Communication and social movements, some ideas and thoughts while I wonder how it all works!

 

This is a little text that aims to open some basic questions and introduce a personal analysis around how we produce and use information individually and collectively.

Could we just imagine for one instant the different routes that a “piece” of information, in a material way, can take before being read and understood by its receptor? I take here in my hands some of the free publications I got from ESF in London last October: let's explore them! because they are interesting, rich, complex and various. Those magazines, flyers, CD ROMs were brought to me by a friend of mine, as I couldn't come to London , so they are particularly precious to me. I am a lucky girl – I couldn't get to the ESF in London but some pieces of the information produced there came to me! In a way, when you begin to think about it, it is amazing how material information travels around. Each time that you read, watch or listen to something, you have a piece of data which comes towards you. Will you make use of it? Information travels from the ESF spaces and stands, from the autonomous spaces, from the wooden tables inside the squatted social centers, to our bags and our kitchen tables, tol the places where we will feel comfortable enough to take the time to read this piece of paper, put that CD or video on, put up this poster in your kitchen. Those are the multiple ways that social information travels around and spreads until it can be received, shared, read, commented upon and criticized. Some pieces of information will provoke reactions, actions and thoughts; others will be forgotten, abandoned, never read until the end: with this abandoned info contributing to the debris of mediascape information flows that are shaping more than ever our contemporary societies.

But our interest in those little individual stories, the ones that explain how you got to be “consuming” this material piece of information, are not just related to a poetic perspective. They are obviously aiming first of all to give a historic background to the ways in which material pieces of information travel around. They give a context to remind you that a person, or a group, is behind the creation of what you are absorbing, and that the pieces of information has been shaped different factors: political, cultural, economic contexts; questions, needs and subjectivities.... In a way, each story that links you to a piece of data in a material sense is rich in knowledge about the reason that this information exists! Nevertheless, that doesn't means you will get to understand, identify or really discover the little stories around the original motivations that produced that information. But playing with this subject you soon begin to wonder about more essential questions:

•  How do the groups, organizations and actors involved inside the ESF processes (including the autonomous spaces surrounding them) communicate between themselves, in other words how do groups involved in social transformation communicate with other groups involved in this same objective?

•  How does the ESF confluence process communicate with the rest of society, in other words, how do actors and groups that care about social transformation communicate with actors, groups, and institutions not directly involved with the dynamics of the ESF and more widely with social transformation in general?

One of the main issues of the ESF process is to be able to build a corpus of information and knowledge about social transformation (all levels included: local, national, continental and global) that can get to be used in a sensitive, dynamic and interactive way for all persons who aim to integrate, use and develop this corpus of information and knowledge (two concepts which are related but not the same). After this main issue we could ask ourselves about how to get this informational corpus of knowledge from ESF spaces and spread it out inside the global mediascape of “mass media”?

But are we really aiming to do that? Do we need to make this step? Or shall we rather work to facilitate those alternative channels of autonomous information until they become powerful enough to be able to compete with mainstream media? AsSensitive approach to the problematic of social transformation would on balance opt for the second option, building new ways to open alternative ICT infrastructures and tools and then take them to mainstream citizens who are consuming information in their everyday life. But at the same time, who says that the mass media and alternative autonomous spaces are not both sides of the same global mediascape? And who says that we should abandon and desert completely broadcast medias that are often controlled by media actors who are slaves to the neo liberal dictatorship?

When you think about the “general” quality of contents and formats that you find inside the alternative and autonomous information and communication channels, it is always strange to realize that those actors, collectives and organizations sources that are producing so many forms of information aren't already considered as legitimate sources of information. The explanation for this is not simply dependent on the role of institutions or the mass media lobby. It also has to do with information receptors, potentially all of us. Why is it that even if those information sources generally count as diverse and serious, they are not being taken up as realistic sources of information by the wider population?

Some theories from the science of communication and guerrilla communication have shown us that the delivery of an argument and the multiple analyzes of the social facts that have produced this argument (like “women” and “men” are not receiving the same treatment in working places and in society in general) are not going to be accepted and integrated by an increasing number of individual receptors in a way that is proportional to its “trueness”. It is not because you multiply the supports and ways to spread a “true” fact, that you really get to provoke indignation and conscious amongst the population that is not personally involved in social transformation, people with a political restlessness. And so what? What's so new in all that? Nothing particularly, just my increasing stupefaction at the fact that spreading alter communication, contra-information, and building alternative medias ICT structures, is not perhaps the only solution we should contemplate when we want that information to become effective in a political sense. To say it another way, how can social transformation information become aggressive and perceptive enough to affect mass media information production, in other words, mass public opinion?

In summary, if we do know, believe or suppose that the good building of alter information is not thought to have a “real” influence upon public opinion, what should we do?, What should we take in consideration when we do try to communicate our analyses, the contents of the activities and networks conversations that we are stimulating inside the alternative mass media spaces for social communication? How should we make it? To whom should we direct that information? How could we guess it has been understood? In fact what do we seek to know better?

Here it looks as though we are facing a double sociological problem of creating a process where the “analysis” of the situation of a social, political, cultural or gender conflict gets to be relevant enough to produce its own proposals of solutions to those conflicts. In a certain way we could say that the production of information from the social movements and from civil society involved in social transformation needs to be working at some points with networks that are practicing “activist research action”. But this article won't focus on this precise point that would be related with methodologies and contents shaping. We would rather here make a proposal to build more reflection around the way we produce and spread information related to the activities of our organizations and/or affinities groups.

When someone gets to go to an ESF, inside or surrounding spaces like the “autonomous spaces” s/he looks for several things generally: on the one hand, to learn, hear, meet new groups, persons, activities, debates, methodologies. This means that through coming and assisting to conferences, plenaries, speeches, debates, workshops, he/she is going to enlarge and expand her/his own knowledge of the contemporary objectives of social transformation, and aims and strategies to achieve it. On the other hand, all these dynamics won't depend only of the short laps of time when you get to walk with thousands of other people from one meeting point to another one inside the related spaces of the ESF. Those processes are expanded in your daily life through your communicational habits, your inscription to mailings lists, blogs, newsletters and other online tools to receive online flows of information and data.

One of my questions is related to the ambivalence of our production and creation of information. It is quite certain that those two dynamics (receptor and emitter) always exist side by side inside the same person. Sometimes we only consume, sometimes we are actively producing and spreading our own info and points of view, but what is usually escaping from us is the possibility to evaluate the exact degree of reception of our production/input inside the info flow. When do we communicate the activities of our group or organization, who are we seeking to read, see, and listen to it? Where is the feedback perception outside the use of NTIC digital tools on line; our newspapers, gazettes, pamphlets, flyers, are the X unknown composite that just travels from one house to another one, from one to the rubbish can, but it is also this piece of paper (recycle paper please!) that is at least a factor that can encourage any citizen to change her/his perception around issues like: immigration, women rights, work flexibility, etc. We are not yet able to answer all those questions, we just hope that they have a place where they can be contemplated and stimulate some debates.

Alex Hache is working on a PhD about how social movements communicate their fights and resistances, and collaborating in www.redactiva.tk and www.euromovements.info