I’ve been posting about the Ukrainian presidential runoff elections over at UKR-TAZ, the blog I established in the wake of the 2014 Maidan revolution. (See Four theses on Ukrainian politics and Politics as reality-FB.) The gist of my comments is relevant to the study of social media’s impacts on political and cultural change in general, so I’ll summarize them here.
My four theses were fairly straightforward: (1) that, in electing as its president Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and actor who plays the president on television, Ukraine would overtake all rivals in the race to equate politics with reality-TV, (2) that Ukrainians are more savvy than most about their politicians, (3) that for a political system dominated by oligarchic interests, Ukraine’s is surprisingly pluralistic, and (4) that as with all oligarchic or plutocratic “democracies,” this pluralism is restricted to issues that don’t threaten the overriding interests of the oligarchic class.
I added a concluding sentence about why I wasn’t fretting too much about the electoral decision, unlike some (but not all) of my Ukrainian friends and colleagues. My follow-up post goes into a little more detail about this. It reads, in part:
A few days I ago I posted about how Ukraine’s election of comedian Ze as its president will put them at the forefront of the trend for “politics as reality-TV,” and how that may not be entirely a bad thing. (For one thing, it’s democracy at work; for another, Ze’s hologrammatic persona will become real and Ukrainians will then be able to respond to reality instead of to an empty signifier of ‘change’; for a third, it would make, and has now made, Ukraine the second country in the world with both a Jewish president and a Jewish prime minister, which incidentally would disprove all those Russian propaganda memes about Ukraine’s “fascism” and “anti-Semitism” for anyone who still needs to have them disproven.)
I missed one crucial element then: the extent to which Ukrainian politics had already been “Facebookized,” i.e., to which social media have spun Ukrainians into polar extremes, both of which seem to have fallen off one or another edge of consensus reality. Ukrainians have long been polarized, which has accounted for their revolutions and political oscillations, but the pro-western cultural nationalists and the left-liberal progressives (among the intellectuals I connect with) have usually had significant overlap between them. Now they seem to have departed into separate realities. (And that’s not to speak of larger cultural divides.)
I concluded:
That social media would be so powerful among the population at large no longer surprises me (see Brazil, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Brexit, Trump). That it’s so powerful among intellectuals still does. This development deserves a new term: not politics as reality-TV but politics as “reality-FB.” More for us media scholars to keep up with, I guess.
This phenomenon of social media’s polarizing impact is, of course, not disconnected from the fact that there are forces at large — and in this case the Russian example is an obvious one — whose goal is to exacerbate that very impact.
But it’s also built into the nature of profit-driven social media. These are technologies that thrive on affect — on the generation of emotion in ways that could be directed, whether towards the buying of specific products, the selling of specific audiences (that’s the less overt but more substantial goal), or the cultivation of sentiments, desires, motivations, and identities more generally.
To the extent that social media companies mobilize these forces to their own ends — building a devoted (some would say addicted) audience, increasing market share among advertisers, and developing an integrated set of products of their own to cater to those desires (as Amazon, Google, Facebook, and other titans of tech have done all too well) — to that extent they flourish.
If we can speak of the “oligarchization” of democracy at the national level — a trend that has been with us since the beginnings of modern democracy — then now we can speak of the oligarcho-corporatization of global democracy as well. That, it seems to me, is the common front for global activists to work at in the coming years, with the goal of reining in the new oligarchs while retaining and expanding the potentials for media to contribute to political democratization.
(And the only 2020 presidential candidate in this country, the U.S., who seems to be particularly aware of this is Elizabeth Warren. But that’s another story.)
Happy Earth Day, o fraught and mediascaped planet of ours.
