ABSTRACT

In this chapter I discuss the claims made for the power of digital connection in facilitating and/or constituting new forms of politics. When discussing these modalities careful judgments sometimes get lost in attributions of their actual significance for theory and their strategic importance, or else in the sense that they are no more than a deformation of usual or “real” politics. I want to assess the transformative significance of digital connection on forms of politics, on political identities and on understandings of what constitutes the political and political spaces. I will rehearse and assess the allegedly “new” politics of resistance thus afforded, and locate such developments in the broader warp of social and media theory. The chapter builds on work undertaken on the insurrections across North Africa and the Middle East, discusses the protests that accompanied the banking crisis after 2008, along with urban protests and riots in different parts of the world and the appearance of post-secular politics sometimes found in terrorist networks.