> The Jacobin article repeats, with less overall engagement, older criticisms of tactical media found here:
>
> http://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-029-dawn-of-the-organised-networks/
Thanks for the pointer. I haven't read Rossiter's essays in a while. But here, his and Lovink's interest is in institutional form, and a subset of what has been termed Tactical Media: communications media, really.
"The organised network is a hybrid formation: part tactical media, part institutional formation. There are benefits to be obtained from both these lineages. The clear distinction of the organised network is that its institutional logic is internal to the socio-technical dimensions of the media of communication. This means there is no universal formula for how an organised network might invent its conditions of existence. There will be no “internationalism” for networks."
The point I was trying to make, which may not have been clear at all, is that the tactical gestures of Tactical Media are read in different ways in different societal contexts. Lewis' essay echoes this from Lovink/Rossiter:
"Tactical media too often assume to reproduce the curious spatio-temporal dynamic and structural logic of the modern state and industrial capital: difference and renewal from the peripheries. But there’s a paradox at work here. Disruptive as their actions may often be, tactical media corroborate the temporal mode of post-Fordist capital: short-termism."
But isn't neoliberalism applied unevenly across the globe? Or it manifests different aspects of itself in different places?
Zeynep Tufekci has recently made the point that Twitter was/is a bridging platform in MENA protest:
"A common misunderstanding has been that Twitter is used mostly for protest coordination --yes, some, but that is not its key role."
"There is a "new media ecology"; it's not just one platform. Cell phones, Al-Jazeera, social media--each part has different roles."
"Twitter is both a "bridging platform"--connecting multiple groups-- *and* a local coordination/conversation platform."
In MENA then, you have Twitter and YouTube posts being taken up by Al-Jazeera in a way that Rossiter and Lovink had dismissed in the context of their 2005 essay:
"Networks will never be rewarded and 'embedded' in well funded structures."
Never say "never," I guess.
Best, Charles