ABSTRACT
Media scholarship has been trying to assess the new possibilities offered by the digital media for the society; distinguish them from the affordances of the traditional media environment. The liberating digital ecology opened low-cost opportunities for people to correct media, adjust media, supplement or substitute media by their own channels, blogs, videos, tweets and other individual digital expressions of all sorts. The weaknesses of contemporary participatory culture obscure individual engagement: ‘participation gap’, ‘transparency problem’ and ‘ethics challenge’. Tactical media are very subjective: they represent the point of view of the user, hence derive from the personalised use of social networks and individualist political engagement online. The power of the emotional affect and non-rational drivers of engagement plays a strong part in contemporary dissent practices. The design of many digital networks suggests various options for the users to participate in digital politics, from those requiring little effort to the more time- and energy-consuming ones.
