Political Dysmetropsia – Activist tactics in the (under)formatted world of social media

• Main Authors: Carlsen, Hjalmar Alexander Bang, Birkbak, Andreas, Madsen, Anders Koed
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: https://vbn.aau.dk/da/publications/c578aad8-c63c-42ea-872f-a75e1cfa8ae2; https://vbn.aau.dk/ws/files/224222888/SMAO15_paper_43.pdf; http://www.social--media.org/

In an age of social media, activists are met with an abundance of opportunities to engage in things near and far. An activist engaged in environmental causes, for instance, might be presented with a photo from his brother’s community garden next to a plea from Greenpeace to support wildlife in the Arctic. Should the small but home grown salad be evaluated in relation to the precarious situation of distant polar bears? Or is the familiar relationship to the brother and his garden a reminder that there are limits to the range of issues we can care for? Such challenges can be referred to as ‘political dysmetropsia’, borrowing the name of a group of visual illusions, which distort one’s sense of size or depth. This paper presents a study of how activists handle political dysmetropsia in their social media practices. We draw on Thévenot’s sociology of engagement to argue that engagement always raises questions about how the environment should be understood (Thévenot 2007, 2014). At the same time, we observe that social media give this challenge a specific shape. Social media-induced political dysmetropsia, we propose, is an urgent but overlooked challenge for contemporary social activism. Our contribution is to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing how activists handle this challenge. Thévenot proposes three different regimes of engagement ranging from the most familiar to the most public. Each of these regimes come with their specific engaged reality and specific engaged good, which means that the theory captures a world where the same things can seem small or large, far and near, depending on how they are engaged and in what moral register. Thévenot talks not of ‘frames’, which are culturally mediated, but of materially and morally supported ‘cognitive formats’ which are bound to specific regimes of engagement. A central focus lies on the appropriate formatting of both the communicated object and its environment. This points towards an analysis of the role of technical infrastructures like social media ...