Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780252038846)

Digital Rebellion examines the impact of new media and communication technologies on the spatial, strategic, and organizational fabric of social movements.

Todd Wolfson reveals how aspects of the mid-1990s Zapatistas movement--network organizational structure, participatory democratic governance, and the use of communication tools as a binding agent--became essential parts of Indymedia and other Cyber Left organizations. From there he uses oral interviews and other rich ethnographic data to chart the media-based think tanks and experiments that continued the Cyber Left's evolution through the Independent Media Center's birth around the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.

Melding virtual and traditional ethnographic practice to explore the Cyber Left's cultural logic, Wolfson maps the social, spatial and communicative structure of the Indymedia network and details its operations on the local, national and global level. He looks at the participatory democracy that governs global social movements and the ways democracy and decentralization have come into tension, and how "the switchboard of struggle" conducts stories from the hyper-local and disperses them worldwide. As he shows, understanding the intersection of Indymedia and the Global Social Justice Movement illuminates their foundational role in the Occupy struggle and other emergent movements that have re-energized radical politics.

Author: Todd Wolfson
ISBN-10: 0252038843
ISBN-13: 9780252038846
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Language: English
Published: 11/01/2014
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2015