Tuesday, July 24, 2018
State Violence and Capitalist Media
In Not a Twitter Revolution: Anti-neoliberal and Antiracist Resistance in the Ferguson Movement, Cristina Mislan and Amalia Dache-Gerbino examine how community activists overcame mainstream media’s criminalization of protestors and social media dominance to present a nuanced story about police brutality as “a product of an institutionally racist economic state system.” As the authors note,
By placing social media in context with interviews, this study challenges previous scholarly works that celebrate social media as pillars of social movements. We reposition St. Louis activists (not Twitter discourse) as the central voices of the movement and argue that “leadership and organizing cannot be simply tweeted into existence.”
