Time of protest

This chapter investigates media practices of protest movements from a media archaeological perspective. ¹ Rather than analyse media as discourse or narratives, media archaeology considers the material properties that constitute media technologies as well as their temporal and spatial consequences. According to Jussi Parikka, media archaeology is interested in ‘materialities of cultural practice, of human activity as embedded in both cognitive and affective appreciations and investments, but also embodied, phenomenological accounts of what we do when we invent, use and adapt media technologies’ (Parikka 2012, p. 163). Hence, in this chapter I investigate the temporal and spatial properties of media technologies employed by activists. The combination of media archaeology and media practice theory is fruitful as it brings together a materialist perspective on media with experiential aspects of media as practice. Empirically, I am drawing on a diachronic, comparative study of media practices of protest movements of the dispossessed. The three movements examined – the unemployed workers’ movement in the 1930s; the tenants’ movement in the 1970s; and Occupy Wall Street in 2011 – emerged in the context of large-scale economic crises and represent attempts at filling the discursive void that the crisis situations induced. Based on extensive archival research in combination with interviews with activists, I argue that activists are navigating shifts in media regimes, from mechanical speed to perpetual flow towards digital immediacy, and from a space to a hyper-space bias. Based on these shifts, activists today are experiencing an increasing desynchronization between media and political practices.