online calls for protest. Five years following, Twitter feeds are blowing up with a new type of networked political protest using memecraft as its medium in order bring down the alt-right, anti-immigration Dutch PVV Party, the most recent case of the West's feverish wave of populist campaigns. This paper asks: what can these early castings of the digital city and their contemporary discontents teach us about the new modules of citizenship and digital activism within the post- internet city?
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Environment and Urbanization, 2009
Faced with formidable challenges to expression in Cairo's public spaces, urban blogger activists have developed new ways of articulating dissent, namely spatial tactics ranging from boycott campaigns, cyber-activism and protest art, to innovations in mobilization, means of communication and organizational fl exibility. This is particularly evident in the way these activists have (re)claimed Cairo's contested public spaces in downtown Unions Street and Midan al Tahrir (Liberation Square) and transformed them into zones for public protest, employing urban installations and street graffi ti and constructing signifi cant sites of urban resistance and spatial contestation. The emergence of this grassroots street activism opens up a new public sphere through which the role of urban governance might be contested to accommodate cultural identities within various forms of spatiality and popular democracy.
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Matrizes, 2013
For the last few years online social movements have spread through several latitudes creating important theoretical challenges for several areas of knowledge, concerning the nature of such actions, given the connective and technological quality of its acts as well as concerning the creation of a new kind of locality, simultaneously informative and material expression of an unprecedented dwelling condition that brings humans together, informative circuits and territorialities. Finally, the necessity that imposes rethinking the composition of human collectives beyond the perspective of modern sociology, since it presents itself as expression of a reticular interactive ecology that is no longer political, that is, anthropomorphic and ideologically oriented.
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Web 2.0 studies position new social media as creating relational connections, yielding new geographies based on increased awareness. YouTube exemplifies these media, fostering relations between geographically and politically disparate people. Moving beyond the dichotomy between space and cyberspace, this paper expands upon Wellman's (2001) description of cyberplace, and argues that place and cyberplace form a continuum upon which filmed events can be located. Invisible Children, a non-governmental organization concerned with raising awareness about Ugandan child soldiers, illustrates the role of new media in this continuum through disseminating their videos of protests on YouTube. This analysis expands our understanding of both the links between the generation of awareness and movement participation, and media's contribution to geographies of collective action.
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2014
As the Internet becomes more widely adopted, the virtual space has advanced to closely represent aspects of the real world from which it was created. Due to this trend, researchers of various disciplines have become interested in studying relationships between real world phenomena and their virtual representations. One such area of emerging research seeks to study relationships between real world and virtual activism of social movements. In particular, social movements holding extreme social perspectives are often studied due to their tendency to have robust virtual presences in order to circumvent real world social barriers. However, many previous studies are limited in scope as they utilize manual data collection and analysis methods; they also often fail to consider the real world aspects of groups that partake in virtual activism. We utilize automated data collection and analysis methods to identify significant relationships between aspects of social movement group virtual communities and their respective real world locations. Our results demonstrate the existence of relationships between the real world aspects of social movement groups and their virtual communities. These observations provide insights into the behaviors of social movements within virtual environments, and suggest that virtual communities are closely related to their real world counterparts.
Since the emergence of the concept of user-generated content websites -Web 2.0, Internet communications have developed as a powerful personal and social phenomenon. Many Internet applications have become partially or entirely related to the concept of social network; and cyberspace has become a space about 'us' not 'where' we are. This paper investigates the theoretical grounds of the effect of cyber experience on changing the individuals' uses of the public spaces, and sustaining this change through maintaining the ties and reciprocal influence between actions in physical and cyber spaces. It aims at examining the impact of cyber territories on the perception, definition and effectiveness of personal space within different circumstances; and its role in changing the uses of spaces where people used to act habitually. The personal space, here, will be represented as the core of both: change and consistency -the space of bridging the reciprocal effect of cyber and physical counterparts, which is transformed through the experience of physical events mediated into the cyberspace. The paper is part of a study which looks at the case of Tahrir Square during the Egyptian political movement in 2011. We will compare the activists' actions and practices in the Square during different events of non-routine use of the square and its surroundings. The case study will show the level of consistency in the features of the produced personal space within different waves of the revolutionary actions for all that different circumstances, motivations and results.
2005
The World Social Forum (WSF) emerged in the wake of a global wave of protest against capitalism characterized, in part, by the expression of broader political ideals through network-based organizational forms. The WSF was thus conceived as an “open space” for exchanging ideas, resources, and information; promoting initiatives; and generating concrete alternatives. At the same time, many grassroots activists have criticized the forums for being organized in a top-down fashion, including political parties despite their formal prohibition, and favoring prominent intellectuals. Radicals thus face a continual dilemma: participate in the forums as a way to reach a broader public, or remain outside given their political differences? Based on my participation as activist and ethnographer with the (-ex) Movement for Global Resistance (MRG) in Barcelona and Peoples Global Action (PGA), this article explores the cultural politics of autonomous space at the margins of the world and regional social forums on three levels. Empirically, it provides an ethno-genealogy of the emergence, diffusion, and proliferation of the concept of autonomous space. Theoretically, it argues that the cultural politics of autonomous space express the broader networking logics and politics increasingly inscribed into emerging organizational architectures. Politically, it suggests that the proliferation of autonomous spaces represents a promising model for rethinking the Forum as an innovative network-based organizational form.