Crisis and critique: a brief history of media participation in times of crisis

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Crisis and CritiqueA Brief History of Media Participation in Times of CrisisBy Anne KaunZed Books LtdCopyright © 2016 Anne KaunAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-78360-737-2ContentsPreface, Introduction. Protest and the media, 1. Crisis and critique, 2. Protest times: the temporality of protest media practices, 3. Protest spaces: the production of space in events of contention, 4. Protest speeds: resynchronizing fast capitalism, Conclusion. Protest technologies: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, Collections and materials, References, Index, CHAPTER 1Crisis and critiqueWhat role do crisis situations play for critique and how can critique further crises towards progressive social change? Before exploring protest time, protest space and protest speed, it is necessary to define crisis and its relationship to critique more extensively to develop an understanding for the backdrop of the protest movements and their relation to media technologies more broadly.Economic crises are critical junctures and potentially mark a state of exception and potentially enhance crucial change. Robert McChesney discusses critical junctures as 'rare, brief periods in which dramatic changes are debated and enacted drawing from a broad palette of options, followed by long periods in which structural or institutional change is slow and difficult' (McChesney 2007, 56). He argues further that critical junctures in media and communications occur under the following conditions:• There is a revolutionary new communication technology that undermines the existing system.• The content of the media system, especially the journalism, is increasingly discredited or seen as illegitimate.• There is a major political crisis – severe social disequilibrium – in which the existing order is no longer working, dominant institutions are increasingly challenged, and there are major movements for social reform.Critical junctures could hence be considered as a period of opportunity for directing social change through different actors. Crises such as the Great Depression, the economic crisis of the 1970s (often labelled the oil crisis) and the Great Recession are examples of critical junctures. At the same time, capitalism confines infinite critical junctures in different sectors of society that are related to each other but might appear in slightly different periods (Foster and McChesney 2012). Identifying critical junctures as such becomes an ontological and epistemological question. Economic crises that appear in conjunction with social, cultural and intellectual crises are important points of crystallization in the analysis of change in media and communications, too. They potentially fill a discursive void enhanced by the crisis through new media practices (Koselleck 1973/1959). Consequently, media become arenas as well as objects in the struggle of directing social change during critical junctures (McChesney 1993). Following Raymond Williams, means of communication are also means of production, which is particularly true in so-called information-based societies nowadays. Williams argues:(...) the means of communication have a specific productive history, which is always more or less directly related to the general productive historical phases of productive and technical activity. It is so, second, because the historically changing means of communication have historically variable relations to the general complex of productive forces and to the general social relationships which are produced by them and which the general productive forces both produce and reproduce. These historical variations include both relative homologies between the means of communication and more general social productive forces and relationships, and, most marked in certain periods, contradictions of both general and particular kinds. (Williams 2005/1980, 50)Taking major economic crises as a starting point for the analysis rath