ABSTRACT
This chapter engages recent debates around the power of the internet and social media in the public sphere. Some deliberative democrats argue that new technology is politically ineffective and de-skilling; others are more optimistic. The protest group March for Our Lives (MFOL) that arose in the wake of the Parkland school shooting challenges the pessimists. Aletta Norval, Jodie Dean, Judith Butler, and Zeynep Tukekci are my interlocutors; they redefine the public sphere to account for social media, the internet, and Twitter, making the old public sphere of Habermas and company more contemporary. I argue that social media was instrumental to the success of MFOL, organizing on- and offline activities (marches, vigils, lie-ins, and die-ins) that cultivated affective solidarity for the movement.
I amend the hypothesis of vital materialists by arguing that the agentic capacities of things must respect the social powers of their users. The capacity of the privileged students of Parkland is compared to the disadvantaged Black students in Chicago who had been fighting for gun control for decades.
While MFOL made considerable gains in instantiating democratic practices – collaborating respectfully with other more established protest groups, inspiring followers to provide content on their Facebook page, and encouraging students to participate and form sibling groups – their relationships were not always egalitarian or reciprocal. As a single-issue protest group, their tactics reflected their intent to achieve their goal as quickly as possible. Its unified voice was sustained by strong leadership. The democratic promise of this protest movement was limited by the political realities: the lobbying power of the NRA, the opposition of the Republican Party, the supporters of the Second Amendment, and a culture of guns impeded their goal of gun control. In addition, their focus on the visceral impact of this horrible event didn’t translate into a policy-driven movement.
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