Editor's Introduction: Academic research into activism and new media – the anatomy of a mésalliance
Balázs Bodó
Editor's Introduction: Academic research into activism and new media – the anatomy of a mésalliance
Abstract
The first edition of Eastbound collects together articles from an international conference on new media and activism organized last October in Budapest. We brought together more than a hundred academics, activists and artists to engage them in a discourse about how contemporary activism is affected by the emergence of new media technologies.
By confining participants to a single space, our aim with the conference was to cross-fertilize the often distinct dialogues these separate groups have amongst themselves. The results, frankly, served mostly to dispell our notion of researchers as looking to activists as gateways to understanding radical social change and thus transforming society itself, and of activists as able to utilize the distilled findings of academic research. The two groups hardly had anything to say to one another.
Problems were identified accurately. Descriptions of situations were thorough. Proposed or realized actions were interesting, thought-provoking and sometimes effective. But these separate instances of activist uses of new media – whether the description was from the inside or from an academic viewpoint – rarely add up to anything particularly consistent or coherent. They remained as they were presented: one after the other. Detached fragments, and little hope of them forming a bigger picture. Neither academics nor activists offered a way to put the pieces together. They left as they arrived: lonely, as strangers.
As for the activists, they had to realize that they face a power that is in constant fragmentation, reshuffle and reboot, continuously morphing as it tries to incorporate the rapidly changing fields of society, politics, economics and technology...